I think there are many people who have very high bars for how good something should be to post on the forum. Thus the forum becomes dominated by a few people (often people who aren’t aware of or care about forum norms) who have much lower bars to posting.
This is a plausible mechanism for explaining why content is of lower quality than one would otherwise expect, but it doesn’t explain differences in quality over time (and specifically quality decline), unless you add extra assumptions such that the proportion of people with low bars to posting has increased recently. (Cf. Ryan’s comment)
often people who aren’t aware of or care about forum norms
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who aren’t aware of or care about the “high bar” norm. This is in part due to others explicitly saying the bar should be lower, which (as others here have noted) has a stronger effect on some than on others.
Edit: I don’t have time to do this right now, but I would be interested to plot the proportion of posts on the EA forum from people who have been on the forum for less than a year over time. I suspect that it would be trending upwards (but could be wrong). This would be a way to empirically verify part of my claim.
I’ll add another mechanism:
I think there are many people who have very high bars for how good something should be to post on the forum. Thus the forum becomes dominated by a few people (often people who aren’t aware of or care about forum norms) who have much lower bars to posting.
This is a plausible mechanism for explaining why content is of lower quality than one would otherwise expect, but it doesn’t explain differences in quality over time (and specifically quality decline), unless you add extra assumptions such that the proportion of people with low bars to posting has increased recently. (Cf. Ryan’s comment)
You’re quite right, it was left too implicit.
EA has grown a lot recently, so I think there are more people recently who aren’t aware of or care about the “high bar” norm. This is in part due to others explicitly saying the bar should be lower, which (as others here have noted) has a stronger effect on some than on others.
Edit: I don’t have time to do this right now, but I would be interested to plot the proportion of posts on the EA forum from people who have been on the forum for less than a year over time. I suspect that it would be trending upwards (but could be wrong). This would be a way to empirically verify part of my claim.