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Comment by probablyfiction | Hacker News Reader

Another thing that seems to be the case is that new members are unable to become assimilated into existing culture because the entrenched users quickly become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms. The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.

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>>The culture is co-opted by the newcomers.

I must admit I've not seen this yet. In the forums I frequent the old elite rules...to the point where the admins trust the powerful members to manage it to some extent. If 3 powerful people decide that a new user is undesirable then said user is a dead man walking. Obviously not very democratic etc...but its super effective in maintaining the peace....the powerful members provide a base-line that absorbs most of the BS...the admins step in when something dramatic happens.

I must admit I've not seen this yet.

Generally that means that the forum just hasn't grown enough in popularity. There are exceptions of course, depending on how heavily moderated the forum is.

You're thinking of individuals. The point is that, even if the "old elite" have the power to just say "Ban that newcomer" and the newcomer gets banned, the "old elite" do not scale while the influx of newcomers certainly can. One, two, three, even 20 bad actors can be dealt with by a small group of community gardeners. But thousands of bad actors are just on a totally different scale and cannot be dealt with in the same way.

This is similar to the situation of event security guards. They individually hold more power than any member of the crowd, but if the crowd collectively decides to rush the stage, they can't really stop it from happening because it is physically impossible for 50 people to overpower 10000.

But when does this ever happen? Startups generally are not communities, and communities generally don't see exponential growth.

But VestedContributors can also be really tricky. They know enough of the rules to skirt them, sometimes break them, yet they are popular so they get given passes on their poor behaviour.

New users attempt similar rule breaking; get banned; and re-join to troll.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor

> The vested contributor is someone who believes they are entitled to a degree of indulgence or bending of the rules because of the duration and extent of their past contributions. In some cases, this view may be shared by other community members. The indulgence of vested contributors undermines FairProcess and the WikiNow. It is demoralizing to those who have made less widely recognized contributions, and to recent arrivals. An inside club or "cabal" can arise where there are a number of vested contributors who reinforce.

That is certainly true. I find myself in exactly such a position on one of the forums I frequent. While not exactly popular, I'm quite immune to most rules simply because I post a lot of content and have a knowledge set that is not common on that forum.

So yes VestedContribs are problematic - ultimately it comes down to the forum admin making a call on whether tolerating some BS is worth the value contributed. And that threshold is remarkably low in my experience - people post so much crap that its not difficult to stand out as "value".

"i) new members are unable to become assimilated into existing culture" "ii) entrenched users quickly become the minority and are unable to enforce cultural norms." "iii) The culture is co-opted by the newcomers."

I just feel like that breaks down in terms of logic. The new members must have a _different_ culture to the entrenched ones correct? If they had the same one there would be no conflict. They must have a different one and enter at such a rapid rate (the AOL example) as to overwhelm the existing base. And they must all have a pretty similar new culture so that it can become the dominant culture. But now the dominant culture reflects the majority of users which is what we'd want right? Anything else would be elitist and/or totalitarian?

How does it follow that it is elitist?

What if the culture of whatever forum really liked fart jokes and then the majority stormed in and started talking about the weather? Are the jokers being elitist when they say they don't like the changes that have happened?

Exactly, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Keep the new members away from each other so they can't influence each other while they're learning to become part of the group. Have small groups of existing members mentor each newcomer until they've assimilated. If they can't learn to work with the group in a certain time frame, ban them so they don't start corrupting existing members.

Maybe start a regimen of group chanting.

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