Although I'm not really a fan of discussions about discussion sites, I do have a theory about this:

In the past, communities have only grown slowly, a couple of people would join the community in any year, and a few would leave. In the new buzzword laden world that we live in a community gets a new place to form, in a virtual space.

This means that it can grow _1_ from nothing to something frighteningly large in a matter of months until it reaches the point where the signal to noise ratio becomes so bad that people who used to read most of the content get bored and wonder off.

This hasn't happened with perlmonks yet, but it certainly has affected slashdot and newsgroups like comp.lang.perl.misc . To hold off the decay that comes with increased popularity, it might become necessary to rapidly alter the voting system, make people with higher levels more able to post (while still letting new people in) or add new categories which allow people to discuss topics in greater detail but with a narrower scope.

_1_ see Newest Nodes for the extra users.

Update: In my travels around the web I found the following from a few years ago which might interest people. Life Cycle of a BBS

In reply to RE: Growing Pains by quidity
in thread Growing Pains by mirod

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