71–78 of 78 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem. I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?
There is the difference between HN and reddit/digg etc. that pg and co. do HN for love, whereas, whatever other motives they may have, the other sites are trying to make money.
Limit the number of news submission per user in 24 hours. I suggest max 5 news/24 hours. That way, we can guard HN from spammers.
If this were actually a problem, they could circumvent this restriction by simply registering many accounts. A better solution -- as others have pointed out in the past -- would be a karma threshold for posting articles, but since it's not a problem yet, why bother?
PG has said he won't let it, and will do what it takes to keep it high quality.
I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.
Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal? HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users; presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette. Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about…
I'm not sure it's necessarily the quality of the users. Call me an optimist, but I think most people in general are decent and most people that bother to come here are pretty smart.
I think the problem with size is the same reason everyone else is a crappy driver but you. In a normal day of driving, you are surrounded by mostly good drivers, but a couple of them are bound to make really stupid mistakes (just by random chance). Since this is your only experience with them, you label them a "bad driver" and it overshadows all the good driving around you. If you only drive on lightly traveled roads, you are less likely to see a stupid mistake, but get on a major interstate highway in a major city and there are enough people that something is bound to happen.
Likewise with large social news sites. Every user is a 'good user' 99% of the time, but has that random moment when they do something trollish or get carried away with an argument and say something mean. (I know it has happened to me before.) When a site gets large, the probability of this happening on any given thread rises accordingly, and since everyone focuses on these instances, it seems like every thread is full of trolls and angry people.
I think anonymity also plays into it. Large communities are by default anonymous, and small ones are not. People in small towns don't cut each other off or tailgate each other, because you are likely to know the person in the other car, or at the very least be headed to the same place. (I know, I'm from a small town.) In a major city, you are never going to see that other car again, so no one cares if they act like an asshole.
That way new users can get a feel for the community before they start posting and you only get users with a real interest in the stories posted here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eventually you will grow and you will need to start making things bannable. What you also need to have is a probation system where you can't post for anywhere from 4 hours to a month depending on what you do. That acts as a warning. Get put on probation too many times and you're banned. That's how it works at Something Awful, and they still have pretty good quality after almost 10 years. And they are for-profit. Also…
No, S.A. is a pay site, it's some trouble to get yourself a new credit card, but on free sites you just make a new alias.
So while banning certainly won't have the same effect as on S.A., it can be useful despite how easy it is to create new accounts.
Limit the number of news submission per user in 24 hours. I suggest max 5 news/24 hours. That way, we can guard HN from spammers.
That would be a bad idea since submissions follow a powerlaw , meaning that the majority come from a relatively low number of users that submit a lot. Check http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb for an example.