[bjourne]

Most communities seem to go that way. In the beginning, most people spend their time contributing first-order content. Then, as the community grows, it attracts more meta-users who are more interested in moderating the content creators. They create ever more rules and policies requiring content creators to jump through more and more hoops. Eventually the experience becomes so frustrating that people give up.

Wikipedia seem to me to be in that situation. StackOverflow is on its way there. It has exactly the same kind of problem with "deletionists" that Wikipedia has. Perfectly good questions are often closed for very arbitrary reasons.