Is it true that any community that grows big enough, gets ruined?

One of the forgotten aspects of this is how a growing community fights the normal distribution of people's ability.

If I am a small company, it is relatively easy to employ, say, 2 very talented engineers/marketers/sales people.

As the org grows, it becomes harder to recruit the best, we have to accept slightly less than the best if we want to increase headcount. As we grow, we push our talent pool to the average and even possibly below that. Everyone who is not "the best" is, at best, a distraction or deadweight but at worst is causing negative productivity/creating tech debt/making the system less efficient.

Once you add that to the inefficiency of bureaucracy at size, it is a recipe for a lack of performance. Not necessarily rubbish but certainly not as high performing as it felt like in the beginning.

Well, yes, and the answer is in your own question.

Here's the thing: there are certain characteristics that are necessary for something to go from Zero to critical mass; then - if that "something" crosses cha chasm, it becomes popular.

Now, the people who are instrumental in taking that "something" from Zero to critical mass are the early adopters (aka the weirdos, the foolish, the hungry) while the later-stage adopters are the boring "average" people, and - of course - spammer and influencers-wanna-bes.

Therefore communities later-stage are qite different environments than early-stage.

You can see that when working in start-ups (garage days vs post IPO days), you can see in using disruptive products, and, very publicly, in Reddit's subs too.

The good old days are indeed the good old days.

A few related resources:

* Crossing the Chasm

* The Innovator's Dilemma

* How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content.

To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.

But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.

I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.

Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.

There's another side effect: Whenever a site or community grows, it becomes a more and more attractive target for bad actors. The site finds a way to separate signal from noise, this attracts an audience, and that attracts bad actors who learn to mimic the signal in order to access the audience for their own gain. Unless the site finds a way to expand whatever it did in the first place to isolate signal from noise, to also isolate signal from mimicry, then the site will go into quality decline.

We've seen it on Amazon with fake reviews and a flood of cheap crap, we've seen it on Facebook with clickbait, bots and manufactured outrage being counted as "engagement", we've seen it on Etsy with cheap crap passed off as homemade crafts, we saw it with StackOverflow-copying SEO-spam on Google, and just blogspam and SEO-spam in general. Whenever there's a commonly-relied-upon signal, there's someone trying to mimic it, thus lowering the value of the signal.

This actually harbors a good point. The quality stays high if the interactions users receive are strongly weighed towards the high-quality content/people.

I think HN fits this to an extent by weighting voting power according to account age and other factors, which would dramatically slow the speed with which an explosion of new users would change what is seen on the homepage. User comment quality remains a hard problem to solve though.

But with traditional social media structures, as the user group grows, the quality of voting/interaction suffers - you get more people willing to like/upvote memes, clickbait, and controversy.

Maybe what we need is more media/discussion curated by people who care about quality instead of curation by the masses

Very true, but that mechanism in itself is extremely difficult to scale.

"Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...

I find myself more and more in favour of gatekeeping/keeping a low inflow of new people.

Too tired of the "include us -> we demand change -> we demand you be kicked out -> build your own place" cycle.

I used to be very against any form of gatekeeping. And lost a few really nice communities through that cycle.

The underlying causes of the problem are both mathematical and human. While the mathematical causes are reasonably well understood by experts, I think the book Sapiens covers the human factors quite well.

A tidbit from the book is that humans works well in a tribe size of ~150 and anything larger requires a cohesive belief system that ties tribes together. According to the author, examples of such belief systems are religions and corporations. The author goes much deeper and no part of the book was boring. I highly recommend reading the book, it's a much more distilled version of the comment section.

At time of writing, five other comments in this thread link to Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is an example of a large community that has not become ruined, through social and technical counter measures. There may well be people who think that it "is not what it once was" and that's probably true for Wikipedia and for many communities, but that's different from the changes being ruinous.

> Wikipedia is an example of a large community that has not become ruined

there's an awful amount of moderation in wikipedia though. With enough moderation, you can control the community. And tbh, wikipedia has two disjointed groups - the editors and the viewers. The editors are moderated heavily, but not the viewers, since they are not contributing. Therefore, even if the viewers are large, they don't contribute to the editor's community.

I don’t think it’s splitting hairs to say that Wikipedia is a project (with community) more than a community first, and that probably helps.

> I have seen a game with millions of players become crappy once they became mainstream and started to attract very young and very old.

> On that note, I am glad that HN is still a niche community and hope stays that way, and UI becomes even more crappy so people from other cultures and walks of life don't start joining in

So age 25-40ish mostly white upper middle class men. Got it.

Complaining that things aren’t exclusively for you and your background, when maybe they used to, is not novel at all. It is amusing when anti-conservative folks do it and fail to see the hypocrisy.

Mass market mainstream content tending to be low quality and unoriginal is a very different concept.

I like to wake up and be cynical all the time.

That being said, I've been reading Hacker News for for ~15 years. (Pretty much from inception)

I've noticed that some meta-eras don't appeal to me that much, and have bickered about it in passing comments, but never properly thought that it had ever gone down hill.

That's not really related to the original question.

Just doing an obligatory hats off to the staff and community.

This situation is a manifestation of how anonymous others are treated in society. Until our species, our entire global society, matures to the degree that an "anonymous other" is not automatically treated as one of an ignorable population that can be abused without recourse, such scale situations will continue to exist. I use this reasoning to say "humans do not scale". This issue is present everywhere, any place where the group is large enough to form sub-groups, those outside a sub-group become "others" and are treated as a collective, analyzed as a "dumb crowd", and intellectually discredited because they are close enough to an "anonymous other" the treatments of anonymous others bleeds into even these small collectives. It is a real problem, and is barely identified formally.

I've seen dozens of examples of this, but I'm still hesitant to brand this to be causality. There seems to be some degree of correlation though.

Smaller communities tend to be more familiar - people recognize each others names, and people have each other's backs, when someone is trolling or something. When things grow beyond a certain size - maybe related to Dunbar's number - the group dynamics change.

In some cases this can lead to the community to loosing coherence or even becoming toxic - but I don't think that's inevitable. I believe it IS possible to grow a community to a larger size and have it stay nice. I think though, that in order to keep a community nice when growing beyond a certain point, some effort is required - effort which wasn't necessary while the group was smaller and kinda self-organized.

Also, growing slowly rather than quickly might help - as newcomers have some time to acclimatize and internalize those unspoken social rules that govern a group's dynamic - and will be able to pass on the knowledge to those coming after. People who join a group will eventually adapt to the group - but that process needs a bit of time. But when growth is too fast, a newcomer might have more interactions with other newcomers rather than long-standing community members, and thus will adapt to something quite different.

Hey this is happening to the whole world, thanks to the Internet.

Before that, competence and excellence could exist in small pockets of humanity, but now, internet has wiped them out of existence by injecting the dumbness of the majority into them....

What is "ruined" for you, might be just right for others. People's perceptions of value and usefulness vary.

E.g. I work for a huge corporation and am very happy, but it started small. I am working at a "ruined" workplace? Perhaps if you personally value a small start up you'd consider it so, but I value the stability of an established company that I can rely on getting my salary from.

Personally, I think it's true. For the simple fact that the vast majority of people are pretty boring to other people for one reason or another. And that the common person feels compelled to help or advise, for no ill purpose, despite often being unequipped to do so.

When you create a niche community, for that moment in time people are interesting to each other in the sense of having something in common, exciting even. As less serious folks inevitably filter in by word of mouth, linking, or curiosity, the SNR drops pretty considerably.

At one point in life I was a truck enthusiast and mechanical expert and joined a pretty nice community around it. It didn't take long for the laypeople to join, start sharing typical urban myths and terrible advice, and getting -upvoted- for doing so by other newcomers. It went from a community of highly technical folks to a community of commons, and lost all interest.

I'm no different. This was a Silicon Valley, startup, VC based forum initially. I found the community really interesting and loved the topics discussed. But I'm just some weirdo in the desert mainly sharing anecdotes anymore. That's not to say I exist to annoy anyone, but I could see some of the original folks being annoyed by people like me.

> It didn't take long for the laypeople to join, start sharing typical urban myths and terrible advice, and getting -upvoted- for doing so by other newcomers

I can relate so much to this. The Facebook groups for my hobby are filled with beginner questions followed by terribly wrong advices given by other beginners who have no idea what they are talking about. It's extremely frustrating to read, but I put most of the blame on the platform and not the users.

>...and that the common person feels compelled to help or advise, for no ill purpose, despite often being unequipped to do so.

I've had to step back a little from Reddit because of this, I seldom post because I feel there are much better answers coming from other people, I consider the thread a sacred space, but it's clear other people can be reckless and by extension my time and energy is wasted.

Silly of me to think following Elon on twitter would bring out a certain caliber of responses about manufacturing and tech as a whole. The guaranteed disappointment each time has me spending only 3 minutes a day there. Twitter is a bad case for equal access for all, at least for now.

I used to think this was inevitable, but as I've aged I have come to view the process differently.

When you join that group, you change the group. So it's a small shift whenever somebody joins. And even without a change in group membership, people change and their interests and time commitments change.

There have been many online groups that I have been a part of, that have not grown, and still gotten worse. Usually because somebody I liked became less active.

So the constant is really change. And most of us don't like change much. Sometimes change is better, that's why we stuck with the group when we joined it.

There's a pretty interesting phenomena in life that rates of loneliness tend to be vastly higher in urban areas than in rural. [1] It makes absolutely no sense on the surface. How can a town of 1000 people have a lower rate of loneliness than a city that has several orders of magnitude more people per area?

You're definitely right that as new members join a group, the mean interests of that group change. But you can't discount the average weakening of social ties. When there are 5 people in a group everybody is going to know each other extremely well. When there are 50,000 you'll have no clue who the vast majority are and respond accordingly. When you get into the millions everybody else may as well be a one-off chatbot. Unless you purposefully create a group within the group (which is really just starting the whole process over again), your odds of seeing the same individual twice approach zero.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7012443/

I've thought about this a lot. The totally unscientific conclusive I've come to is that it isn't about scale per- se but about the money and greed that tends to come with that scale.

As Acton once said[1], "absolute power corrupts absolutely".

There's something to be said for small, and there's something to be said for niche too.

[1] https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/lord-acton-writes-to-bisho...

Money usually optimises for advertising, advertising optimises for reach, and reach is the opposite of exclusivity or refinement.

There's some benefit to some selective markets, especially if they tend to focus money more than brains --- this is the notion behind virtually all luxury or high-end products, and was a role served by magazine publishers in the last quarter or so of the 20th century: a clear indicator of market segmentation and focus, combining both the magazine's own audience bias as well as geographic (and hence, socioeconomic) market differentiation. That's now largely moved to online and mobile.

I'd wager that those communities that so called "get ruined" didn't grow as their size grew. What I mean is that the rules, norms and the culture that allowed X number of people to thrive in a niche, most often does not translate to much larger Y size. If a community decides to allow growth, it must also be flexible to adapt to that growth. And let's be crystal clear on one thing: communities grow because they want to grow. There exist sites online that have very strict sign-up policies that ensures they are kept small and/or limited to a certain type of users. Some even show long questionnaire on their sign-up forms and you have to wait for sometime to contribute and have to stay active to keep your membership, etc.

I see this over and over again. I think people see the money and the monetization inevitably degrades the quality.

I'm attempting a web 1.0 business experiment with a website targeted towards finding unique stuff in the city I live in. I've decided, as a philosophy, that there will be no comment section with people bickering to moderate, no email signup, no real database, no login, no data collection on my users (besides whatever google analytics tracks) - but I personally don't want to handle your data. I guess this is all to say, I'm going to see if I can avoid falling down this rabbit hole as the community grows - can I avoid ruining the website? I guess I'll see.

I think if you do it right you can monetize tastefully, but that formula is still a work in progress. I just have a sense its possible. I think most people just chase the money into oblivion trying to scale into huge companies mostly for ego? However, it's entirely possible to create little lifestyle businesses on the internet that bring in a decent salary, but don't scale to tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it would be fun to see the web return to a less chaotic place.

I think the web is less chaotic now. I was extremely chaotic early on, and it was great and terrible. You had niches for everything, style was all over the place, people made things efficient in interesting ways and, of course, there were scams and spam and trash and bling.

Now the web most people 'see' is fairly standardised and curated. I mean, try searching for a good forum on a specific topic now; you get wordpress/medium blogs or a link to Discord/Twitter/FB. A lot of the unique and niche 'group interests' are now within the walled gardens of Facebook (+Instagram) and Twitter or Discord, which are basically not searchable from a general search engine query. Or they're in Reddit, the uber-forum that's at least still searchable. I think that's a problem.

I think there's a subtle issue here you've almost hit by 'people just chase the money into oblivion,' and I think it's this: they don't quite understand or appreciate the value their 'product' creates and the audience it is for. So they chase 'monetisation' as its own reward - ads, dark patterns, trying to reach an ever 'broader audience.' Which becomes much easier to compete against and they lost not just customer base but loyalty and recognition.

The Young Web was Creator Chaotic.

The Present Web is Marketer / SEO / Advertiser Chaotic.

There was a high diversity of original content, much of it neither monetised nor monetisable, in the early days. It wasn't necessarily high quality, but it was different.

Today, you can find (if you look for it) quality material, but it's drowned in absolute oceans and galaxies of crap. In the relatively early days of television, Marvin Kitman observed "On the TV screen pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel." The Internet does this on steroids. It's a fundamental characteristic of mass media.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110706222108/https://projects....

Having been here 11 years now, IMHO HN is 90% as good as it was in 2011.

Reddit has lasted pretty well too because of it's ability to shard out bigger communities into ever smaller communities, but the larger subreddits are a bit creaky.

I remember when r/programming and r/machinelearning about 5-6 years ago regularly blew my mind with intelligent discussions but now many of the submissions in both subreddits are just ... not that interesting. The surge of users resulted in the eventual displacement of the original community.

r/experienceddevs is now the place for those types of discussions.

Not disputing what you said in any way, but on the time-scale of 5-6 years, I wonder whether your interests have shifted or you've gained enough experience with the area to become harder to impress.

> HN is 90% as good as it was in 2011

Then it was already very average.

I think the determining factor is what the community's ultimate goal is. I would say that scale improves communities where cohesion or 'quality' can be relaxed in favour of expanding the base of people helping in that goal.

An example that comes to mind is the physics community. I hear a lot of criticisms in recent times about physics around the shortcomings of string theory, particle physics, and even some criticism towards newer areas like quantum computing and topological materials. In this instance, criticism actually improves the community because it necessitates the community to review and defend its beliefs. For most physicists, the rigor and empiricism of the community is extremely desirable, and so the extra conflict is accepted.

In short, I am sort of asking you to be more precise. What does it mean, to you, for a community to 'decline'?

Generally yes, for a few reasons related to the pursuit of growth itself:

* Growth is always a core pursuit, and what is required for growth is not always to the benefit of the core audience/user/customer

* With growth, more humans get involved. Harder to manage many people and keep everyone on the same page, so systems and processes are developed to standardize and remove human error and reduce costs. A lot of babies go out with the bathwater in the process, and it's tough to avoid.

* The bigger the org gets, the more it has to hire just to fill positions instead of hiring people who are truly the right fit. This has a compounding negative effect and further spreads decay.

I think there's a sweet spot in size that varies for every org, but it's hard to know what that is: there are problems at every stage of company growth and tomorrow always seems like it's going to be better than today. In the early days it is. Eventually, without warning, it isn't.

Clay Shirky posted an interesting talk quite a while back that gets into some of this - "A group is its own worst enemy". https://web.archive.org/web/20030713130936/http://shirky.com...

A social network is like a mirror - we run to the next one apalled at ourselves figuring it out in every stage of life all at once. It's ok, soon it will be normal

It depends how you define community. If the game's growth discourages the people you actually play with from playing, then sure, it kills your community. If your neighborhood becomes too expensive to live in, your community will be crushed. Pretty much anything involving scaling a factory of any kind will necessarily favour broad applicability, but whether that means your community within that stops being fun depends largely on what those changes are and over how long of a timespan they occur. In WoW, people like to cling to the classic version of the game that they played when they were a kid and have since changed. Those changes were obviously good in a lot of ways, but also negative in others. Those people could argue that changes since then killed their community, but really what happened is that tradition is inherently stagnating in some ways.

The hilarious corporate mantra of buying out a startup and keeping it a "startup with much better funding that runs independently but within the company" is a joke tho seriously

I think it is more insidious than that. Take for example Subnautica - an awesome indie game unlike many others, not without its issues but well loved and made with care. After the initial project success, the team started (and eventually released) another project - Subnautica: Below Zero.

However, in the middle of development it started to have issues namely around the decisions to add personality to the player character, character's gender and additional plot lines based on this, characters received voice overs, then it was redone, then plot was changed, people left, etc. The original game had no "main character" per se while Below Zero did and my general impression on reading all the drama was that the game was no longer influenced by people harboring love for the craft and those who genuinely wanted to play it but rather "others" whose interest was using this medium as yet another proxy to push their agenda.

Back in the days me and my friends used the term "normies" but I don't think this term would precisely describe what's happening. There are many people one would describe more or less "normal" who are kind, respectful, and don't degrade the quality of communities they are part of. So here comes the question - who are those people who destroy communities and what we can do to stop them at scale?

It’s tragedy of the commons. The smaller the group the more likely members are to care for one another and the community. The bigger it gets, the less likely a new member is to behave with the culture of the community without moderation, the more the average behavior goes down. It helps if you have an on boarding process that educates on the culture and norms or attaches new members to existing so they can be introduced into the culture instead of just thrown into it.

What happened to the Ask HN "tag"? Do people just not use it anymore to highlight it's not a link to another website?

Man, all these new people on HN have ruined it. No one respects the old rules anymore :)

Perhaps it's worth thinking about why we want communities to grow big at all. I think things go wrong when two different sets of incentives are muddled. The first are those that lead to a great community. The second are those that lead to a successful business built on providing a platform for a community. The business wants the community to grow because larger communities mean more revenue. But larger doesn't mean better from the community's perspective; it often means completely changing the community's character. There are probably tens of thousands of small self-organized, self-policing communities on the web that are doing fine because they don't have the business incentive to scale.

For many people, growth of "their" community provides much-desired social validation. Whatever modern terms you might use to describe this ("money", "success", "popularity", "coolness", etc.), it seems to be a far-older human need. One often tied to the need for security - so trying to dismiss it, or deal with it ever-so-rationally, is generally a mistake.

I have only seen this effect with artistic products and true communities(As in, places where you know most of the people, and your relationships with others there are at least as important as the official goal of the group).

Technology does not have that effect, because machines aren't people. There's essentially nothing about Linux that I don't like way better now than when I started.

Lightweight tech may lose it's lightweight status, but it still runs extremely fast because of the optimization that "bloatware" usually has.

If people think it's gone downhill, then it was probably always as much of an artistic work as a technical one.

Hacker News isn't a specific tech project, and is closer to a real community, so in this case I would expect that it would go directly toiletwards if it got big.

I think the main factors are content overload and a small group of users that quickly ruin anything.

That group often isn't there at the beginning, because they don't start stuff(Making an effort is uncool), but they do like to show up and shitpost.

It doesn't take many people who really don't care, to turn a place into 4chan. Moderation can't even fix it, you just get kidz bop 4chan lite.

I'd argue that technology does have this effect as well, though it manifests differently.

Machines aren't people ... but people buy machines, or the services based off of them. And as these get increasingly complex, and the market grows, that market becomes less specifically skilled and discerning, more easily swayed by bogosity. Audiophile equipment and wine markets exhibit many of these characteristics, and are well-known case studies. Bicycles are another example. With digital computers specifically, Moore's Law helps offset some of the worst abuses, but the intrusion of mass-market crap still occurs, ironically all the more in more competitive and larger markets.

I'd say no, but usually yes. In any competitive environment, usually an entity is incentivized to maximize total value, not value per user.

It matters not that a new user is better than the average existing user. It only matters that they are better than nothing. Good things grow, and they get worse per user over time if they can. The book unsong is an interesting read if you find this concept interesting and you like scifi.

But there may be some interesting counter examples where group ownership is distributed per user, or with equal voting per user. I imagine in such scenarios, it is possible for quality to increase monotonically.

But this would require all existing members to make good decisions about growth - which might not be that easy as it sounds. I wouldn't be able to think of examples off the top of my head... one interesting one to consider might be the group of all humans...

I think communities should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

A larger community does typically have more potential to shift in itself. Whether this is "good" or "bad" lies in the eyes of the beholder.

I think, however, that people that are insistent on keeping a community locked-down and small and who self-appoint as gatekeepers are often more destructive to a community than actual outsiders. They're usually fragile people who require a sense of value and elitism/superiority to feel good about themselves, and they exist everywhere.

Yeah, it's generally called ["scalability"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability ).

For example, you can't generally scale-up a machine by just multiplying all of its dimensions by, say, 2, and expect it to still work the same way. Ditto for organizations.

Scalability would generally be a problem even if you could ensure that the sorts of people involved wouldn't change. But, if you're considering a scenario where the the types of folks involved also change, then that'd probably tend to amplify the effect.

That said, systems can often be scaled-up with due consideration to how they work and ensuring that the fundamentals are kept.

If you have a stable community, there is a certain distribution of participants from recently-joined to oldtimers. The bulk will have experience with the community's unwritten rules due to experience; new folks constitute a tiny minority and and "infraction" of theirs can be gently corrected.

This no longer works when suddenly scaling up participants. Behaviour by inexperienced members goes uncorrected and drowns out the original behavior. Aspects that were frowned upon can become the new standard. In short, the atmosphere changes - and no one genuinely controls the change's direction.

This is a great thread with many insights about group dynamics.

One analogy/model I like is the gravitational effect of groups. This doesn't say much about their quality, but affects size.

People talk about the "value" of a network, but it can also be seen as power. A large network exerts a power, not only on those inside it, but also on those outside.

"Gravitational" large groups suck-in individuals, and other smaller groups, in a runaway agglomerative process, like stars. Once commercialised this happens by acquisitions and mergers.

Groups start out with control over their boundaries and size. You can take or leave them. Past some point they lose that. Other groups die because of them, and we get a "Monopoly" problem.

Facebook and Google were both harmless until it got to where you constantly heard about them from everyone you met. Then comes pressure from others to join. Eventually the cool, or individually empowering thing to do is to not be in that group. That can induce loyal stalwarts to leave too.

To press the "star lifecycle" analogy (perhaps too far), I think the jury is out on the end-life. Some may become Red Giants, just growing, diffusing into space but growing cold. To me, Google has become that, "ubiquitous yet amorphous" offering an extremely low value prospect but permeating too much. Some, perhaps like Twitter, will go White Dwarf, pulling-in to a smaller, super intense thing that goes bang! Although it has millions of participants, people outside it's small gravitational range are barely aware it exists.

Human interactions are different from particles. The most successful lobby groups are not the largest or most ubiquitous, but those that have a clear common interest and manage to balance size with willingness to expand resources for the group's goals.

Yes it is true and it seems to be the result of our tribalistic history.

We are well adapted for social groups of 50-200 people but have a hard time to "belong" in too big groups. One could argue the subcultures/counter cultures of the young is a modern form of tribalism.

This shows especially in larger social networks online, where people stop treating each other in friendly manner.

There's a similar essay that describes how scenes (e.g., art, music, literary, ...) develop.

First you've got the creators themselves.

Then the early / appreciative fans.

Then come the hangers-on. Not there for the creation so much as the crowd.

It goes downhill from there: grifters, frauds, pickpockets, exploiters, etc.

Eventually, the creators get bored, or tired, or can't afford the now-gentrified prices / location, and move on. The remenants of the scene itself can persist for decades --- the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco is one example, and downtowns throughout the world are littered with the dried husks of former literary circles and the like, hoping to catch a stale whiff of the fragrance that once blossomed there.

I wish I could find the essay, it described the dynamic really well. I'd seen it online ~5--10 years ago, believe it was making the rounds at the time.

Depends on what your metric is. Large communities can be very useful for video games, because the matchmaking pool becomes larger, which means faster and more skill-accurate matches.

I play Starcraft 2, and while the pool for players in 1v1 and 2v2 is still fine, 4v4 has few enough players to where it can be a pain to match up with another team. Just takes a really long time, and you sometimes get repeats even if they're much better or worse than you, etc.

> Is it true that any community that grows big enough, gets ruined?

Well, you know what they say - nothing lasts forever. But, glibness aside:

I think the answer is yes, ultimately. But I don't think that it is bigness per se that dooms a community. This depends on how you define community, of course - is "all of Facebook" a community? Does everybody have to know each other for it to be a community? In my opinion, no; what defines a community is what it unites around - what it believes to be worth defending, specifically.

So the real killers are whatever influences force the community to sacrifice exclusionary principles - the places where the members of the community will draw a line and fight for a side, so to speak. A growth imperative is such an influence, since less exclusion = bigger TAM, hypothetically, and as other commenters have pointed out, people change the communities they join.

Interestingly, I don't think monetization as such kills a community; after all, there are plenty of communities that rally around monetization in itself as something valuable and worth defending, and many others might tolerate it as one of the exclusionary principles that keeps out the trolls.

I think a lot of countries that went through eras of ethnic strife or balkanization have positive associations with bigness. Yugoslavia being a prominent example. The US itself may be a pretty good example of a place that benefits from its bigness, openness and ease of movement and sheer scale. A lot of large scale industry which underpins much of the modern world is really located in places that have the capacity and population to pursue big projects.

Within online communities that are dying there is often new life injected if they consolidate. I think the success of Linux is largely owed to big organizations that made it commercially viable. In decentralized form in something like Debian, which aims to reach as broad a base as possible, or corporate in the form of Redhat, but in each case with a growing population, real resources and unified goals.

A company like Amazon during the pandemic is I think also a good example. The logistics that their size enables and the ability to absorb sudden shocks just does not exist at any small company, and it was the big companies that kept the lights on and the goods going around. I was strongly persuaded by Tyler Cowen's book on the topic a few years ago[1].

[1]https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250110541/bigbusiness

> Have you ever seen an example where anything became better than before when it grew big.

Human societies?

Just not for everyone.

But I'm pretty sure that as a rule of thumb and in the long run, the bigger they get, the better they get at promoting the survival of their core audience...

Need just a bit of cunning, discipline, structure and communication.

With just a drop of ruthlessness of course.

I think this is a really good video. It might not apply to everything you are thinking about, and is mainly centered around the fighting game community. But I think it can say a lot about the behaviors that we all do to try and keep a community - and how limiting who is considered a part of it is a vital part in a community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8055HIDm1A

Thank you for posting this question! I've just recently been thinking about this effect in terms of how computer games were degraded as a medium by an outgroup who has no interest in games and wants to push its own agenda. What is more scary though is to observe the same process in scientific communities today, which I think may have long lasting negative consequences for all of us tomorrow and the days after that.

Sure they do.

"Good ideas don't often scale", Robert S. Barton, cited by Alan Kay found via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31337452

Or a rhethorical argument – if grown 'too big', failure is inevitable. It may take a while, however. :-)

Can we’re get the title changed to Ask HN, please?

"Bad money drives out the good".

Dota 2 subreddit used to be great, but eventually the toxic people came in. Those who were neutral either left or became toxic. Those who were good left.

You really do need intense moderation to keep a community good and that's not easy.

Dunbar’s number is basically the rule that when the population exceeds about 150 or so it rapidly fragments, based on observations of prehistoric villages.

Apple, the community has gotten better as it's gotten bigger.

But generally speaking it's hard for a community to get better as it grows. As the community grows it begins to split because there are so many needs to satisfy so an overall feeling of dissatisfaction dominates and people become unhappy with what the community has become. We see it all the time. In extreme examples members are willing to destroy the community with out knowing how to make it better. They are just upset that what they have is not what they want. In a way they unite on the idea that they are dissatisfied. It's extremely hard to satisfy everyone all the time. And as a community grows that becomes even harder.

One way to keep unity is to have a set core of believes and unite around them by making sure everyone adheres to them. So the community focuses on the believes rather than the reduction of satisfaction.

All you have to do is find something large that you think is good. Agriculture? Buddhism? Science? Disney?

All large human organizations are broken masses, muddling along.

I think so. For each and every attribute (of anything) there is an "interval" of proper values. Too few/too much is dangerous.

A recent pertinent thinker was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr

To "ruin" a good community takes time. To grow a community takes time. Maybe correlation isn't causation in that case.

I would throw in a a spanner here, with snap chat, it technically did become more mainstream, but it has always tried to be a "niche" platform.

Today it barely has the same relevance.

That's just the nature of teen apps. They are very fashion based and become lame after a short while. I'm sure Tiktok will also go that way.

Take YC, I have heard from many founders it's not what it used to be...

Different doesn't automatically mean worse.

I should expect it. It’s not really a “community” any more past a certain point, and more like a telecom system; communities may exist within it but it’s not a community.

An obvious factor others have mentioned is you can keep everyone in your head, build some kind of consensus around community standard and a few volunteer moderators can actually monitor it.

But another is stakes. If you ban Trump from Twitter, there’s a tremendous fan base and political effects. We don’t need to discuss it here, the only thing that matters is that it matters. So the stakes are high, and it’s not obvious and non-controversial that Twitter should even try to curate a community.

Conversely, if you get permabanned from Stormfront because you’re too left wing, nobody minds. There are no stakes. Nobody will try to buy Stormfront to stop them from banning progressives.

So it’s very easy and comfortable for small communities to police aggressively.

The present is never what it used to be. We remember the good and forget the bad.

Its why, make X great again is such an effective propaganda slogan (its been used by many groups, not just the current one)

As per my mum's fridge magnet:

"the older I get, the better I was"

Have you never turned HN back 10 years and stared in awe at how much better the community was back then? Even in relatively "niche" communities like these, it happens.

I've spend hours upon hours with Algolia on several years old HN threads. I don't know how you come to the conclusion that it was better back then. Lots of threads had replies that would get light light grey real fast these days - not because they were controversial, but they just didn't bring any value to the table.

Edit: Something that came to my mind right after hitting 'reply': Maybe the share of technical threads to political/ psychological/ religious/ philosophical/ news/ etc. threads was bigger in comparison... If that's a downgrade for you, then I could understand your position.

This is surprising to me because I view HN as one of the highest quality online communities I frequent. What has gotten worse in your opinion?

I believe that if a community grows big enough it gets ruined, but “enough” may be bigger than you think.

> Have you ever seen an example where anything became better than before when it grew big.

Yes, many times.

When your community is too small it’s boring, there isn’t enough user-generated content. As the community grows bigger users produce more content. Popularity encourages creative people to join and existing members to put more effort into their work (motivated by a larger audience and more competition), creating better content.

I think Geometry Dash and Trackmania are examples of communities which seem to be doing better than ever despite growing a lot the past couple years.

The issue is, when a community grows it creates disagreement: some users like different content than other users, users start to fight over which rules / goals / overall direction the community should go. Usually the overall community ends up in the middle ground, where everyone is only partially satisfied.

Case in point: Hacker News with informative / political articles. Some people only like learning, some people like tech drama and even general politics. The result is half informative, half opinionated pieces on the front page.

But it helps when the community focuses on a niche topic, and sticks to that topic even if it grows. Because that means everyone just talks about the niche, and people who aren’t and don’t get interested in it won’t join. It also helps when said topic is non-controversial and non-political, so there’s not much to disagree on and get mad about.

Trackmania’s community is still close because it is a very specific game: racing on a custom track to get the best time possible. There’s not really much else to do in Trackmania, so if you don’t like making custom tracks, trying to get the best time on one of them, or watching people do those things, you won’t like Trackmania. It’s also clearly not provocative.

Hacker News is kind of a niche because it focuses on tech from the perspective of professional software engineers. Nowadays Hacker News does get controversial, but I know it has systems and moderators in place to limit flame wars and politics as much as possible.

Large subreddits, Discord communities, Facebook groups don’t really feel like “communities” because the users’ interests are too diverse: many of the posts are uninteresting to many of the users, because it’s hard to imagine a post which can interest a majority of the users at once. They also get a lot of drama because people post about politics and those posts get encouraged and upvoted and reposted.

HN doesn’t seem like a very niche community to me, it’s far bigger than it used to be

I'm here for about 1-2 years now and I don't really get the feeling of HN being a small community.

The UI really makes it feel comfortable spending time here, because it's not overloaded. Maybe that's why it doesn't feel that big (and chaotic) here. I'd love to see actual data of usage though. That'd be interesting.

It used to be small more than 5 years ago, but big posts now can get more than a thousand comments. That was unheard of back in the day. Dang even has to ask people to log out during those times to help prevent the load. That said, HN has always had an extremely fast turnover on the front page, and the content is roughly the same as ever.

There also used to be more old experts here than now. It used to be that you could come on here and expect to find someone who worked in some legendary tech position, a genuinely famous or legendary programmer. I don't see that kind of thing much now

I've made a comment earlier on that same thread that touches on some aspects of what you said. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31364858

> Dang even has to ask people to log out during those times to help prevent the load.

I witnessed that, but forgot about it.

Edit: But for real, how many are we?

Saying this from a 7-days account... Either you're relatively new and can't really speak to what HN used to be, or you're using a throwaway to post content you know is low-quality.

Why are you defensive? My old account got marked as dead, so I had to make a new one

I look this post up and re-read it every now and then. Not it 100% fits my real-world experience, but has definitely fit some cases to a T.

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

> Creators and fanatics are both geeks. They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.

> Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing

> The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother.

It's true for countries so I would guess it's true for all organizations.

Once the community becomes too big to enforce it's rules it will be ruined, imo it's that simple

I think it happens even with out the growth in community size. Many companies perish, many groups of friends disband, rare bands last for decades.

People change and situation changes.

Some thoughtful comments in this thread so I would like to add something pithy and under-appreciated: once you reach a certain number of users, content moderation is the only thing that matters; everything else is ui chrome.

Specifically with respect to forums, I'm going to repost something I wrote before:

Metcalfe's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the number of nodes (or people) in the network. That is, V = k * n^2, for some constant k.

But we now know that there's more to the story. That valuable network attracts users, but it also attracts abusers - spammers, propagandists, trolls. They don't add to the value of the network; they detract from it.

Here's where the handwaving starts. It is my perception that the proportion of abusers rises as the size of the network rises. That means that the total number of abusers rises faster than the number of users - perhaps as the square of the number of users.

Worse, those abusers do more damage than their numbers would indicate. It's not just that you have messages that should be ignored. It's also that you have to increase the level of mistrust for every message. I'm going to guess that the abusers do damage about in proportion to the square of their number (which is itself in proportion to the square of the number of users).

That leaves us with V = k * n^2 - c * n^4, to account for the damage from abuse.

It follows that one essential of larger networks is keeping c as low as possible. Otherwise abuse destroys a network.

Also note that, for any given k and c, there is a number of users beyond which the value of the network is negative.

I feel users don't have to be nefarious to have negative effect on the network. Example, you and your 4 friends in middle school are hanging out and having fun. One of your friends mom shows up and sit next to you guys. Suddenly you can't talk about 80% of the stuff you'd in absence of her, even though the mom isn't spamming or trolling. But yes as network grows it attracts marketers and spammers. But also kind of audiences matter too. A large network of only consisting hardware enthusiast is really useful. But a large network of general population would affect what posts make it to front page, how they get reported, and how slowly they get answered as they will drown against cat photos, political rage, and personal success stories. Even people with all specialized skills and relevant interest won't get to see those niche posts.

On reddit there is concept of subreddits. But regardless you are more likely to be distracted with other subreddits then interact with niche you are an expert in. why more coding questions are asked on stackoverflow than r/webdev

The mean is attracted to quality, but doesn't 'get it', and drags it down. So you end up with regression to the mean. It happens to everything 'cool' everywhere, all the time.

When a community is young and niche, it only attracts those who seek it. These seekers get it, but they have that 'je ne sais quois' that is often envied by people whose motives have no resemblance to the theirs. Once the second wave hits, it is downhill from there.

tldr hipsterism.

Any community that gets big enough for Tencent to invest in gets ruined.

I think it is inevitable that a big community is ruined eventually, yes.

I have a rule that I think applies to groups - if a group is going to be effective, it has to come together with a very clear goal. Once that goal is achieved, the group disbands - it is over. If you keep to that rule - disband once you achieve success or failure on your very narrow goal - groups can be effective.

What actually happens, is that some individuals in a group find they have alignments within the group. They then seek to convert the group to their interests. That might be fully or partially successful, but hierarchies start to form, there are overt and covert discussions. At this point, there is an attempt to subvert the 'group will' as it were, for the benefit of the individuals now running or attempting to run it.

The background issue to this, is that individuals who are not fully individuated seek completion by membership to 'something bigger' - a group of some sort. Then, the desire to belong is weaponised against their individual will - the dynamic is that an individual's power is harnessed by another. Those doing the harnessing are satisfied by the harnessing, but the majority are unsatisfied.

The answer then - for the individual at least - is to be very clear why they are joining a group, why they will leave, what is acceptable or not.

"Almost a law" - Moore's Law? Technology gets better?

Or birth? 9 women can't deliver a baby in 1 month. Is there a glitch in the machine? Of course there is!

Do you know where it is? Me neither! Pray to God and Jesus about IT! Try something else. Keep going, until you're stuck, then keep going until you all agree it's fun and happy.

Now? Raise the average life expectancy, or die trying and meet God that way. I'm an idiot hacker who wants to try. Who's coming?

Facebook was once Literally Harvard. It's a great many things now, but one thing it is not any more is "Literally Harvard". It's now 3 billion+ people, few of whom attended said institution or anything comperable.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.

(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)

It can only get worse.

Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.

And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....

For a few reasons.

- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.

- Limits to common experience and interest.

- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.

- Just plain scale.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991

And many new communities don't start out as highly-selective. There's something of a double-downward-wedge at play:

- If a community starts out selective and grows, it can only dilute the original cohort.

- If a community starts out antisocial, even slightly, it has a profound tendency to drive off the more pro-social members with time, what's been called "the evaporative cooling effect", or the Nazi at the Bar problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/https://blog.bumb...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101126001133/http://lesswrong....

https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

The situation also appears with specific channels or publications. TLC was once the PBS-affiliated, NASA-sponsored The Learning Channel. H.L. Mencken's American Mercury was once a highly respected literary magazine. Both transformed tremendously. You're likely aware of TLC, the Mercury's story is probably less known today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury

There are communities that do remain reasonably coherent over time. Most of them are size-constrained, many cycle through members. Universities and colleges are classic examples of these. Most of their members, the undergraduates, remain with the institution for only a few years --- graduating in 4 or 5 typically, though many don't graduate (drop-out rates may approach 50%). Staff and faculty tend to remain longer, and provide institutional memory, though the institutions themselves provide some of that robustness as well.

There's much made of the failure of planned utopian communities, though it seems to me that the archetypal college town often strongly resembles one, and many of these have persisted for a century or more, which is longer than most other planned communes. (There are some exceptions in the latter case.)

Admissions standards, a highly-encouraged stay-a-while-then-move-on dynamic, a clearly articulable goal, viable economic support (in the case of higher-ed, a fair bit of that being direct or indirect governmental aid), and attention to the underlying needs of a community and institution, all seem to help.

As David Weinberger's noted, conversation doesn't scale very well.

And intimacy doesn't scale at all. Yet it seems to be what many social networks are trying to promise. Intimacy is virtually by definition the inverse of scale, and any attempt to try to scale it will end in tears.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/intimate

Yes, you can share a moment with a stranger. But if both of you move on, then it's just that one moment. And even in live performance, the relationship of audience to performer, no matter how strong, is parasocial, it's not a reciprocal relation (something both fans and stars eventually come to grapple with).

https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c7000...

So, no. You can have a small, selective, intimate, and focused community. Or you can have something else.

The question comes down to: which do you prefer?

It's more than just that. There's a feedback to the dynamic.

Excellent communities regress to the mean.

Substandard communities regress to the lowest possible level.

An ancient Italian proverb state "poca brigata, viata beata" (small brigades makes wonderful life's), more prosaically in societies of any sizes we have various kind of individuals, most are "good" some are not. As the society grow the slice of "bad" Citizens cohort can grow enough to unite against the others.

That's happen with organized crimes as well as élites (witch tend to evolve toward dictatorship witch actually is organized crime), meanwhile "interprocess communications" start to exhibit more and more issues, hyper-subdivision of labors, made possible by the bigger size, remove large slices of generic knowledge so makes people fragile, for instance just look at those who live "in nature", they mostly know what to do if a tree fell on the road during winter, how to fix some plumbing, change a tire etc, nothing special, just generic knowledge. Those in big cities tend to know far less, so you can tell them that a broken plumbing joints means a 300€ complex work or that there is or not an immediate emergency of some agricultural productions etc. On scale that means it's easier to make people believe what some PR what they believe AND peoples are far less "adults" because not having a large slice of generic knowledge they can't much stand on their own feet depending more and more on third parties who tend economically to concentrate in oligopolies.

So yes, there are size limits, I can't really tell where is the threshold but there are different many thresholds...

There are other significant negatives to HN, too. You have to have the "right" political opinions if you want to avoid massive downvotes, for example. Oh, and don't bother to criticize capitalism one tiny little bit, either.

I like it. It's the only social media where people are actually upvoted for being right. Despite the community growing there's still an emphasis on quality here. If you get downvoted for your political opinion, it's probably because you're just venting a baseless opinion, or you're ranting off-topic. Show me a well reasoned on topic political comment you made that got downvoted and I'll eat my words.

Nom nom nom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28400591

I don't think you generally need much reasoning to argue that people should obey laws and that laws should be enforced. The only surface area I see for disagreement here at all, much less downvoting, is whether one thinks a legally mandated quarantine is a good law at all. My second comment even got flagged for stating that a single person evading a legally-mandated COVID quarantine could do an exponential amount of damage.

If that's not sufficient proof, like I said, I can provide more. I actually abandoned another account here because the downvotes and rate limiting of my account got too annoying to deal with. I can't prove for certain that many of them were downvoted for politically-motivated reasons, but there are many for which I can't see any other likely reason.

Edit:

Here's a great one as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28335425

Here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332616

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330675

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315319

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28314059

Social justice warrior (SJW) is a pejorative term and internet meme used for an individual who promotes socially progressive, left-wing and liberal views, including feminism, civil rights, gay and transgender rights, identity politics, political correctness and multiculturalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

You know that the entire purpose of HN from day one was to advertise YC funded startups whose entire purpose of existing were to get acquired?