I think a lot of the sentiment here comes from people wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
What people want:
Everyone 'good' for the discussion.
No one 'bad' for the discussion.
No manual labor.
Unlimited growth while maintaining a perfect community.
What you have to do:
Grow slowly
Restrict Signups
Moderate
The internet is clearly still an incredible communication platform, but it is by no means a human utopia, or even an opportunity for one. If you want to build a good community, you have to do just that. Build it. The internet is rarely going to just give it too you. And your community will without a doubt rot as time goes on if you don't pay attention.
Yes, what I find most interesting about listening to the Stack Exchange podcast is how much attention and conscious effort they put into constructing the community, and in a continuous fashion (i.e. it's never finished).
That said, it seems to me that we haven't reached the limits of the machine part of the human-machine moderation team. Voting up and down (here on HN, on Stack Exchange, Slashdot, etc.) is fine, but pretty rudimentary, for example. I'm wondering if there are any others experimenting with more heavily algorithmic moderation.
I love the attitude of "meta == death" that stack exchange has. They have just enough meta to get the job done. The absence of social networking stuff is pleasing too. Compared to, for example, Wikipedia which has gigabytes of useless meta trollery and weird social norms.
I agree. I've lurked on StackOverflow for a long time now, and I watched the rise of 'meta' style questions as they polluted the question space. This lead to the establishment of the Meta-StackExchange site, which was not an obvious choice at the time. I love how the product they've created provides a very strict structure within which a community can take place.
I wonder what approach, if any, Quora will take to the potential of meta-pollution.
Building a community makes sense when the community is the primary focus on the website. But when your primary focus is something else - such as sharing letters from interesting people in history - it's just not worth the effort. I think Shaun made the right choice, and I think it applies to most websites.
It's a shame because a site about sharing letters from interesting people in history will attract experts, and they will have fascinating things to say. Yet they are not heard because of all the flamebaiting and trollfeeding.
To push the metaphor a bit too far, I think it's more about people realizing they just don't want cake that much.
As you say, it's perfectly possible to build a good community if you're willing to put some work into it. People who run community-oriented sites mostly know this by now.
But a lot of sites pick up communities accidentally. Blogs tend to have comments enabled by default. Adding a forum to a site sometimes seems like a simple idea that will make users happy. Social networking features seem like a must have for some kinds of web apps, even if they aren't the main focus. And of course, these accidental communities inevitably decay until the reek of them spreads through the whole site.
I think a lot of people are remembering that they didn't actually want to run communities in the first place. They added community features because it was the path of least resistance, and now that they've seen where it leads, they're turning them off rather than sinking a lot of effort into making them work.
I'm pretty happy with the development, personally. The communities I like are going to stick around, and as for the others, well, there are more than enough places to have flamewars already.
(Disclaimer: I turned off comments on my own blog a couple of months ago. It's made me a happier person, but I may be projecting just a bit.)
Not everything needs to have a 'community'. A depressing majority of the web using public are idiots and having a no-consequence comment area just encourages them to leave their garbage for you to clean up.
All these people here making earnest suggestions about building comunities - you really should think about what went on here. Communities occur when people have something in common they care about, I doubt historic letters was ever going to be one of those. A community of people who collect historic letters? Perhaps. A community of people who just read them from time to time? Don't be so stupid.
Actually, I feel his pain. I'm sick of all the things the parent LoN post talks about, sometimes enough to want to switch off commenting on everything. Most of us have more useful things to do even if we understand that building community takes work. One trip over to a comment thread on a typical YouTube video is enough to make sensitive people lose their faith in humanity a little.
This is an incredibly insightful comment. There is simply no way to avoid the hard work of curating the community. That is the way for many valuable things, which is why they are valuable.
That said, there is a way to motivate speakers to speak well, substantially, and with respect: convince them that there's something in it for them if they do. "Reputation points" are only loosely coupled to the real prize here at HN: civil discussion between bona fide hackers about the topics we are interested in. This is very hard to find, and extremely valuable.
What people want:
What you have to do: The internet is clearly still an incredible communication platform, but it is by no means a human utopia, or even an opportunity for one. If you want to build a good community, you have to do just that. Build it. The internet is rarely going to just give it too you. And your community will without a doubt rot as time goes on if you don't pay attention.