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Comment by LionessLover | Hacker News Reader

We have such systems in place - see Wikipedia and/or Stackoverflow. Both platforms IMHO have become stagnant messes. A group of people who spend waaayyyyy too much of their life on those platforms and by now identify with it way too much get power-hungry. It's "their" platform now. While still being able to deliver some value a lot of the fun and "feeling easy" about or when using the platforms actively (instead of just passively looking at what they produce) is gone.

It's equivalent to managers or politicians who are in power for too long. Basically, the 0.1% who contribute the most are the ones who should actually get thrown out of "office" occasionally.

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I disagree. Moderation plus meta-moderation would work well for the singular task under discussion: putting shredded documents back together. And because there's no usernames or discussion involved (displaying "User happykitten92 made this move. Was it correct?" would defeat the purpose of preventing troll collusion), everything is done anonymously so nobody has a fiefdom they are protecting; the value is in accomplishing the goal.

To add to this, the concept is not exactly new when it comes to crowdsourcing. Casting Words uses these approaches with Amazon Mechanical Turk for validating others audio transcription for accuracy, formatting, and so on.

You can also validate actions anonymously, by obscuring the user name at the point of validation. We do that on our site.

Choose the lesser of evils. It's not possible to maintain the easy and fun atmosphere of a tiny community once it grows beyond a certain size.

Personally I don't share your opinion on Wikipedia and Stackoverflow. Sure they've lost the new car scent, and there's a lot of noise and bureaucracy, but they're still tremendous resources.

> A group of people who spend waaayyyyy too much of their life on those platforms and by now identify with it way too much get power-hungry.

Though, what is "waaayyyyy too much"? Someone who consistently responds to a question on SO every day or checks 10 pages on WP for language issues every day?

And are long timers really power-hungry or just fed up with discussing the same things over and over again? (Not saying the latter is better.)

I'm sure what you say is true for some, but I think the vast majority is actually civilized and most of the time quietly doing their thing for a project.

What I am missing with most "power awarding" algorithms is a time factor: Respect has to be earned again and again and some "powerful" person who has been inactive for a year can easily come across as condescending to someone who has been very active and engaged in a project for just the last 9 months and thus does not have more than baseline respect for the old timer because s/he never saw him/her in action. An example of a, in my opinion, better solution would be to lose 10% of your karma for every month of inactivity on HN (just an example, I don't think HN suffers from the problems described) or removal of the "auto patrol" flag for users who have been inactive on WP for some time.

Idk about stack overflow but wikiedia degenerated into a bureaucracy, especially evident in the smaller communities (i.e. not the english)

my definition of "waaayyy too much of their life" in the context of this topic is, people who don't have much going on IRL due to social adjustment impairments and personality disorders discover these online communities and have their emotional needs met by fitting into an online community.

Nothing wrong with all that, some hermit toiling over research into an obscure topic can do great work, but the same sorts of neuroticisms and anti social behaviors that can plague real life can more easily over plague online.

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