Online forums usually decline with growing user numbers (this happened to Reddit, HackerNews, as well as LessWrong 1.0)
Reddit and HackerNews, sure, but was the decline of LessWrong really due to growing user numbers? From what I’ve seen and read of LessWrong history, the decline was due to reductions in post volume, rather than post quality, which seems to me that it was a symptom of stagnating or shrinking active user numbers. Simply put, fewer people posting → fewer reasons to check the site → fewer comments → stagnation and death.
LW 1.0 had an additional problem that no one wanted to risk writing a worse than average post in Main, leading to ever increasing standards and fewer posts, but I believe user numbers were still increasing, and quality of Discussion posts decreasing, during that process.
I’m not confident that was actually the decline and shouldn’t have sounded so confident in my post.
Though your explanation is confusing to me, because it doesn’t explain the data-point that LW ended up having a lot of bad content and discussion, rather than no content and discussion.
Anyhow, I believe this discussion should be had in the meta section of the site, and that we should focus more on the object-level of the question here.
I endorse clone of saturn’s reply elsewhere in the thread. I didn’t often go into the discussion section, so I thought that there were fewer active users, when in reality it could very well have been fewer active users posting in the Main section.
Reddit and HackerNews, sure, but was the decline of LessWrong really due to growing user numbers? From what I’ve seen and read of LessWrong history, the decline was due to reductions in post volume, rather than post quality, which seems to me that it was a symptom of stagnating or shrinking active user numbers. Simply put, fewer people posting → fewer reasons to check the site → fewer comments → stagnation and death.
LW 1.0 had an additional problem that no one wanted to risk writing a worse than average post in Main, leading to ever increasing standards and fewer posts, but I believe user numbers were still increasing, and quality of Discussion posts decreasing, during that process.
I’m not confident that was actually the decline and shouldn’t have sounded so confident in my post.
Though your explanation is confusing to me, because it doesn’t explain the data-point that LW ended up having a lot of bad content and discussion, rather than no content and discussion.
Anyhow, I believe this discussion should be had in the meta section of the site, and that we should focus more on the object-level of the question here.
I endorse clone of saturn’s reply elsewhere in the thread. I didn’t often go into the discussion section, so I thought that there were fewer active users, when in reality it could very well have been fewer active users posting in the Main section.