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Comment by toxicFork | Hacker News Reader

“That’s more than double the population of the entire UK, so it makes about as much sense as generalising every single person in the UK, if the UK had twice as many people.”

Great quote.

One thing I have noticed with subreddits is that whenever a subreddit passes a threshold of subscribers and gets more frontpage exposure, the quality gets worse and worse until everyone starts hating it, unless moderators take serious action. It happened to many of them, from /r/atheism to /r/gaming, to /r/adviceanimals. As you get more people into any community, it needs more policing and moderation. AskReddit and some others have stricter rules and seem to be doing better.

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This is so true. I frequent a wide variety of online communities and the same can be said of any of them. Any increase in the rate of new posts always leads to a degradation in post quality until 'stream rate' is reached and people are posting without the expectation of their posts even being read. Maintaining a healthy post rate is crucial but, as you say, quality also needs to be enforced by some form of moderation with unambiguous rules. Evolutions of a community can be tied strongly to post-rate fluctuations over time and most long term users are well aware of these iterations. On forums, large communities can be splintered for the benefit of quality and discussion.

The phenomenon is quite old. See e.g. "eternal september" [0]. The sad thing is that nobody has any better idea than strict rules enforced without mercy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

> The sad thing is that nobody has any better idea than strict rules enforced without mercy.

The other sad thing is that so many online communities die because the moderators aren't willing to resort to that, even though it works.

> unless moderators take serious action

And even then, when moderators do take serious action, there is often an accompanying backlash against them. As if the very degradation of quality is a feature rather than a bug.

Very interesting problem. How quality will attract its own spoiling. Something I've seen on boards is generational issues. Period P+1 will rediscover/recreate what P did, making P lose interest, P+2 repeating the cycle. The lack of communication side of this (~generational gap?) is very interesting too.

AskScience and AskHistorians are two of my favorite subreddits due to the strict rule enforcement.

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