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Folks, it appears Kuro5hin is dead:
The site was founded by Rusty Foster in December 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot.[10] Kuro5hin's membership once numbered in the tens of thousands,[11] but its popularity declined significantly from its peak in the early 2000s.[13] On May 1st, 2016, the site was closed down permanently.
I didn't visit it. It seemed then like the bunker where the tinfoil hat brigade hung out. In the Slashdot days it served as the guardrail for conventional wisdom. But now that the tinfoil hat brigade has been entirely vindicated, and Kuro5hin is dead, it makes me a little sad. What are your favorite memories of Kuro5hin, and will we see its like again?
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No self-made man ever did such a good job that some woman didn't
want to make some alterations.
-- Kim Hubbard
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:41PM
I'd be perfectly fine with SN staying the same size and keeping the same community it has now. I've rarely seen an online community improve by adding more members
And from an AC in an adjacent thread
While I get your point, I do think any site that is not growing will inevitably die. The trick, though, is to attract the right kind of new people to the site. We need people who can add insightful comments to the discussion, make interesting submissions to the queue, etc.
I believe you are both correct and all 3 of us want to see the same thing: maintain a constant quality of our experiences, which are defined by the community, at the expense of possible growth. One of my quirks is I always assume everything I see is being done wrong and I've learned to temper that and perform analysis. I was a Kuro5hin reader and contributor and rather enjoyed it but something went wrong. What it was I don't know but I think SN is at risk of it happening here too. Growth for growth's sake is something that would be done as a business decision to increase advertising revenue. Fortunately that economic incentive does not exist in SN. However stagnation is not good either. Contributors won't be here forever (at the very least they are going to die at some point) and enough stagnation will lead to atrophy; these are serious issues to consider as far as I can tell.
My verdict in regards to SN doing it wrong is as follows: there does exist a workflow and community standards that could produce a high quality user base and survive growth while maintaining high quality experiences. However it is not a technological problem by any means: it becomes a multidisciplinary problem. The primary domain is psychology: experts would be needed to identify why communities fall apart under growth and devise policies and cultural norms to combat them. The technology side is almost unnecessary except it is the means to deliver and enforce the design of the community system.
Final conclusion: SN is doing the best job they can considering the primary means of solving a problem is through technology. It doesn't seem reasonable for SN to be able to solve the psychological issues unless a working group of volunteers could be formed. But they would have to be qualified experienced psychologists, I don't think college graduates would be able to do it. If this can be tackled successfully it would produce some pretty good results.