In the linked post, the difference between 1 & 2 emerge in most communities, it's the September that never ended, the inner circle pulling up the drawbridge at the sight of the hordes of outer circle people swarming in. Group 3 belong to group 2 and are hoping to jump to group 1 but just haven't managed it yet (and don't know what it takes).

The caretakers seek to either preserve things how they were, or to make it conform to some twee memory (sentimental, nostalgic imagining of how it was, which doesn't conform to reality... i.e. people imagining HN was once better even though pg showed that the quality in the past and present was similar) or unrealistic ideal.

I personally don't think the first two groups can co-exist peacefully without a degrading in the quality of the experience from the perspectives of both groups. To please either group will rub the other the wrong way.

My take is that communities work best with gated circles and steps of promotion. That there is progression.

I don't mean karma (the computer measurement of progression and merit).

I mean that this is a social problem and people solve it and not computers. That all communities are able to recognise themselves pretty well, and would organise themselves accordingly.

I mean cliques.

Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus.

I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail. It needs to be recognised that it's a social problem that merely needs technical tooling.

By which, I mean that these self-identified networks, hierarchies, groups, should be able to control access, visibility for their collaborative work.

In the context of Stack Overflow, it's obvious that the goal of keeping everything visible at the highest scope is to drive as many eyeballs to unanswered questions as possible. But I would argue that it is better to allow sub-communities to thrive and to allow them to control the granularity of those sub-groups... thus putting them in charge of how many eyeballs see their particular set of unanswered questions.

Just like HN, a single SO tends to be far too broad. Just like HN, SO would benefit from allowing users to create smaller groups within the larger scope to deal with ever more niche interests.

Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.