Decreasing signal-to-noise ratio is a common enough issue in all sorts of (specially Internet) places.

I remember when I read almost all of usenet news in an hour a day. It is a long time since I could do that.

Since then, many other group mechanisms have gone somewhat the same way, including email lists, some IRC channels, bulletin boards, user groups, conferences, etc.

The increasing noise (or lower average perceived quality) is likely to continue to happen as more people discover an individual forum, particularly if it is a good quality one.

As people gravitate towards it, the average goes down. The "fix" is for someone to hate it enough to go and setup a new forum.

The alternative fix is to make the "club" exclusive in some way, but that just slows down the influx.
--
Brovnik

In reply to Signal to Noise Ratio (wasRe: Ruminations of an ex-PM monk) by Brovnik
in thread Ruminations of an ex-PM monk by jcwren

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.