My brain notes, in passing, that Eternal September, and the Septembers that preceded it, can be described in terms of concentration of force. If a forum has a certain culture, and a bunch of noobs come in without it (instead exhibiting some kind of “mainstream lowest-common-denominator” culture, incompatible with that of the forum)… If they come in one by one, then they’ll face negative reinforcement (downvotes and/or critical comments), pushing them to either adopt the forum’s culture or leave; if they arrive in a clump, then they’ll be in a position to positively support each other, reducing the negative-reinforcement effect. If enough of them arrive in a group, then the forum’s “immune system” may fail to stop them, and they may end up changing the forum’s culture.
Today, a sudden influx of users tends to come from some big event. Like when a hugely popular site drops a link to your forum, or when there’s a huge story on your forum that draws a lot of interest from outsiders. (The Leverage story is one of the latter; a story like Zoe Curzi’s is fascinating to humans. I told a non-rationalist friend about it, and he said it was very juicy gossip. It also came up in discussions with rationalists, some of whom are more active than others on LW; I wonder if the posts were also linked to on other sites. I wonder if LW admins could confirm patterns like “The recent huge threads about Leverage and about MIRI had a higher proportion of non-users, of new users, and of less-regular users than most other threads.” HTTP referrer headers can give the proximate source of inbound links, while interpersonal gossip is harder to track. Actually, regarding links, habryka posted an image recently [incidentally, the top post, “I don’t know how to count that low”, is an example of getting linked to by Hacker News] … but although it’s interesting, I don’t think it directly addresses my above question.)
So, it seems like sudden large influxes of users, attributable to big stories or big inbound links, are a danger to a forum’s culture. That seems to be “common/received wisdom” from some portions of the internet I’ve occupied.
This brings to mind a funny episode from Hacker News’s history, where its creator posted something like “We’ve gotten written about by a major news site and will probably be flooded by mainstream people who want to talk about politics and don’t care about technical subjects, so please make an extra effort to post and upvote links about Erlang internals and things like that to discourage those people”, and existing literal-minded users took this to heart and filled the front page with nothing but Erlang links.
Anyway, combining one of the proposals with “concentration of force”, this generates the following idea: If you have something like “dedicated volunteers or paid posters”, then by far the best time to deploy them is when you have what looks like one of these big influxes. (It seems an obvious enough combination that I’m mildly surprised that this wasn’t on Duncan’s list of terrible-idea suggestions. Perhaps because it goes against the focus on small things? Heh, Gunnar_Zarncke has the same suggestion.) My impression is that existing moderators did put a bunch of time into following the huge threads; but, like, if you had a squad of “reserve forces” of extra moderators kept on retainer, who only get called in occasionally, that’s probably more efficient and effective.
My brain notes, in passing, that Eternal September, and the Septembers that preceded it, can be described in terms of concentration of force. If a forum has a certain culture, and a bunch of noobs come in without it (instead exhibiting some kind of “mainstream lowest-common-denominator” culture, incompatible with that of the forum)… If they come in one by one, then they’ll face negative reinforcement (downvotes and/or critical comments), pushing them to either adopt the forum’s culture or leave; if they arrive in a clump, then they’ll be in a position to positively support each other, reducing the negative-reinforcement effect. If enough of them arrive in a group, then the forum’s “immune system” may fail to stop them, and they may end up changing the forum’s culture.
Today, a sudden influx of users tends to come from some big event. Like when a hugely popular site drops a link to your forum, or when there’s a huge story on your forum that draws a lot of interest from outsiders. (The Leverage story is one of the latter; a story like Zoe Curzi’s is fascinating to humans. I told a non-rationalist friend about it, and he said it was very juicy gossip. It also came up in discussions with rationalists, some of whom are more active than others on LW; I wonder if the posts were also linked to on other sites. I wonder if LW admins could confirm patterns like “The recent huge threads about Leverage and about MIRI had a higher proportion of non-users, of new users, and of less-regular users than most other threads.” HTTP referrer headers can give the proximate source of inbound links, while interpersonal gossip is harder to track. Actually, regarding links, habryka posted an image recently [incidentally, the top post, “I don’t know how to count that low”, is an example of getting linked to by Hacker News] … but although it’s interesting, I don’t think it directly addresses my above question.)
So, it seems like sudden large influxes of users, attributable to big stories or big inbound links, are a danger to a forum’s culture. That seems to be “common/received wisdom” from some portions of the internet I’ve occupied.
This brings to mind a funny episode from Hacker News’s history, where its creator posted something like “We’ve gotten written about by a major news site and will probably be flooded by mainstream people who want to talk about politics and don’t care about technical subjects, so please make an extra effort to post and upvote links about Erlang internals and things like that to discourage those people”, and existing literal-minded users took this to heart and filled the front page with nothing but Erlang links.
Anyway, combining one of the proposals with “concentration of force”, this generates the following idea: If you have something like “dedicated volunteers or paid posters”, then by far the best time to deploy them is when you have what looks like one of these big influxes. (It seems an obvious enough combination that I’m mildly surprised that this wasn’t on Duncan’s list of terrible-idea suggestions. Perhaps because it goes against the focus on small things? Heh, Gunnar_Zarncke has the same suggestion.) My impression is that existing moderators did put a bunch of time into following the huge threads; but, like, if you had a squad of “reserve forces” of extra moderators kept on retainer, who only get called in occasionally, that’s probably more efficient and effective.
(Because it wasn’t a terrible idea. =P)