Poll: Ban Codinghorror?

perhaps a better solution overall would be to implement some sort of restriction on submissions. if you submit from a single domain more than X number of times in the last Y submissions, you're disallowed from submitting from that domain for another Z submissions.

Jeff's post had some thoughtful things to say about designing rules for communities. He's thinking a lot about what the rules should be for his community at stackoverflow, and comparing your rules to other people's rules is a good way to think about this kind of problem.

There certainly isn't one answer: there's an interaction between the rules and the actual bunch of people you have visiting a site.

Personally I'm losing interest in reddit, for instance, because articles about mainstream programming languages get downvoted immediately -- but articles about farting in Python or computing fibonacci functions recursively in an obscure LISP dialects get hundreds of votes.

As for attracting the "wrong" kind of people, I think you're taking the wrong angle. Atwood is trying to get more people to pay attention to stackoverflow -- if he's got any tactical aspirations towards hacker news, it would be using it as a way to promote his own ventures, as he's done with DZone and other programming sites.

What bothers me a lot is the whole attitude of shoot-first-ask-later. It causes excessive noise. He knows it, but he doesn't care, because it gets people talking about him.

He tries to control the conversation by saturating the channel, and the one filter that we have (the community itself) will go bust if we let the channel be saturated.