1. Group #1 joins who care about site
2. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check.
3. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins
4. Site loses sense of community and ability to moderate itself effectively.
5. Group #1 leaves
Others tend to become Generation Ships of the founder culture. I'd put the Well in that category, as the userbase still seems to be strongly focused on the original cohort. Some fresh blood is necessary.
Actually: the idea of a university as an intentional community that tends to survive over time has occurred to me. Not fully assured, but there are an impressive number of centuries-old instances.
And, continuing that thought: YC emulates a critical element of that dynamic, in having regular incoming classes.
People like to complain about heavy-handed moderation but all the experiments to try and build self-moderating communities eventually get overrun with trolls and (worse) self-promoters.
Any automated system will eventually be gamed, something that even huge sites like twitter and youtube are starting to realize now that state-level actors are using them for their own purposes.
And despite occasional (and strong) disagreements with dang and sctb, they do a really good job on HN.
After you make your peace with that, theres an entire world of rules and theories on moderation, all of it useful and important to get the job done.
The cheat code to cut through that mess is -
"I'm coming to agree that theres no substitute for good editorial control"
Trust me on this, the proof is to painful to reproduced regularly.
(You're going to have to try harder for an argument ;-)
Like teachers, now editors are another social good that we need to manage information dissemination optimized for civilization's good.
I've been exploring this topic, as a particular focus over the past year, though it's been an interest for some years.
If you look back to the Catholic inquisition (and its precursors), Gutenberg, Martin Luther (500th anniversary coming up at the end of October), J.S. Mill (I've run across some excellent discussion by Hans Jensen: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_... and http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599 (available via Sci-Hub)).
It's sobering.
Before what date do you think people can be group #1? Or are you ascribing the group number to contributions rather than date of joining?
So after a few months of lurking, I registered here, and now it's my daily[1] go-to site.
---
[1] Hourly. :)
lobste.rs ?
So there were the people who got here first, then the people who discovered the site in 2008, which was a long time ago, and have fair claim to being 'group 2'.
So I think 'Group 3' is me. A defining characteristic of 'Group 3' is that goes back to pre-Snowden times, before the truth was known. Kids today must be 'Group 4'.
This reminds me of A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man:
https://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-center/...
1. Group #1 joins who care about site
2. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check.
3. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins
4. ?????
5. Profit
I still consider my mid 4-digits slashdot id a mark of pride. It's also a great regret that I had spent a significant amount of time on the site before a friend convinced me to finally register an account. I'm pretty sure I could have been in the 3 digit club.
I too remember slashdot fondly, but the webbernets are a very different place today—more fractured, self-selected into groups, more appealing to the masses, less wild west freedom.
I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it was clear that it was mostly a failure in the long run. My conclusion is that a site needs hands-on human moderation to maintain quality.
Slashdot is also a perfect example of the general life-cycle of cool social site. Humble beginnings -> lots of interesting people -> own little subculture -> lots of interesting content with some impenetrable in-jokes -> existing userbase ages out as they get jobs or have kids -> less interesting content, more in-jokes -> owners sell -> dry husk of a site remains.