Jason Calacanis has a good post on the potential decay of a social Web site when it gets popular. He's talking about Digg, but I can still relate. This part in particular...
Today, as a startup, the freak contingent (aka haters) can take over your life if you let them. They bait you all day long, they look for your weak spots and attack them, and the facts are--of course--secondary to the splashy headline. Anything social runs the risk of being taken over by the bastards... look at Wikipedia. It's becoming a field day for flammers, haters, stalkers, and freaks. The whole thing is on the verge of coming apart. It's total chaos.
I've been there. In fact, I revisit those times now and then with my site. Thankfully I don't have to deal with scale of something like Digg, but it does creep into my sites now and then.
That whole "wisdom of crowds" thing is really a fascinating phenomenon to watch. Indeed, I don't think it's something that scales well. The bigger the crowd gets, the more stupid people (as a component of the bell curve) that appear in that crowd. And they're always louder than you'd like.
It's so weird that ten years ago we'd never even think about these kinds of things.
I wonder, daily how you and Walt deal with the bastards, myself. I can understand why it gets so frustrating and I truly appreciate both CBuzz and PBuzz because the worst dickheads are removed and the lesser ones are put into their places.
People who complain about the strictness on those sites or how they think it's easy to run them have no friggin' clue.