I think there's a real disconnect between HN and Metafilter. Metafilter is about making good posts. There are tens of thousands of active members and only a few dozen posts per day because you are supposed to make good posts. The motto is "best of the web" and it is a serious motto.

By design (I think?) HN is not about making good posts; it's exactly the opposite. It's about posting whatever link you happen to stumble across. The hope is that maybe the good posts will rise to the top via voting, and that comments will add value to bad posts. This is a really different idea! I'm not personally convinced that it's possible to get a high volume of visible good posts using this idea in an open general-interest community, because no matter what you do, there will always be more people ready to vote for popularized, lurid, and flamebait posts than good posts.

I think that distinction has much more of an effect on content than moderation. (Although if you've decided that you only want good posts, you probably need moderation to enforce your decision.)

What's the threshold HN crossed where it started needing active moderation? Because '08 HN threads were just better than '11 threads. Is it just a number of users, past which no set of guidelines restrains pathological conversations? Why? If you can trace it back to what thing happens when you get to your 50,000th user, maybe there's some passive moderation mechanism you can identify to keep it in check.

I'm not sure it's number of users--- Kuro5hin's downhill slide roughly coincided with a net loss of users, and its heydey was probably also its most populated era.

'08 HN seemed pretty similar to me, though, though I was just a lurker. It was a mixture of good technical content, startup-scene celebrity watching, too many TechCrunch posts, a vaguely political thread every few days (sometimes with a weak "hacking" justification), and the periodic thread once every 3-4 weeks about how HN is dying / has too many political posts / is turning into reddit. Just fewer total comments and votes (by a good margin).

Some random examples: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179755 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105739 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109052 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80234 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437727

For me, I noticed it when people started posting things from investor blogs and the VCs and angels themselves started commenting here. I think that spurred some small handful of users to start showing off how smart they were in hopes that they'd get a response from fredwilson or whoever, and that just naturally spread the way it did. (There's a certain high when you get fredwilson or msuster to respond to your comment on their blogs; I think it's the same dynamic here.) I'm not blaming the VCs at all here - but that's when I started noticing it. (joshu and yegg are the exceptions that prove the rule because they're hackers first.)

Also, I've been told the Something Awful community is surprisingly pretty awesome, although I'm not a participant there. If there's some intersection of structure/moderation between MeFi and SA that HN could implement, I think that'd be a great place to start.

sighs We complain because we care. It doesn't mean that we have all the answers or we're pointing fingers. It means we're so invested in finding a solution to this problem that we won't just move on. Given just how good HN was (and remains), minute changes are more noticeable. I don't think a comparison of then-and-now really gives us useful data. There's just a gestalt, a feeling, you get that something's not quite the same. The closest I can think of is when you're out to dinner with someone you've fallen out of love with; your routine isn't any different, but you just know that it's not the same.

SomethingAwful was (is?) good because of the membership fee, and because of the viciously strict moderation.

You could have your account deleted, with no warning, for:

    * Persistent lack of punctuation or grammar
    * Posting tired memes
    * Persistent inability to cite sources for claims (in some subfora)
    * Dozens of other things I can't remember
    * Basically anything the mods decided to ban your for

The reason this worked is because the mods were drawn from the community. The admins would look at a subforum, see who was trusted on there, had good judgement and was there a lot. They would then make that person a mod, without asking them or even telling them! That person would just log in next time to be confronted with lots of extra widgets on the UI.

Because the community was so cohesive across the site, that person would then know immediately it was their duty to post a thread saying "Hi, I'm XYZ, your new Moderator" and christen their new powers by stickying the thread.

Again, they were not told to do this, but they would immediately and without fail, because the criteria for being chosen as a mod means that anyone who is chosen would be aware of this tradition, and in fact every other aspect of their role, having learned by example.

The SA forums were operating lots of quite deep game mechanics stuff nigh on ten years ago. It's very interesting. Most of the measures wouldn't be appropriate for here though, a lot of them involved strategically fostering antagonism for the benefit of wider community cohesion. It really worked over there for a long time though.

EDIT: I seem to remember that for a long time they only took payment by actual credit cards, visa and so on, and not debit cards, paypal etc. This was deliberate to prevent kids from signing up.

Something Awful and Metafilter both charge money to join. Something Awful is pretty awesome...but is double-sided. The people from Something Awful are the same people who founded 4chan. ADTRW (Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse) is one of the boards of Something Awful and they were the first people on /b/ the day it opened along with 4chan and have set the bar to where it is since.

They are basically a grown up 4chan...amazing things like Copenhagen Suborbitals http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ but aren't all pretentious and srs business like Hacker News likes to pretend it is.

Theory on the threshold: the point at which groups that social engineer social news sites decide the site is worth their time. This is also a point where the population has grown to a certain point and the discourse has regressed, providing a larger and more easily manipulated audience.