"Perhaps give an actual, real IQ test to use a site. There are several 10- or 20-question tests that have a .85 or higher correlation to full-length tests, and that is probably good enough for internet work."

Suggesting a short-form IQ test as a way to cure the problem of site degradation suggests the author hasn't read many sites populated by people who have scored high on IQ tests. They can be appalling too. Rationality and IQ are orthogonal

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=97803001...

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/aij-cnt.pdf

and there are plenty of people with high IQ scores who don't know how to behave themselves in online discussion. For some really pathetic examples of IQ tests identifying high-scoring ne'er-do-wells, see

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/

and especially

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html

for what really happens when high-IQ people get together. (Sometimes those unusual IQ tests are not validated, but then again validation is just another problem with IQ tests. )

To light a candle rather than curse the darkness, I would suggest that the way to keep an online forum on-task, civil, and useful is simply (difficultly) to moderate it well. As I recall, Reddit's "no censorship" policy has been manifested with very minimal moderation. Deal with the user's overt behavior on the site, and don't worry about the user's IQ score. Smart is as smart does.

A more interesting question would be: why shouldn't HN revert to the mean?

EDIT #1: The speed at which I'm being down-voted warrants some further explanation...

The article headline raises a question about the potential decline of HN as a "quality community". The fact of the matter is that with all things being equal, HN is just as susceptible to decline just as much as Digg or reddit - HN follows the same "social news" principle after all.

So then why shouldn't it follow the same principle?

In attempting to answer this question I'm hoping that members will forward ideas to counter this principle in general, given that all things are equal in this space.

EDIT #2 [on a separate note]: I should add that the future of HN (or Digg or reddit) ultimately depends on the demand of the community. If we get an influx of users that want to discuss:

Ruby vs. Python

Emacs vs. Vim

Bootstrapping vs. Funding

Or whatever else comes to mind, then so be it. Btw, we've been good as a community in avoiding religious discussions, so I'm pretty happy to be insulated from the whole Mac OSX vs. Vista debate!

The bottom line is that we can draw parallels to other communities that have risen/fallen based on the whim of the dominant memes that come and go, but eventually the fate of this place relies upon what memes we choose to propagate.

There's a very simple fix for this that has been proven to work: charge for admission and moderate incredibly heavily. Charging some small sum, say $10, weeds out lots of younger people (no credit card). Moderating heavily deters people from joining and causing a fuss because they will quickly lose their investment.

Content (and members) need to be pruned constantly. Comments with too low a karma rating should disappear; they're just noise. Submissions that are turning this place into "Economic News" should be removed before they get to the front page and get random up-votes to create even more noise (if I have to flag something on the front page, that's wrong).

I have moderated many forums and though I've never modded a for-pay community, I know strict moderation works. Some people will complain, but the people who come for good content and good camaraderie will thank you for taking out the trash on a daily basis.

Of course it's next. It's just a matter of time. This is obviously the natural life cycle of internet forums, and has been since the beginning.

Story quality is directly linked to user growth. When you have a small niche site with "niche-expert" users, you get a high interest and visible actions; as the site grows, individual actions matter less, the niche is expanded into those that may only have a casual interest in the topic, and the forum inevitability changes to meet the needs of the average user - which is not the same type of user that previously existed. As the more windows are broken, the more "decay" is introduced into the forum. But the site is doing exactly what it's supposed to do - mirror the average demographic. It's that demographic that changes.

You simply cannot grow a website like this and maintain a niche focus. So if you choose to welcome more and more people, this is the end result. The sites that have been successful at maintaining focus control either the story submission (/.) or the entry of users (MeFi).

Sites like HN and reddit need to limit growth the same way a small startup shouldn't focus on growth per se if they want to retain that particular environment.

How to do this successfully is another problem altogether.

I know a handful of people that have reasonably high IQ's (above 130 or so). Many of them also have infantile senses of humor, short attention spans, and live with their parents well into their late 20's.

It's been said a few times already, but raw processing power doesn't necessarily say anything about a person's maturity, rationality, or interests.

What could work, however, is a Maturity Captcha! When a user submits a story, (s)he's presented with a series of snarky headlines and/or lolcats and asked "Do you think this headline is funny?" or "Isn't the kitty clever?". Or maybe word problems: "Jack wants to buy a Wii, but he only has enough to pay his rent. Should Jack buy the Wii anyway?". An answer of "yes" to any of those would have some negative repercussion (instant user ban, posting ban, lower karma, public humiliation, etc).

Getting past the captcha would be ridiculously easy for 14-year-old geniuses, but at least there will be a constant reminder of exactly what's unwelcome.

On the other hand, aggressive censorship could take care of the chaff pretty effectively. After all, the problem is, generally: "how does a small ruling-class of individuals shape the growth of an entire community". There no sense in deceiving ourselves about what that means: elitism, exclusivism and in some senses, totalitarianism.

But hey, if it's YOUR community, do whatever you want!

I think HN has a few advantages that give it a fighting chance:

1. It's not a business, or at least a direct one, so the site owners are not focused on growing the audience infinitely. 2. It is not dependent on advertising revenue, so there is no pressure to go "mainstream" to attract bigger advertisers. 3. The members are passionately self policing. Seems like every other day there is a thread about HN going off the deep end.

It's very interesting to me that so many other people had the same experience with Digg and Reddit that I did. At first, I read it obsessively but now I can barely stand to scroll through the headlines. HN has gone through a different cycle so far. At first I only read the front page because it had enough of content for me, but now I skip many of the front page stories and go directly to the "lost" gems on the new page.

I understand Digg has this problem and I stopped being a regular user there over two years ago. However, with reddit, it's pretty much a la carte. You subscribe to the subreddits you find interesting and your home page will only show those. I do not subscribe to the most popular subreddits like politics, pics, business etc. and instead subscribe to smaller, niche subreddits like wikipedia, long-text, and space. My wife subscribes to funny, cute, and health subreddits and reddit has material customized for both of us.

Yes, it is more work to make sure I get to keep seeing interesting things and it does take some time to find more interesting subreddits to follow but it is much better than seeing typical mainstream news on it all day.

I was wondering out the meta-phenomena of community members complaining about decreasing quality. While it may be valid, doesn't it make more sense to make a more concrete argument about why the quality is going down.

More along those lines here: http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2009/02/dilution-of-qu...

hmmm... community management

1. Nightclubs are an intesting example of the steady rise and decline of new ideas. They attract copycats and their followers and the club dies, because the initial 'intellectually curious' crowd gets run over. Meanwhile, clubs that are overly elite and gated just don't have the style and communication culture. I've seen this, as a music fan, in Munich, Germany, over a period of 10 years. Often places that look like a dump are able to maintain their fans (that's one of the strategies).

2. Gated communities become stale quickly. Silicon Valley culture developed, because it was beneficial to work together with others as the pie was growing for everybody. (That's also why the industrial revolution created a middle class). The academic community is a stark contrast to this, because there is no tenure position out there for everybody. IMHO (5 years work at university) the communication culture is probably in the order of 50% toxic intimidation games (noise).

One key difference is that HN can be seen as "startup news" not "tech news". This is a much tighter niche, which reduces the appeal to certain demographics. It also means that if HN starts down a "slippery slope" that it starts from a point further away from base, giving more time to adapt/confront it.

What if you could just have some settings: 1) I don't want to see any submissions from people who became "members" after me. 2) And, I don't want to see ANY comments from people who signed up AFTER me.

So the site stays about the same for ME. Even though it may look different to someone else.

I don't think HN is going down the same path as Digg. It's still keeping it's focus for the most part.

Having a semi-gated community can work. One of the best places for statistics/business/intelligent discussion in baseball is sonsofsamhorn.net - you need to get invited to get a membership, but there's a "Sandbox" that non-members can post to. Anyone can read SOSH, but the quality stays high due to mostly only qualified members posting/discussing.