I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod
But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.
my general takeaway from that was that people might get annoyed when you tell them what they are not allowed to do on your site, but most of them will roll their eyes and put up with it. if you tell them what they have to do they will simply drop the site and never look back.
I do my best to make the activity requirements clear upfront, so the only people who will be upset are those who choose not to sign up anyway. For me, the far bigger challenge is learning how to define these "rules" in a way that makes the group sustainable over the long run - which is to the benefit of everyone involved. While the idea of having to post once every 25 days may seem unnecessary, if 100 people followed it to a tee, you're going to have a group that remains active indefinitely.
I do see your point, and I agree that if any sorts of hard rules are to be imposed upon a discussion, it needs to be done tactfully.
We'll send a single warning email before removing people from the group, to give them a chance to post again to stay active.
1. Why is there a minimum commitment to post? It makes it more difficult to overcome the inertia required to sign up in the first place.
2. Why do I need to write an intro before I can see any content? Without seeing any content, I don't know if it's worth spending any time writing up an intro. This really rubbed me the wrong way. I haven't written an intro yet, although I will probably half-ass one just to get a look at what kind of discussions are taking place.
The minimum commitment of posting once every 25 days is mostly an incentive to keep people active. In my experience, if these groups go a certain amount of time without activity, they're effectively dead anyway.
Regarding the requirement to post an introduction - it's my experience that without this requirement, there's often barely enough activity in the beginning to even get things started in a given group. While I do lose about 30% of people who sign up and decide not to post an intro, the introduction posts are usually the nucleus for all discussion that follows.
As far as half-ass writing an intro - that's completely fine, and a lot of people do that too. I should make it more clear that that's 100% fine - if you want to write "hello, just curious about what's going on here" that works.