Hubski community works because we're small and not very diverse. If we were to grow 10x as big we would have more problems. The more people you have the more likely you are to have people with drastically incompatible views and those people will naturally clash and fight. In a small community they may choose to keep things civil and ignore each other but in a large community it makes more sense to attack the opposition and rally your like minded supporters.
Yeah, I don't think so. We keep saying "this will work only this far" but it keeps working. I think the architecture scales, and I think it's in all of our best interests to keep the architecture scaling. It's not like "this will work until suddenly we need moderators" as we've had these little bimbo eruptions before. The community survives.
I wonder what would happen if a large group with distasteful beliefs all joined Hubski at the same time? Would we see a splintering of sorts where multiple groups coexisted but didn't interact much with each other, or would we see a lot of vicious fighting like in other internet communities? Or something else? Do you think Hubski could survive something like that without moderation?
It's happened several times. We had the CircleJERKERS (the guys who brought you the chimpire), we had Lorelai, we had Team SRS. What happens is they form their own little circlejerky cadres, recognize that nobody else is interacting with them, and leave.