All invite-only early-access things that get hot are like it; once they go to general availability they go to shit, it seems.
I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently, it's hard to take this tool seriously.
Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but homogeneity helps with that).
I'm sure deciding where to draw the line and clearly defining rules, and then enforcing them is a complex task (same as in public policy or international relations) inherent to any social network, and it is unlikely that an optimal solution exists considering the difference of opinions. However, could this type of rule help mitigate the issues mentioned?
Do you even know where you are right now?
> My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content. To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.
> But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.
> I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.
> Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.
My attempt at a solution is to keep it in request-access beta and do targeted advertising only at people who share interests with high-quality subset(s) of discussion on the site, so the new users usually see and can learn what high quality discussion looks like on the site even if all areas aren't mature.
As the site matures you can naturally let more people in until a quite open beta, then full release trying to never take on more than say 10% of the daily active users in any given section/hashtag-cloud per year.
And you want the community to be able to assimilate those who come in versus the newbies overrunning everything.
I’m not on and am waiting for an invite, but if opening the gates means it ends up being a place I don’t want to be, what’s the point?