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Wei_Dai comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong
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How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?
Have you for example informed yourself of the case of Reddit (the original one) which is particularly relevant to this community in that the software is so similar?
I have not, but Paul Graham has (since he was an investor in Reddit) and he has stated many times that he believes that his community, Hacker News, is in constant danger of falling prey to the dynamic that rendered Reddit worthless to thoughtful busy people, and he has taken many different measures, including banning a user relatively frequently, denying new users the right to cast downvotes -- or any votes at all if their karma is low enough -- and disappearing the "reply" link on certain posts based on an algorithm.
Is anyone aware of any good write-ups on this topic? I'd be interested in seeing any insights as to why things happen the way they do, and what we can do to improve matters.
To answer my own question, here are a few write-ups I found about why the quality of an online community tends to decline over time, and what can be done about this problem:
Also, the book "The Virtual Community" that Richard Hollerith mentioned is available online, although I wasn't able to find much information in it about the specific topic at hand.
Howard Reingold's book with the string "Virtual Community" in it. Old though: 1994 or so, but very informative on pre-Internet communities. The chapter on France's Minitel (term?) I found particularly valuable.
I've been participating in online communities since 1992, and most of my information has come from short comments by people trying to preserve the character of specific communities. Paul Graham's comments on Hacker News are particularly worthwhile, but have not been collected in any one place.