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Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any examples of a site where treehousing has improved things?

Metafilter is often cited. They have a $5 fee for accounts.

Then again, Something Awful is $10...

That's clubhousing, not treehousing. Treehousing would be putting social barriers on entry. Clubhousing would be financial.

These terms are 100% arbitrary and invented an hour ago, but these seem like good definitions.

Dribbble, then.

It'll be interesting to see how that model holds up to another 2-3 years. The few invite-based communities I've been a part of started to degrade as the social graph grew out and started to pick up the occasional undesirable.

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.

Advogato investigated the problem of transitive trust networks pretty thoroughly as I recall. Anyone here able to comment on how they turned out?

I am seriously considering pruning branches, not just leaves of the social graph to keep communities healthy.

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.

Zed Shaw's Utu had that idea. Doesn't seem like he's still working on it.

I'm not surprised that I like how Zed Shaw thinks :)

This is how many private bitorrent sites work, or at least claim to work. You are responsible for your invite tree.

A better way might be to nuke the undesirable, put their branch on notice if they start to cause trouble, and remove them if necessary.

It avoids unnecessary disruptions. Not all branches will shake if a leaf falls.

Apple comes to mind, app-wise.

I was thinking in terms of communities.

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