cousin_it comments on Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx. - Less Wrong
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Your description of the problem seems spot on to me, and most of your proposed solution sounds sensible as well. Using a questionnaire to let users graduate into the advanced section seems a little exploitable, though.
One alternative could be requiring a new user to select one of their recent comments for "admission review". If the "reviewers" agree that the comment is unusually good, they let the user in, otherwise they give some guidance on what can be improved, and let the user try again in a week or so. That may also have the side effect of improving the quality of discussion in the easy section, as users try to write comments that are good enough for "admission review".
Why is my questionnaire exploitable?
The problem with having old users review new user's comments is:
This might actually scare off old users. Or create a backlog of comments to go through that prevents new users from participating. There's a high risk of this going totally dysfunctional. Unless you see something about it that I don't?