Long-term online community management is a hard problem. This discussion seems to mostly assume that LW would stay at pretty much the ideal state as long as it had an influx of smart people. I see at least two problems here. One is that LW doesn’t have a very clear outside context to specify what’s on topic and what isn’t, such as a forum focusing on, say, military history, knitting or recent publications in theoretical mathematics would have. LW is about a very open-ended problem, and approaches to it are mostly specified by what goes on in the comments. This makes LW vulnerable to community drift, where low-quality discussion starts setting the tone of the site, and drives out quality posters. New posters don’t just see “a discussion site about rationality”, they see a site with a specific culture and specific approaches, and if these look crap, the non-crap posters will look elsewhere.
The other thing is scaling issues. The site dynamics will change as it grows, and a site that’s usable at one scale of users is not necessarily usable with another scale. As an example, it’s currently feasible to follow conversations through the “Recent Comments” sidebar. Should the comment traffic grow by an order of magnitude or two, this would become a lot more work. Managing threads, keeping crap in check and getting to know active users would become much more work at a larger scale.
Successful long-term forums seem to have moderators who have specific ideas on how to keep the community healthy and who work actively towards that goal. I don’t have really good references on this, but this long post from kuro5hin has good stuff on how online communities thrive or fail, and Paul Graham’s post on managing Hacker News is interesting.
Long-term online community management is a hard problem. This discussion seems to mostly assume that LW would stay at pretty much the ideal state as long as it had an influx of smart people. I see at least two problems here. One is that LW doesn’t have a very clear outside context to specify what’s on topic and what isn’t, such as a forum focusing on, say, military history, knitting or recent publications in theoretical mathematics would have. LW is about a very open-ended problem, and approaches to it are mostly specified by what goes on in the comments. This makes LW vulnerable to community drift, where low-quality discussion starts setting the tone of the site, and drives out quality posters. New posters don’t just see “a discussion site about rationality”, they see a site with a specific culture and specific approaches, and if these look crap, the non-crap posters will look elsewhere.
The other thing is scaling issues. The site dynamics will change as it grows, and a site that’s usable at one scale of users is not necessarily usable with another scale. As an example, it’s currently feasible to follow conversations through the “Recent Comments” sidebar. Should the comment traffic grow by an order of magnitude or two, this would become a lot more work. Managing threads, keeping crap in check and getting to know active users would become much more work at a larger scale.
Successful long-term forums seem to have moderators who have specific ideas on how to keep the community healthy and who work actively towards that goal. I don’t have really good references on this, but this long post from kuro5hin has good stuff on how online communities thrive or fail, and Paul Graham’s post on managing Hacker News is interesting.
Also, IQ focused community management doesn’t have a terribly successful history.