Ask HN: Avoiding the "Eternal September" Effect?
What's being done with Hacker News that will prevent the "Eternal September" effect to happen here?
I've seen it happen to a lot of communities and I'm genuinely curious how it might be avoidable, for both this community and many others.
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11 comments
| 8 points
| on HN
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I don't get that at all. Could you please explain why it would be "wrong" to penalize people for being disruptive?
I'm saying that most of the time culture "degradation" occurs with more people because these people aren't directly in that culture. They might not be part of it because they don't understand it in the same way as everyone else does. As a result a different interpretation can lead to a culture shift. This is what happened in "Eternal September", where the original culture and focus of the community was diluted with the growth of new individuals wanting to do things differently. Most of the time the new ways of doing things aren't as good as the old, simply because it needs to cater to a wider audience and to less of the niche it started with. This is what Hacker News needs to avoid.
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Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.
This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the barrier is removed for the sake of growth.
I don't think PG would want to do that though, since it might have negatively affect the number and quality of the applications YCombinator receives. Other sites also avoid this option out of a desire for users. The incentive structure makes my obvious solution fairly useless.
Lots of online communities are really bad about being asshats to the newcomers (or just ignoring them like they don't exist). This is not a way to inculcate people with good manners. It is a good way to give them reason to be asshats back or, in the case of ignoring them, making them feel like they can do anything because no one cares or is paying attention to them anyway.
It's not a very good way to reference it, though, and in general comes off as snobbish. There's also a distinction between complaining that HN is going downhill (which the guideline discourages) and asking how to prevent it from going downhill (which I see as a good topic of discussion). Of course, asking what HN is doing to prevent it is one which might be more easily answered by watching the site for a while.
Based on an extremely unscientific sampling (going back a bit over a million items and then hopping around randomly between 300 and 386 days in the past), while there is a slight decrease in the level of conversation - and a fair amount of karma inflation - it's not too noticeable, and I expect that it would be somewhat difficult to distinguish between a discussion thread now and one from a year ago, if all temporal identification was stripped out. Maybe the type of articles has changed a bit, and maybe really short comments tend to be upvoted a bit more than they used to, but by and large HN is not going downhill.