Ask HN: Avoiding the "Eternal September" Effect?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373809

by Jarred • 15 years ago

8 11 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What's being done with Hacker News that will prevent the "Eternal September" effect to happen here?

I've seen it happen to a lot of communities and I'm genuinely curious how it might be avoidable, for both this community and many others.

egiva• 15 years ago

I can't speak about Hacker News, but Eternal September for me is synonymous with the "Disruptive Newcomers" effect - so you reduce the ability of newcomers to be disruptive by: 1. suspending accounts (maybe too drastic) 2. Community Flagging (middle-of-the-road approach!) 3. Progressively giving a user more rights as they contribute more to the community (StackOverflow does this well). 4. Giving experienced users a community monitoring (admin) position and the ability to edit or censure content according to your site's rules (again, StackOverflow does this, and rewards Admins with points when they edit new posts).

Jarred3• 15 years ago

But isn't penalizing people for being disruptive wrong? I'm saying that how does one avoid a massive degradation of community culture when the community becomes larger?

JoshKalkbrenner• 15 years ago

teams

ggchappell• 15 years ago

> But isn't penalizing people for being disruptive wrong?

I don't get that at all. Could you please explain why it would be "wrong" to penalize people for being disruptive?

Mz• 15 years ago

I think "welcoming them warmly at the door" is a helpful technique. Seems to me that the issue is not newcomers but lack of inculcation in the culture. If you want them inculcated, it helps to a) give them motive to get inculcated and b) give them opportunity to get inculcated.

Lots of online communities are really bad about being asshats to the newcomers (or just ignoring them like they don't exist). This is not a way to inculcate people with good manners. It is a good way to give them reason to be asshats back or, in the case of ignoring them, making them feel like they can do anything because no one cares or is paying attention to them anyway.

staunch• 15 years ago

We flood the front page with stories about Erlang to bore them into leaving.

dstein• 15 years ago

  user:	Jarred
  created: 51 days ago

sorbus• 15 years ago

I believe that this is a reference to one of the guidelines: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

It's not a very good way to reference it, though, and in general comes off as snobbish. There's also a distinction between complaining that HN is going downhill (which the guideline discourages) and asking how to prevent it from going downhill (which I see as a good topic of discussion). Of course, asking what HN is doing to prevent it is one which might be more easily answered by watching the site for a while.

Based on an extremely unscientific sampling (going back a bit over a million items and then hopping around randomly between 300 and 386 days in the past), while there is a slight decrease in the level of conversation - and a fair amount of karma inflation - it's not too noticeable, and I expect that it would be somewhat difficult to distinguish between a discussion thread now and one from a year ago, if all temporal identification was stripped out. Maybe the type of articles has changed a bit, and maybe really short comments tend to be upvoted a bit more than they used to, but by and large HN is not going downhill.

Jarred3• 15 years ago

I'm not specifically referring to Hacker News. I'm building something that has a large community aspect to it and I wanted to know so I can avoid a potential "Eternal September" later.

JoshCole• 15 years ago

Right now Hacker News combats eternal September systematically through hell banning and a karma system. The karma system is actually set up in a way that tries to select for the best possible material. A user's karma and their post's karma are both factored into how far up the page a post will be displayed. This leads to new users being exposed to the hacker news culture more frequently. Post feedback is also set up in this way, because older users are the only ones capable of downvoting.

Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.

This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the barrier is removed for the sake of growth.

I don't think PG would want to do that though, since it might have negatively affect the number and quality of the applications YCombinator receives. Other sites also avoid this option out of a desire for users. The incentive structure makes my obvious solution fairly useless.

Ask HN: Avoiding the "Eternal September" Effect?

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