I agree with most of this.<p>In fact I agree so strongly that having witnessed the rise and fall of many a community I've run or been a member of that I think that there is a natural lifecycle of a community.<p>I also believe that whilst you can artificially lengthen the life by controlling inputs, you can also kill a community by the very same methods... possible to do but very difficult in the long term.<p>Instead of trying to control the inputs (censor, dictate), I'm embracing the side effects of a lack of censorship... a shorter life span perhaps, but a community that burns brighter during it's life.<p>Effectively what this means is that I'm building community software that has at the very heart of it the notion that a community will die, and that a successful community will schism during the death phase as members attempt to preserve the bits they love.<p>The idea being that communities rip themselves apart, and that at some point HN will do so too. And when it does it won't be replaced by a single "new HN", but instead by many smaller communities each serving a niche that existed within the larger.<p>Even though those niches appear smaller than the thing they emerged from, they are likely to be larger in volume (active users, posts per day, upvotes) than HN itself was before it.<p>As a metaphor for this, think of a kind of community cellular division: the splitting of a community into smaller microcosms that will eventually grow and then split themselves.<p>In some ways you could argue that StackOverflow actually did this preserving the dictatorship through the Stack Exchange network. Except, I don't really accept that a dictatorship can know when a specific community needs to sub-divide itself to survive. I think that comes from within the community.<p>In the software I'm creating, the very tools to gradually manage the creation of new microcosms is given to the users... in much the way that users can create subreddits and that helps reddit to grow.