I'm impressed that you can even remember users from such a huge community.
I've been a long time member of /., first as a lurker, then finally posting a bit and getting more involved, but I only know the names there when I see them, not recalling them by heart like you do.
On HN it's fairly easy to recognize on sight a few hundred or so, and to be able to recall several 10's at least, but it feels more like a 'hackers village' than a city.
Right now I figure about 7500 active users on HN, but, again, my measuring methods are somewhat approximate so take that with a huge lump of salt.
If it grew to 'city scale' (say 50K+ active members) that feeling would completely change, most of the posts would be from members that you would not recognize.
It has occurred to me that it is very well possible that PGs strategy is based on keeping HN manageable, and to ruthlessly prune that which does not belong in the hedge is a pretty good way of achieving that.
Over time the quality should go up, not down if you keep at it consistently. Hard to tell if that's happening though, not sure what kind of metric you'd have to come up with to discount for the growth of the site vs the quality of the comments.
In the case of Reddit, remember that the site is built to fracture into mini-communities. Once you get involved in one or two, you meet all the people there, and remember them as they show up elsewhere.
P-Dub was easy to notice because for a few months, every time he posted five people would reply to him telling him to do his homework. And karmanaut was similar, because his replies got such insane upvotes compared to other people. His legend was self-propagating.
S2S2S2S2S2, on the other hand, was one of the founders of SuicideWatch. Last year I made a handful of calls to local police stations when people who threatened to kill themselves were in my area. I'm still impressed that three people were able to have such a positive and widespread influence.
I've been a long time member of /., first as a lurker, then finally posting a bit and getting more involved, but I only know the names there when I see them, not recalling them by heart like you do.
On HN it's fairly easy to recognize on sight a few hundred or so, and to be able to recall several 10's at least, but it feels more like a 'hackers village' than a city.
Right now I figure about 7500 active users on HN, but, again, my measuring methods are somewhat approximate so take that with a huge lump of salt.
If it grew to 'city scale' (say 50K+ active members) that feeling would completely change, most of the posts would be from members that you would not recognize.
It has occurred to me that it is very well possible that PGs strategy is based on keeping HN manageable, and to ruthlessly prune that which does not belong in the hedge is a pretty good way of achieving that.
Over time the quality should go up, not down if you keep at it consistently. Hard to tell if that's happening though, not sure what kind of metric you'd have to come up with to discount for the growth of the site vs the quality of the comments.
That's a pretty subjective issue.