Every Growing Community Faces the Same Problem and Almost All of Them Handle It Badly

We went from four thousand members to two hundred thousand over about five years, and roughly every eight months there was a conflict that had exactly the same structure and that I never once handled well.

The structure is this. Existing members experience the arrival of many new people as a decline in quality, and they are correct: the average post does get worse, because the average member has been there for less time and knows less about the place. New members experience the existing culture as hostile and cliquish, and they are also correct, because a body of shared context is functionally a barrier and the people who have it are not aware of using it.

Both perceptions are accurate descriptions of the same event, which is why the argument is unresolvable and why it recurs. I spent years trying to find a position that would satisfy both and there isn’t one.

What I eventually learned is that the question “how do we keep the culture while growing” is the wrong question, because the culture is partly constituted by the size. A place with four thousand people where you recognise a few hundred names is a different kind of thing from a place with two hundred thousand where you recognise none, and no policy preserves the first inside the second. Trying to preserve it produces the worst outcome — a community with the social dynamics of a small place and the population of a large one, which is exactly the cliquishness newcomers complain about.

The two things that helped, neither of which fixed it:

Splitting by activity rather than by topic. Our topic-based subdivisions did nothing; people just posted in all of them. What worked was creating a genuinely separate space with a different purpose — one for questions with a norm of patient answering, one for discussion among people who wanted a higher bar. Both self-selected quickly. The complaints dropped substantially, because the two populations largely stopped colliding.

Being honest with long-standing members about what was happening. For years I responded to “this place has gone downhill” with reassurance, which was dishonest and did not land. What worked better was saying plainly that yes, it is different, that the thing they miss was partly a function of a size we will not return to, and that the older space still exists in the more specialised areas. Several people found that clarifying rather than upsetting; a few left, which was the right outcome for them.

What I would not do again is try to slow growth to protect culture. We did this once, closing registration for a period, and it produced a stagnant few months and a set of people who felt entitled to a place they now considered theirs. A community that is not taking in new people is not preserving itself; it is aging.