[marginalia_nu]

I think the problem is the scaling of communication, rather than letting in the unwashed masses. In any community experiencing continuous growth, there will be a constant influx of people unaware of the social norms and conventions. Most of these "normies" are just regular people, that if they stuck around, you'd realize they were no different than the regulars.

If this is a one-thing event, the community usually stabilizes, but the problem with reddit is that the central premise seems to have become growth, so there's always a bunch of new faces, which makes maintaining an actual community nearly impossible. Only exceptions seem to be communities where the topic is extremely esoteric, or the moderators are super aggressive.

[dotancohen]

I agree. Any community can only scale at a certain rate and maintain its culture. Scaling too fast leads to the infuxed culture dominating.

We see the same issues with immigration as well, see for example how many European cities are struggling with the prevalence of Arab culture and Muslim customs. They welcome the immigrants (the people), but do not welcome the changes to the culture of their cities.