And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with.
"Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."
On reflection it resembles flocking behaviour. I imagine that website members can be modelled as simple agents with two rules:
1. A cool site has few, impressive members.
2. Move towards the cool sites.
Given an arbitrary distribution of "impressive" members, this should cause a constantly moving flock of members to move from site to site regardless of its purpose.
3. A member's threshold of minimum community coolness below which they will leave, is correlated to their impressiveness.
Yes, I'm that elitist. And yes, I'm well aware I probably wouldn't get voted in :)
But here's the other part - keep the site open for reading. That means it (hopefully) self-selects for quality, and other people can observe a high-quality discussion.
Then again, Something Awful is $10...
These terms are 100% arbitrary and invented an hour ago, but these seem like good definitions.
It was harder to get rid of them because they knew someone who knew someone, and trying to push them out had a network effect. It might be obvious to someone removed by 3+ levels that a bad element is bad, but the person who invited them might not see it.
I.e. if you invited a bunch of bad apples, you will be pruned too. I have no idea if it would work, but it's pretty obvious that open social graphs beyond a certain threshold are not conducive to high-level discussions.
It avoids unnecessary disruptions. Not all branches will shake if a leaf falls.
Brutal, but brilliant... even if it is not necessary true :)
This is just human nature, it manifests itself in the clothes we wear, the cars/bikes we drive, the places we live, it certainly also applies to social websites. I'd be surprised if it doesn't - we'll see how facebook fares, or if there will be a coolkid exodus as the rest of the world gloms on.
It's basically a (sub)cultural arms race that everyone fights in.
It might be different in places other than California though, like New York.
Most economists believe that a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing available.[41][42] This view is based on analysis of empirical evidence as well as the understanding generated by theoretical models.[42] Economists from differing sides of the political spectrum, such as Paul Krugman[43] and Thomas Sowell,[44] have criticized rent regulation as poor economics which, despite its good intentions, leads to the creation of less housing, raises prices, and increases urban blight.
Now that I think about it further, it seems obvious that rent control would be a tool that can be used by a municipality to control rents in either direction, depending on their goals.
A big part of political-economic maturity (for me at least) realizing that just because the supply/demand lines from your Econ 101 class don't line up, doesn't mean that something is worthless. It could be that you're not measuring everything. Culture matters, preserving social mobility matters.
Just kinda irks me when someone comes in with the Econ 101 argument regarding a policy that's being implemented by people with advanced degrees in city planning. These people took Econ 101, and know more about the subject than you or I. They could still be wrong, of course, but it's not for a silly simplistic reason like that.