> <i>"When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..."</i><p>This is one of the most off-putting things about HN in my opinion. It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit in that tired jokes and posts with little thought are usually voted down to the bottom, but posts that poke holes in the original argument are often top comments.<p>A lot of technically-minded people take great pleasure in finding and fixing bugs. The problem is that finding errors in human interaction leads to pedantry, nitpicking, and cherry-picking. This is especially true as the community grows and interactions with all but the most visible people becomes rare. People have less incentive to give others the benefit of the doubt, and more incentive to find the problems and point them out.<p>I'm worried about our once-little community, but I don't know how to prevent the petty fault-finding from resurfacing in such a large and shifting community.
The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.<p>Generally, very successful people don't spend large amounts of their time commenting on online forums. In this manner, the biggest 'losers' in the real world, with the most time to waste on the internet, become the biggest 'winners' in the online community.<p>The end result is that the cultural norms of the online community end up being set by people who are the least qualified to create or enforce any kind of healthy norm.<p>edit: just wanted to say that I recall reading something similar on a blog a long time ago, although I cannot remember the name of the writer.
While the blog article mentions interesting points, I don't think its insights have much to do with technical communities such as Hacker News or Stackoverflow.<p>HN is mostly very civilized. (Granted, some of that is due to moderators.) So the blog's bullet point about "trust" devalued because of one-time transactions does not seem relevant. It's relevant for reddit/atheism but not HN.<p>To me, the problem with HN, SO, etc is the voice of experts getting drowned out by amateurs. The growth rate of new amateurs joining will always outpace new experts and each year the signal-to-noise gets worse. I haven't seen a clever self-governing mechanism that addresses this social dynamic. The upvote/downvote/karma history is not enough to solve it.
Whilst I agree with the general thesis of the article, this paragraph seemed very distasteful to me:<p>> <i>There is no reason to trust people you will not interact with again in the future. There’s no incentive not to defect. At the end of my last relationship, our interactions became significantly less pleasant as it became more obvious that it was over – I would not have to deal with this person in the future, so why bother going through the motions of kindness?</i><p>Without meaning to be rude or make an attack on the author's character, the author does sound like a bit of an asshole there.<p>How about being nice to people because you're a nice person, rather than because you want to get something out of it? If you could murder someone and get away with it, would you? I wouldn't, because in abhor the idea of killing people. Similarly, I would act decently towards another human being even when I have no incentive to do so, simply because I am a decent human being and I don't like the idea of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to others.<p>As they say, a gentleman remains a gentleman even in the gutter. If you need to be surrounded by other decent human beings to be decent, if being surrounded by jerks automatically reverts you to jerk behaviour, perhaps you're not a decent human being after all, only a chameleon sort of person who will do whatever they think they can get away with.<p>I hope a majority of people here would behave the same way as me - decently, irrespective of the surroundings and likelihood of "getting caught". And there's the rub I guess - a community composed mostly of decent human beings will be less vulnerable to this effect than one composed mostly of selfish people who only act decently when they can see a tangible payoff.<p>That may be another path to survival: find the assholes and keep them out, and then perhaps you can deal with growth more easily.
I forget the web page - I think from another HN reader - but they made the point that these challenges are the exact challenges that distributed computing wrestles with. For any problem set that a lot of resources are working with, how do you properly surface the most valuable results, how do you combine and summarize them, etc. There are a lot of discussion community sites that just try to pull in their own homegrown algorithms ("let's have a moderator!") but I suspect a lot of these experiences could be improved by reading up on distributed computing algorithms.
This fits perfect with what PG said in a Tech Crunch Interview in 2013 <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-new...</a><p>● "[Paul Graham] wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days"<p>● "He explains that [Hacker News] was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has gradually been getting diluted."<p>● “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says.<p>● He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.”<p>● “The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says.
Daydreaming here... so how about a community that funnels users into buckets automatically? Think of an HN where you only discuss an article with a pool of ~500 people instead of 80,000. When new users join, they're distributed to the smallest groups. Nobody is overwhelmed with an influx of noobs. And you might actually be able to start remembering the names of the active people in your group. Perhaps you could see top comments from other groups, but not interact with them directly.
<i>>'The probability that I will interact with any one user ever again on a site like YouTube tends toward zero. I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say.'</i><p>My sense of a terrible 'community' like YouTube is a bit different. I've always had the impression it's more about performing and the size of the audience - more about votes and reactions than expected interactions.<p>No matter how nasty or inane your opinions are, you can share them on a related YouTube video and receive anonymous validation from other people who agree with you. When you're feeling bad about yourself and want to lash out, you can post something vile and get a response.<p>I believe this was a source of a lot of complaints about changes to the comment system. It hurt ones ability to receive instant gratification by dropping a comment on the top of the stack.<p>In the bat analogy, upvotes/karma are a sort of secondary 'junk food' blood supply that costs the giver nothing and some bats don't care for it as they prefer real sustenance but others are addicted to it. The 'community' ends up as a circus of votefiends bludgeoning each other for another hit.
Regarding to HN, problem is that social proof takes a huge part in determining what gets on the front page.<p>People check /new, see that some post already has 1 or 2 upvotes, checks it instead of some without any upvotes. The upvoted one gets even more upvotes (because more people are reading it), and it's on the homepage.<p>A bunch of my submissions made the homepage and from what I've noticed, the threshold is about 7-10 upvotes in the first hour. So can we fairly say that a dozen of people decide what's on the homepage? Maybe.<p>My suggestion: don't show upvotes in /new for 30mins after submission? As a trade off, a little time might get wasted on low quality submissions but maybe there would be more better quality submissions on the front page.
SomethingAwful is consistently high quality and has been for the 7.5 years since I discovered it. 190,000 users now, I think 90K in 2006.<p>The secrets seem to be<p>a) charging people $10 one time to join/post and view more than a few pages of a particular thread<p>b) segmenting into different subforums - over time they become different communities within SA that have their own quirks.<p>c) ruthless moderation that can and often does lead to posting probations and bans (requiring another $10 to reverse)<p>In particular, the politics/history, sports, video games, and arts discussions are very good.
It is hard to appreciate the change in tenor the network experienced when AOL gave its users access to Usenet. I have never considered it in the context of the prisoner's dilemma as a one shot exercise but that certainly has an intuitive appeal.<p>We see it here on HN of course, someone creates a new user account, makes a single low value snarky comment and then off to oblivion.<p>An interesting counter example is twitter, which I've seen that as people become more invested in the reputation of their 'handle' the less ill considered their tweets seem to become. When that isn't the case that is also interesting.
It took a while to find, this old kuro5hin article is a good read on the subject:<p><a href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000" rel="nofollow">http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000</a><p>Titled "Attacked from within" it details the problems in scaling a community and community life-cycle very eloquently.
Another thing that seems to be the case is that new members are unable to become assimilated into existing culture because the entrenched users quickly become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms. The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.
A potential solution:<p>Implement a comment recommendation system. Based on comments you've liked and disliked, the system will push comments you would like to the top.<p>The quality of the community you see is then completely up to you. If you like poop jokes, you'll see poop jokes. If you like pedantic attacks, you'll see pedantic attacks. And if you like insightful comments, you'll see insightful comments. As you stabilize on a community you like, you can start responding to their comments, and then they too will have the chance to vote on your comments. If they like you they'll start seeing more of you, and a micro-community will evolve naturally for free.
I found this recent article about online harassment and moderation much more optimistic: <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/</a> (Primary source: <a href="http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player" rel="nofollow">http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-...</a> ) Even with 67 million users, the developers of League of Legends have apparently reduced misbehavior substantially using fairly simple (although non-obvious) techniques.
I wrote a post a while back about how the design of your social tools can help solve this problem:<p><a href="https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/c4c4074591ba</a><p>If you look at sites that are based on following users or categories they are able to scale to much larger sizes without breaking down.
I think part of the reason it that the communities finish talking about whatever it is they are talking about. When I started reading HN, a lot of the ideas that are common fare were new and interesting. Now, some are borderline cliche.
Some other influential writing on this subject:<p>Clay Shirky: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
<a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...</a><p>Xianhang Zhang: "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>
The solution (in so far as there is a solution) is to cultivate a culture. Large communities remain civil through culture.<p>Last week I wrote a post called "How to Cultivate Culture" that received a good amount of attention (outside of Hacker News) about this: <a href="http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-culture-on-a-website" rel="nofollow">http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/6-ways-to-cultivate-cu...</a>
I agree with the general premise. However, I also believe there's probably a way to shift the threshold depending on the culture and community.<p>When I was asked to be a moderator of brand-new (at the time) forums for a very popular Minecraft mod pack, it was being flooded with quite a large volume of people who would not adhere to some basic rules. The rules were quite simple and straightforward, but that didn't stop me and the owners of the site from straight banning large numbers of people.<p>The pure shock of forcing the "Yes we will see you again, you are not anonymous, and your reputation matters" into the system caused a lot less posting activity to take place on the forums, but the quality of each post was well worth it. A lot of people got banned trying (and failing) to wrap their brains around this concept.<p>The end result was I actually felt proud of helping shape an online community that was large, effective, and constructive. As it grew, so did the number of other moderators and that "critical point" kept shifting right, so we could have more users and still maintain a quality community. However, this requires a very proactive approach.
Great article. That being said, seeing some proposed solutions to this problem would have been nice. One strategy that Reddit employs quite well is the Subreddit system. This creates smaller sub-communities that aren't victims of the 'large' community problem. Of course, overtime a subreddit becomes a default or gets too many subscribers... but it's still a decent solution.<p>I think it'll be interesting to see how growth affects Hacker News. I'm still very impressed with the quality of the articles and comments (yes, there are some bad ones here and there, but compared to most sites HN is excellent)... I think the downvote threshold for HN has actually been quite successful in encouraging people to post useful comments. It gives a goal for people with low-karma to strive for, thus encouraging them to post better content. I think a more extensive reward system like this has potential for creating a better community.
I agree with the author's thesis but I think other reasons apply to other communities.<p>Ideally, you would like to ensure the "greatest good for the greatest number" in a community. Consequently, good or happiness in a community is measured according to the preferences of the majority sometimes to the detriment of the minority. That is why, relative to the number of more intellectually engaging posts, you will see more LOLCats and animated gifs on the front page of Reddit. As somebody on here mentioned many people go on the internet for leisure, and intelligent/civilized discourse for them does not fall under that header.<p>As far as I know, HN was started to foster startups-tech community and I am optimistic because HN's subject matter is specific enough and the community concerned with this subject matter is small enough, for it not to devolve into another Reddit (meaning no offense to Reddit, I still visit there).
I am not sure if this has ever been done, but what if an online community grew to a certain size and then closed it's doors to new members?<p>Could that community avoid the pitfalls of what the article is describing?<p>I could see a place where enrollment closes at a certain point, then reopens once a person leaves or becomes inactive.<p>I would actually like to see if this would work.
>>> These locusts were AOL users. In September of 1993, the company granted Usenet access to their entire user base, which triggered an unending deluge of noobs into the Usenet community.<p>Amusingly, I joined AOL in September of 1993. It was not long after I graduated and lost my university log-in, along with the e-mail address that came with it.<p>I chose AOL for a simple reason: I could dial up anywhere in the country and keep the same e-mail address no matter where I lived. AOL also greatly simplified the process of using the Internet. I ran a small business via my AOL address.<p>Each update to AOL software came via some promotion or other -- an insert in a magazine, or even a pile of AOL disks at the supermarket. At some point it became possible for an AOL user to access the Internet without the AOL software, e.g., by using mainstream e-mail and browser software.
> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..."<p>Wow. I can't say whether this is true or not, but how depressing. Instead of counting on this behaviour, what if we tried to change it? Kindness, respect, and general "give the other person the benefit of the doubt" attitudes could make a huge difference. I just can't get around the idea that not interacting with the same person means you can not care how you treat them... that's crazy.
"The development of trust and kindness between two people depends on the probability that they will interact in the future."<p>Not true. Communities can - and should - use other incentive systems to encourage good behavior. 1) Point systems 2) Public shaming 3) bans / hell bans / abuse flagging / suspensions 4) various combinations<p>The threat of taking things from people that they've earned, even if it's as silly as 'fake internet points,' can be an extremely powerful enforcer of behavior, given the system is set up properly.
"Decay" is a loaded word reflecting the author's bias. All communities change over time as they grow. Their culture then reflects the users. We may not like that community but clearly a lot of people do (after all these are the largest sub reddits we're talking about right?)<p>This is sort of the "This neighborhood was so great until all the yuppy/hipsters moved in and the art stores were replaced with coffee shops serving $6 lattes" argument.
Two online communities that I had to leave because they became really mean and decayed over time was IWETHEY and KURO5HIN.<p>Even Slashdot decayed and when Dice bought them out it was more about commercial stuff and less about technology and making cool stuff.<p>Reddit is over-run with trolls on various sub-reddits they started out in /r/atheism as fake atheists trolling people and then spread to other sub-reddits. Mostly 12 year old kids who think it is funny to grief people.
Maybe it's just a lot simpler: size and success attracts douchebags and morons. It's not limited to online communities. Cities, sports teams, rock bands, movies, you name it, you see it happen again and again. Success attracts the kind of people who act like a-holes in any context.<p>And yes, I'm aware of the great irony of posting this rather superficial comment in this thread. But I'm not sure if I'm actually wrong...
> I have no real incentive to be polite or to put much effort into anything I say. Even my reputation will remain intact – who’s going to witness it?<p>> When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive, and to put little effort into their contributions.<p>If this is true, then HN should put users karma score next to their username when they post.
There's a simpler explanation. The average person is not especially bright, funny, or articulate. The larger a community, the more it regresses to the mean.
I really like this for not defaulting to the standard, lazy, fallacy-of-self-exclusion explanation of "most people are dumb."<p>The same effect seems to occur with large social movements. I've noted for many years that once anything becomes a "movement," it becomes shallow, trendy, and dishonest... even if the original seed of the movement had a good point in the beginning. Once it becomes big there is no longer any incentive for people not to abuse the movement as a marketing gimmick or a source of political power.
This is the most valuable article I've read on HN all week. The fact that it's not on the front page is dissapointing. EDIT: It IS on the front page. Hurray!<p>Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA, Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth (too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the rules of the old when applicable.
I'd say online communities "diverse", not diverge. E.g. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/4sftcoo.jpg</a>