Comparing Reddit, a community where specialists can setup a little fiefdoms and generalists can cheery pick from whatever fiefdom they can find, with HackerNews, a singular monoculture that just happens to attract people with a huge diversity of interests, is a challenge unto itself.<p>Both deploy a wide variety of strategies to enforce quality content: crowd-vote mechanism and individual ignoring.  These two mechanisms should be more than sufficient for even the most obsessively compulsive and curiously unaccountable of curators.<p>The question isn&#x27;t comparing communities based on content or upon curator strategies.  One should question should take aim at the unspoken epistemological assumptions every single curator engages in.<p>Suppose Poster 1 puts topic A into Community A.  There are many overlapping relationships between topic A and community A.<p>Now lets suppose Poster 2 puts topic B into Community A.  There are few overlapping relationships between topic B and community A.<p>&quot;Overlapping relationships&quot; is a very complex topic.  Users might find topic B to be on-topic in an esoteric or meta way, and the moderators will find it off-topic.  Users might find topic A to be off-topic because the topic is to frequently discussed, and the moderators remove it.  However the dice roll, the concept of &quot;overlapping relationships&quot; between topic and community is not a guarantee of topic survival.<p>The selection mechanism of topic survivability is divided between the collective hands of the crowd-vote mechanism, individual ignoring, or moderation termination. And notice I say &quot;divided&quot; , and not &quot;sequentially evaluated&quot;.  Agents of topic survival operate in parallel.  This means that posters have to appeal to not only just three different selection criteria in order to survive, but eight different scenarios that have different highly targeted payoffs.<p>Two rules of the topic lifecycle:<p>* The topic must pass&#x2F;fail three moderation phases.<p>* The topic always has influence on the hardcore communtiy consumers (HCC), the average community consumers (ACC), and the moderators. (M)<p>How topic lifecycles can still influence a community even via multi-phase curation:<p><pre><code>  Case | CrowdVote? | Mass ignore | Deletion? | Outcome
    1  |    Pass    |             |           | HCC get skeptical of ACC and M
    2  |            |    Pass     |           | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M
    3  |            |             |   Pass    | HCC and ACC think M is lazy
    4  |    Pass    |    Pass     |           | HCC and ACC think M is aggressive
    5  |            |    Pass     |   Pass    | HCC hostile to ACC and M, may fracture community
    6  |    Pass    |             |   Pass    | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M
    7  |    Pass    |    Pass     |   Pass    | No effect
    8  |            |             |           | M gets skeptical of HCC and ACC
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The point is that having topics curated epistemologically only appears to work because it fails the slowest.  No outcome of topic enforcement actually bolsters or adds to community value over time because all topic consumption is a destructive process (destruction of time).  Thus, entropy always wins.