The pattern is always the same:

  1. Someone passionate creates a community
  2. Early members are deeply invested — high-quality discussions, strong norms
  3. Community grows, hits the front page / “all”
  4. New users flood in, post memes, low-effort content, drive-by hot takes
  5. Old-timers get drowned out
  6. Mods either burn out and quit, or become dictators ruling their own fiefdom

Reddit’s model accelerates this. Any subreddit that gets popular enough hits the All feed, and at that point the incentives shift from “quality contribution” to “what gets upvotes from the broadest audience.” The people who built the community lose control of it.

I’m working on a social platform and I’m trying to design communities that don’t go through this lifecycle. This is what I have in mind right now. A user’s voting power within a community is proportional to their tenure in that specific community. So if someone’s been there for 2 years, their vote counts more than someone who joined yesterday. No matter how many new users show up, they can’t swing the community away from the people who built it.

The weighting wouldn’t be dramatic, maybe a logarithmic curve where the first month gives you baseline power and it grows slowly over years. The goal isn’t to create an aristocracy, just to make sure the signal from committed members isn’t buried by a flash mob.

Implementation-wise I’m thinking:

  • Each community membership has a joined_at timestamp
  • When scoring a post within that community’s feed, each boost/vote is multiplied by log2(days_since_join + 1) / log2(30) — so 1 day = 0.05x, 30 days = 1x, 1 year = ~1.7x, 5 years = ~2.1x
  • The algorithm still surfaces new content to everyone, but the ranking is weighted toward longer-tenured members’ tastes
  • Also considering: a slow-boot period where new members’ posts are held for review by existing members (like a probation phase)

But I’m second-guessing myself. Some concerns:

  • Does this just create a gerontocracy where old members gatekeep forever?
  • How do you handle the first 30 days when no one has much weight?
  • Would this actually prevent the decay, or just slow it down?
  • Is there a simpler/better mechanism I’m missing?

Curious what other approaches people have seen work (or fail). Has anyone implemented tenure-weighted voting before?

Edit: I appreciate the suggestions. A few of them actually align with features I’ve already built:

  • Trust graph: The platform already uses directed trust edges, with vouching and inviter accountability (if an invitee misbehaves, the inviter is penalized). I can extend this model from the platform level down to individual communities.

  • Invite-only mode: I already have trust-based monthly invite limits for the whole platform, so adding the same option for communities seems like a natural extension.

  • Slow-boot / probation: This is already in place, new members’ posts are held for curator review before being published.

  • Different interaction types: The system already supports multiple interaction types (like, comment, share, gift, emoji). I’m not sure how to expand these into Slashdot-style categories (e.g. agree/disagree, insightful/funny, quality/shitpost, high/low effort, etc.), but it’s something I’d like to explore.

  • Moderation limits: I like Slashdot’s approach of limiting moderation to prevent burnout. I’m less certain whether meta-moderation would be a good fit here, but I’m open to considering it.

  • InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
    2·
    1 hour ago

    I’m not saying this to be discouraging, but the more complicated you make it, the more likely it will fail.

    If you don’t want an online community to degenerate over time, then pick a very small time scale to measure (ex: 10 days) or choose easy to measure but ultimately worthless metrics to measure it (ex: # of words in posts that aren’t slang). The fact is, long term communities change over time, and the overwhelming majority of the time, those changes can and are regarded as degenerating.

    A lot of the things are you suggest have the common pitfall of disincentivizing new users. The more hoops and the less reward people get, particularly when some of the hoops feel punitive, the more likely you are to deter new users and less likely you are to cultivate the future foundations of your community.

    Lemmy, and it’s not even all that difficult sign-up hoops, are a perfect example. The place has grown a bit. It would be hard to convince me that there’s been no degeneration. We pick up the ones that Reddit rejected for basically being the worst of the worst along side the small number of decent users who just happen to have a burning dispassion for Reddit. And even so, this place has really just moved closer and closer to being what Reddit used to be – so, hard to say that’s not degenerating a bit compared to the happy fun nice pleasant place it was in the early days when I first joined.

    Okay, that rant aside, the other thing I want to say is that a lot of these suggestions you’ve made and a lot of the suggestions I’ve seen in the comments: They sound good in theory, but they pretty much only work in a vacuum. If there were no real “competition”, no other communities of merit, they’d probably work out alright. But in reality, people have lots of options. You have to work extra hard to incentivize them to come and stay AND you have to avoid all the traps, nuances, etc that are inherent to this kind of thing. It’s a very fine, tricky line that pretty much nobody succeeds with long term. Not because they haven’t tried new and inventive things.

    And so that I’m not just the naysayer doomsday poopoohead: If you really want to make this work, you’d have to keep a small, well-curated community expertly moderated by one or two extremely prescient moderators with super well defined guidelines and who are in total agreement. Basically unicorns, but if at least one unicorn existed. So, it’s a lot of work, doesn’t rely on complicated procedural / algorithmic gimmicks and it’s not really scalable – but technically doable. I’ve seen it done. Not truly long term, because moderators burn out and then things degenerate.

    OOPS: One more addition here – The other pitfall is that communities have to change or be open to change over time. If they don’t or can’t, they stagnate, and rot. Basically, they degenerate anyway.