After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot.
I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.
So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.
I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.
From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.
Interesting; may I ask what was the example of 'News2' working?
Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to.
I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.
I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.
So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.
I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.