Three posts below, Clay describes the civility problems that have grown over at the kuro5hin community as being a result of unhealthy scaling, invoking Shirky’s Law — “The advantages of anonymity grow linearly with the population; the disadvantages grow with the square of the population.”

Actually, Shirky’s law probably doesn’t explain what’s happening there. The active population at k5 has arguably declined, as traffic is down about 40% from last year.

Rusty, the site’s founder, writes, “we simply aren’t the only game in town anymore. There’s a lot more personal blogs, niche communities, and overall things like K5 than there were before.” I think this is a more convincing pathway to an explanation.

This commenter hypothesizes that a change in demographic is actually responsible for the problems, which makes sense if you assume that the more mature/experienced users will eventually gravitate towards more autonomous modes of publishing.