[epaik]

This effect seems to happen commonly among news aggregating site communities.

Digg used to be pretty cool when it was used largely by people excited about the start-up/tech enthusiasts. As it became more popular, the user-base seemed to devolve as the content started to cater to the LCD.

Reddit has done a good job combating this, with their implementation of subreddits that focus on specific core user demographics. But most of their largest subreddits have a dubious quality of users.

Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.

[pooriaazimi]

> Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.

50 to 100 thousand daily users ("users", not visitors) is not small by any means!

[dredmorbius]

At Internet scale (~2 billion connected users) it's minuscule.

0.005% of all available users.

Within the United States, it would fall well below the 100th most widely circulated print magazine, as a monthly circulation statistic. I'll assume that monthly stats are a few times higher than the daily usage metric, but you'd still have to hit roughly 1 million to break into the top 100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magazines_by_circulati...

From an advertising perspective, unless you're extremely focused in your interest base (and there are markets of interest within the HN readership), it's tiny.