Yvain, #2 in all-time LW karma, has his own blog which is pretty great. The community has basically moved there and actually grown substantially... Yvain's posts regularly get over 1000 comments. (There's also Eliezer Yudkowsky's facebook feed and the tumblr community.) Turns out online communities are hard, and without a dedicated community leader to tweak site mechanics and provide direction, you are best off just taking a single top contributor and telling them to write whatever they want. Most subreddits fail through Eternal September; Less Wrong is the only community I know of that managed to fail from the opposite effect of setting an excessively high bar for itself. Good online communities are an unsolved and nontrivial problem (but probably worth solving since the internet is where discussions are happening nowadays--a good solution could be great for our collective sanity waterline).
I haven't visited Hacker News for a while, but it seemed like the leadership there was determined to create a quality community by whatever means possible, including solving Eternal September without oversolving it. I'll bet there is a lot to learn from them.
Writing high-quality content is one problem, selecting high-quality content is another. This is the advantage of one-person blogs, where if the author consistently writes high-quality content, both problems are solved at the same time.
The role of author is difficult and requires some level of talent, but it can also be emotionally rewarding. The author gets fans, maybe even money: from context advertising, asking for donations, selling their own product or services.
The role of censor (the person who filters what other people wrote) is emotionally punishing...
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