dant

I'm fairly new here (I'm a refugee from Reddit) and occasionally I read comments where someone complains that a post isn't appropriate or that the standard of conversation has gone down recently. And whenever I read those comments I'm troubled by a nagging sense that nobody has a plan. That things will gradually get unbearable and that when they do the people who built up this site will just move on and found a new community and the whole process will start over.

Is there a plan? What's stopping 100,000 Digg users hearing about HN on TV and showing up with posts on Obama's latest news and pictures of their cats?

Clearly there's the code behind the site, the karma system and minimum thresholds for downvoting and so on. I've also seen people linking to the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) occasionally, to try shame people into behaving themselves.

I've got to be honest though, I can't see anything that's fundamentally different about HN that means it will avoid the fate of those other sites. You let me register, what's to stop others? Do you have to "Accept" the guidelines when signing up? I can't remember, even if you do though, let's be honest, nobody's going to read that.

I don't know, do you think HN is structure well enough to prevent it happening? Is there a special plan? Or do people just expect to have to move on when things go down hill?