Just saw this comment thread in Facebook and I had to take a screenshot of it. It’s a good example of the trap some of the more successful websites have fallen into. When you attract the following of everyone, you attract all kinds of people to participate in your comments. This can be seen in the biggest medias of Finland for example. I don’t read the comments there to find anything new, it’s usually only to amuse myself. What this in turn does, it literally turns off the perhaps more contributing people from commenting to your content. You know, the kind of people that would add value to the original content in one form or another.

This is something I’ve also noted with ArcticStartup. While we don’t gather a lot of comments per article usually (and in about half of the articles – there aren’t any comments), but when there is a comment you almost certainly know that there’s a lot of value in it.

I think this whole phenomenon has allowed Quora, for example, to succeed in its early days. Will it stay like that? Hard to say, but I doubt it. The community will become broader and as the late adopters hop on board, the early community and culture will almost certainly fade away.

This is exactly what has happened in Y-Combinator News to a certain degree and they have stated this in their news about news:

Growth can’t keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down. We hope it will happen naturally—that we’ll simply run out of new people the site appeals to.

While its always great to grow – it comes with a price. Personally, I want ArcticStartup to flourish with active readers and contributors in the comments. However, I do want to keep working hard to keep the community relevant to the readers and cut back on non-contributing content. I don’t think we’re close to that point yet so we’ve got plenty of space to grow.

What makes this all very difficult is that the first commenter usually sets the tone to the discussion. I think this is something that’s also partly broken about the whole commenting of articles and content in general. Some sites like Y-Combinator have lots of comments and the comments usually take a life of their own (and thus are more interesting than the original content or link). But the way these are currently presented to the readers who are done with reading the article itself – is not very inviting to participate.

To be honest, I have no answers here and these are merely my own thoughts on this issue.