[paul_houle]

I don't agree with this.

Jeff's post had some thoughtful things to say about designing rules for communities. He's thinking a lot about what the rules should be for his community at stackoverflow, and comparing your rules to other people's rules is a good way to think about this kind of problem.

There certainly isn't one answer: there's an interaction between the rules and the actual bunch of people you have visiting a site.

Personally I'm losing interest in reddit, for instance, because articles about mainstream programming languages get downvoted immediately -- but articles about farting in Python or computing fibonacci functions recursively in an obscure LISP dialects get hundreds of votes.

As for attracting the "wrong" kind of people, I think you're taking the wrong angle. Atwood is trying to get more people to pay attention to stackoverflow -- if he's got any tactical aspirations towards hacker news, it would be using it as a way to promote his own ventures, as he's done with DZone and other programming sites.