Ask HN: Has anyone put thought into the degradation of online communities?

What you're desribing is the Eternal September[0].<p>There are strategies to mitigate the degridation of discourse, such as Hellbanning[1]. Are you asking if there is a way to prevent a small community from blowing up? Or are you asking if there is a way to prevent a small community from blowing up and being bogged down by crappy content?<p>I would say the best strategy would be to have good moderators, and be sure that you do your part to post quality content to the community. Be the change you want to see online. The more quality content, comments, etc. are on a site, the more it will be socially unacceptable to RickRoll[2].<p>Many sites implement a karma-type system to reward good content and punish bad conent (Reddit, HN, StackOverflow, etc).<p>However, two online communities come to mind that don't seem to have suffered in quality of content since their inception: 4Chan and C2Wiki[3]. I think this is due to their obscurity from the mainstream and also anarchist nature of their moderation system. On 4Chan, anyone can post, and there are so many posts, anything untasteful to the community is quickly buried in newer or more popular posts. On C2Wiki, anyone can edit, and edits that degrade the quality of the content are replaced just as painlessly with better content. Interestingly, both communities are anonymous.<p>How can you prevent people from cracking the same tired jokes again and again? Answer coming in 3... 2...[4]<p>I think first you must create an online community that caters to a specific niche, so users can already relate to one another because they share the same interests. Once people relate to one another, they want to share and converse[5].<p>Then, if the community grows in popularity, you must figure out how heavily you're going to moderate. Will you agressivley close off-topic posts and potentially turn away quality contributors (like programmers.stackexchange.com)? Or will you let everyone in, and create specific areas for new interests the community develops as it grows (like 4chan.org/sci)?<p>I see this a spectrum from razor-focused discussion to organic free-for-all. A mistake I belive one mistake that Slashdot made (and is still trying to rectify) is to straddle both ends of this spectrum. They have ended up alienating both the razor-focused users and the free-for-all users and all that is left is the snark.<p>So, I think, to prevent the degradation of online communities, you must chose which end of this spectrum your community is on, and moderate (or don't) accordingly.<p>[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a><p>[1]<a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...</a><p>[2]Was going to be a YouTube link, but resisted the temptation to RickRoll HN because I might get downvoted.<p>[3]<a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki" rel="nofollow">http://c2.com/cgi/wiki</a><p>[4]I'm really tired of this joke on HN, FYI<p>[5]<a href="http://www.browncafe.com/forum/" rel="nofollow">http://www.browncafe.com/forum/</a> (one of my favorite niche online communities)

Do you know the Myers-Briggs personality indicators? The relevant one here in my mind is Judgemental/Perceptive: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Lifestyle:_judging.2Fperception_.28J.2FP.29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Lif...</a><p>Good online communities start with a lot of Perceptives, which are often interesting to listen to. At some point the Judgementals start appearing, and the discussion moves, to use a current example, from the structure and potential future implications of Stuxnet to whether Stuxnet is legal or America is hypocrite etc.<p>The problem is that the arrival of the Judgementals is a positive feedback loop. Judgemental comments breed judgemental counter comments (pro/con) and soon the Perceptives are drowned out in the noise, leaving the discussion and further increasing the share of Judgemental comments.<p>BTW I think the same happens everywhere where you cannot measure the actual worth of someone's contribution. Politics take over and intelligent people leave.

Stack Exchange<p>Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky used to run a podcast where they described exactly the techniques they had discovered.<p>- Communities are segmented according to specialty so as to concentrate expert-level talent. Compare the kinds of questions listed on an SE site to what's asked on any other Q&#38;A site out there. The math questions are asked by actual mathematicians, the photography questions are asked by actual photographers, etc. (You'll also notice that---beyond the gaming site---most of the silos are dedicated to a profession.)<p>- Many of the professional sites are dedicated exclusively to <i>people in that profession</i>. The Theoretical Computer Science silo explicitly requires PhD-level material. The Quantitative Finance site opens the FAQ with "if you aren't earning a living at this, it's probably off topic".<p>- Most SE sites explicitly prohibit subjective questions. Something like, "What's better, Ruby or Python?" will be closed immediately.<p>- Any post can be edited by another user, just as with Wikipedia. So grammar and spelling tend to be pretty decent.<p>- Moderators are given broad powers to close questions, delete posts, suspend users, and even delete accounts.<p>- There is a separate Meta site for questions about the site. That segregates questions about the silo's topic from questions about the silo.<p>Reddit has some siloing as well, but they don't prohibit memes, which is why the content looks the way it does. They also don't have user editing or strong moderation. It shows.

Clay Shirky has studied this extensively and is probably the best resource. "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" [0] is perhaps the best single piece on what you're thinking about.<p>He offers several design guidelines toward the end of the piece, which I suspect informed the design of HN (and the posting guidelines therein).<p>Another technique he mentions is that of MetaFilter, which disables their new user page when they feel the effects of scale.<p>[0] - <a href="http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a>

I don't know how to <i>solve</i> the problem, but I have thought about it; some thoughts:<p>The computing industry seems to keep repeating cycles with local and remote processing - thin terminals and mainframes, then the desktop PC, now "The Cloud" is mainframes 2.0, then mobile apps are starting to bring native code back to the user again (although many are tied into the cloud) - similarly, online communities keep alternating between distributed (BBSes + IRC), centralised (myspace, AOL), distributed (forums + IRC again), centralised (facebook + twitter). As such, the churn of users from one system to another is pretty much constant. (There are many reasons for users to move from one system to another, but this is the one that I've seen as an inevitable constant since the internet began, and other reasons are different each time).<p>How does users moving around relate to quality of community though? Perhaps I'm being subjective and biased, but it seems to me that the highest signal to noise ratio happens at the front of the wave, the masses with the pop culture are the middle, and the ocean of spam trails behind. As such, if we assume that users will move from one system to another no matter what, the degredation of community at a given location is inevitable.<p>Taking slashdot as an example - the technical side of it, while not perfect, was fairly good and did a fine job back when a handful of technically-inclined people used it; but when it became overwhelmed with average people, there's nothing the system could do to stop it (I don't think HN is immune to this either, it just happens to be at the front of the wave right now). Also in the case of slashdot, the editors started treating the average people as their target audience, which accelerated the decline...<p>Also, thanks to things like Ubuntu, slashdot's niche of "linux users" stopped being a niche, thus opening the floodgates - I find that communities are generally better when you need to put effort into finding them, rather than them being the default that the lazy people go to for a popular subject (note that this isn't quite hipster sentiment - that would be to say the subject <i>itself</i> becomes worse when it gets popular).

Yes. I flirted with the idea of an online community with a half life. For example, every 6 months the URL would completely change and only the top 1% of members would be notified of the new location. It would be in their hands to repopulate the community.<p>I haven't figured out how to determine the top 1% but this was more a pipe dream a than serious potential project. Anyone is free to take the idea and run with it.

The NewsWelcome page is excellent.<p>(<a href="http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html</a>)<p>Meatball Wiki has many people talking about creating and controlling online communities. It's focused on wikis, but is applicable to other types of communities.<p>(<a href="http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/" rel="nofollow">http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/</a>)<p>The Japanese origin of anonymous posting (leading into the chan culture) is interesting and is very different to the western use (where "anonymous == arsehole".)<p>(<a href="http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php</a>)<p>&#62; <i>Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?</i><p>&#62; <i>A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.</i><p>&#62; <i>If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.</i>

Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" from 2003 is a bit of a classic.<p><a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a>

I think a community's approach to moderation can also accelerate its degradation.<p>Consider a site where rules are overly broad, moderators are chosen by their ability to assert rules blindly and are actively dissuaded from using their own judgement, and meta discussion is not allowed (i.e. about the site and its rules). Furthermore, people who disagree with each other often enough are silently (shadow) blocked from each other.<p>We've read a lot of stories here about the importance of seeing things you disagree with and not creating an echo chamber for yourself; consider why a community would actually impose that on users.<p>These are symptoms of a community, IMO, chasing the lowest common denominator: sanitize the site as much as possible to sell ads, because disagreement debate drive eyeballs away. A good CPM can certainly be established in a place where everything is awesome and people are never wrong. Dictatorships-with-secret-police generate ad revenue, but not any real discussion.

I find many of the posts on this thread to be interesting, but I personally do not think that this entropic process is a problem. I like decay and I am attached to the plasticity of the internet.

Xianhang Zhang has written a lot about social experience design (what you're talking about he touched on a little in the post about the Evaporative Cooling Effect): <a href="http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...</a>

It's tough.<p>The site I feel worst about is Tvtropes. A few years ago they had the great idea of basing a universal theory of culture derived from Japanese animation. Brilliant!<p>Then they get in trouble with AdSense because of drivel about sexual fetishes in tv and comics written by virgins, and it's just overrun by so many people that are completely incoherent that anybody who knows anything about writing or directing or acting just can't stand it.<p>Wikipedia avoids this fate by being aggressive about deleting stuff. Wikipedia is one of the least friendly web communities out there. But, it really has managed to go mainstream without falling apart.

pg has written at length on the dilution of online communities: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html</a><p>Seems obvious, but surely there are some who haven't come across it yet.

I just want to chime in and say that I've been thinking about and researching solutions to this for years. Only recently have I been pushed towards creating a real product that does solve this problem (due to enough people liking the idea at a Lean Startup Machine competition for us to win). The idea is relatively simple...we prioritize content by segregating people into dynamic communities consisting of users who are highly similar behaviorally. The goal is to create a million little hacker newses behind the scenes.<p>Practical implementation is more of a nightmare, but at this point we're in limited beta and you can sign up to receive an invite at <a href="http://foldr.co" rel="nofollow">http://foldr.co</a> (just go to launch in the upper right and put in your email for the invite).<p>This project is my personal crusade, primarily because I have watched so many great communities die. I can't say for sure whether or not the solution will ultimately work, but it won't do any good if nobody tries.

Paul Graham thought about this as HN grew. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html</a><p>Also, the phenomenon where the people who are most invested in a community are the first to bail when it changes is often called "evaporative cooling".

I run one of the largest current internet forums, there are multiple problems (which I could talk about for hours) but ultimately the only solution is exclusivity. People are affected by their surroundings; as soon as you make a site public it will start to change.

I've been working on a Reddit / HN like site that uses a different ranking system meant to avoid this problem, see this if you're interested:<p><a href="http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/dilution" rel="nofollow">http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/dilution</a>

Spolsky has an old article on how the UI of the software used affects the community: <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...</a>

It's because of Dunbar's number <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number</a><p>Communities are meant to be 150 people or less, where everyone knows everyone else.

The only way to avoid it is to have an invite-only site where new invites are interviewed and voted on by a committee/small group of members.<p>The problem is that as a site gets bigger, more and more people join that have views that are opposed to the original intentions of the site (and owners) and the site degrades over time.<p>The other problem is that you don't know the age of the person posting. Reddit is now filled with high school/younger kids posting.<p>It parallels a true democracy. If we had a true democracy, eventually the extremes would rule.

One thing I've seen done that it interesting is a virtual basement. My favorite online forum is advrider.com. It a vbulletin for adventure motorcycle enthusiasts with over 200k users, 500k threads, and 17m posts. It works surprisingly well because it has a "basement" where anything goes. The understanding is upstairs is for constructive conversation, and the basement, especially "Jo mamma" is for time wasting, vitriolic, political/religious/Etc, posts. If you start a pointless thread, it gets banished to jo mamma.

I know of a few online communities that have blown up and survived. The key was a set of sardonic admins and a site owner that paid for the hosting himself.<p>I think that an ad supported online community is incongruous with a quality online community.

This happens everywhere and all the time. As the community gets more popular and attention, more and more people will sign up and pollute everything. From what I've seen, most of the time, redditors are blamed for that here on HN :P

Tragedy of the Commons. What we really need is more incentive for people to maintain the quality of discussion, like if they were economically invested in the site.