People reflect their surroundings very much in their actions, even more than what we think they do. They react to situations based on the ambiance of their surroundings rather than according to the behavioral traits they developed over time.
The broken window theory conveys this simple yet powerful idea:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
In short, make the surroundings better and people start behaving better.
The same theory applies to online communities too. There are a lot of online communities fostered by hosting high-quality discussions and providing excellent services to users. What happens when you start attracting a very large number of users? What happens when users start deciding what is best for them? What if their decisions are bad for the community as a whole?
Take the case of Reddit. Programming Reddit used to be the place where smart programmers used to hang around and have quality discussions about the subject they care about the most, but the simple fact that Reddit supported other kinds of news/content in the form of subreddits made the site a place for a lot of funny, worthless and snarky comments. Now people are more interested in taking sides in worthless arguments (about Joel Spolsky?) than serious productive discussions.
Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of Reddit, but what I am trying to say is that Reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course, Reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions on Reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.
Meanwhile, Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing from happening to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high-quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned on some social websites (including Reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:
We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter.
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously.
It is not that the people using programming Reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks on Reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much fun is kinda annoying.
The next time you build your online community, build it right. Weed out the unwanted distractions. And the next time you notice a comment that adds no value to the discussion on your blog, delete it. Sometimes, deleting content builds a reputation faster than creating content.
Whatever you do, whatever you write, whatever you say, make it count, and the people around will give you back the same quality.