I'm coming late to this conversation, as I was mostly internet free last week, but
a) Thanks for doing all this work
b) I imagine you generally feel this way, but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality.
I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality and esprit-de-corp rise and fall:
Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit
Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites face.
To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is significantly below the 1:1 line.
Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big improvement.
All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is cheap, take mine!
One additional thought I had here; based on this graph idea, it seems to me a useful thing to do would be to create some sort of way to get a handle on community on quality using metrics.
They would probably be terribly inaccurate metrics at first, but they would also provide a means for people to decide how to assess.
As a start, you could use people, for instance paying people on Mechanical Turk to evaluate a post and its comments for specified HN guidelines; these could be used as a first attempt to get a feel for how well a given day / week goes.
I was thinking the same thing, but maybe also using sentiment analysis or other NLP techniques. Even simple word count trends might yield some insight.
If we could get a dump of all the comments tagged with submission time that would be a nice starting point for people to throw their algorithms at.
a) Thanks for doing all this work b) I imagine you generally feel this way, but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality.
I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality and esprit-de-corp rise and fall:
Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit
Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites face.
To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is significantly below the 1:1 line.
Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big improvement.
All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is cheap, take mine!