> a chronic dilemma for any online community: scale, topical breadth, and discussion quality form an unstable triad

I always wonder about the scale part -- why do we want a community to grow? Is it to reach more like-minded people, to enrich the collective knowledge, etc? That would be so great, and not dilute the other two aspects. But so often it seems that "growth" is just for its own sake, a bit like cancer -- consuming the host in the end, and at best reducing what was a vibrant community to a barely palatable sludge that appeals to the common denominator just enough to warrant eyeballs-to-dollars conversion.

It's a testament to HN that it has, so far, resisted this (to borrow a term from mr Doctorow) enshittification.