This is the most valuable article I've read on HN all week. The fact that it's not on the front page is dissapointing. EDIT: It IS on the front page. Hurray!
Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA, Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth (too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the rules of the old when applicable.
To add a counterpoint: I browse very frequently but rarely ever post. I actually think some of the older posters are worse than the newer ones. A lot of HN regulars seem to me to be so caught up in it that they can't see the big picture -> comments mired in pedantry and cynicism and negativity. Sometimes it's very hard to be able to step back for a moment and take a breath of fresh air. New thoughts and fresh perspective aren't always bad.
HN will probably end up as a case study for the maximum user threshold an online community can sustain, while still having an above-average discussion quality.
Reddit has already been through that cycle. Reddit ca 2006, before subreddits, was not too unlike hacker news, in that it had inteligent posts with inteligent discussion. The seeds to what Reddit eventually became was certainly there, but they it did not yet dominate. I think subreddits actually made it worse, since the people interested in having online communities went to smaller and more specialized subreddits, and gave up on the default subreddits, not even trying to hold up the online community.
On hacker news, there are no "sub hacker news", and it seems to me like hacker news is deteriorating at a slower rate than reddit did. My guess is that the fact that there only is one hacker news, and no subcommunities is a partial reason for that.
Reddit remained interesting right up until the Digg 4 migration in 2010. Not wonderful, but still a place where you could have a real discussion in a default subreddit. Where you would get actual answers in AskReddit, not just a stream of pathetic jokes.
That suggests that a very slow bifurcation my be a good solution to this problem. Not so fast that you end up with a ton of splinter groups that lose cohesion, not so slow that you end up diluting the community.
And ChrisNorstrom's account is about 3 years old, so that fits a stereotype of those with the highest concern over a perceived drop in quality being the newest old-timers.
That's because newer members have no memory of how things once were. They have no way of comparing the current quality of the community with the previous quality of the community. Of course its older members who complain about this problem.
There is a bit of survivorship bias at play. People who complain and don't see things improve leave. The only ones left are the ones who didn't have a problem.
I seem to recall the "don't claim hn is turning into reddit" already when I signed up 3 years ago.
Sure enough, a little manual "webarchive blame", shows that that text appeared in 2009 already. [0]
Personally I feel HN itself is having this very problem with its community right now. It's not only gotten too big but user "Probablyfiction" nailed it on the head. Too many newcomers destroy the existing culture instead of assimilating into it. The more I read about immigration problems in the USA, Europe (mass influx of Arab immigrants), Africa (mass influx of Chinese immigrants), Isreal (influx of African refugees) the more I notice this same assimilation problem exists in real offline communities as well. [New] Growth (too much too fast) can hurt communities by destroying the original characteristics, culture, and qualities that made them successful in the first place. Time and moderation needs to be given to ensure the new follows the rules of the old when applicable.