Ask PG/HN: Is HN approaching Eternal September?
"The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007. Initially it was called Startup News or occasionally News.YC. On August 14, 2007 it became known by its current name.[4] It developed as a project of his company Y Combinator, functioning as a real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed.[5][6][7] The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit.[8] Graham has stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community.[9][10][11]"
I posted this earlier this morning, but deleted it. I know PG posted, but I'm curious what state we're at right now and thought I'd ask. PG, do you think HN has reached an "Eternal September" already, or only approaching it? I'm curious to hear from people who have been with the site since the beginning and enjoyed it at its highest points of delivering favorable content. It does seem a little different to me than it did early on.
What can we do to keep the quality high..? My first thought is positive guidelines to focus on (just a few, see Forrst.com's guidelines), ideas that delivered us the best material/discussions anyways, just put them up so people know.
If it was the small community that is missed, that might be hard to fix.