Re-Thinking Hacker News: From HN to Hacker Villages (HV)

According to TechCrunch, PG worries about Hacker News growth leading to it becoming too much like Reddit, which has lost much of the hacker culture feel due becoming mainstream. The objective of this document is to suggest some mechanisms from offline society can help evolve HN concepts in positive ways.

#1: I wonder if a crowdsourced news aggregator like HN could be split into distinct communities ("virtual villages") instead of one central site, each having its own home page and (limited?) user base?

Let's call it Hacker Villages (HV). In a perfect world, these villages would be computed as clusters of what is currently all of HN. Clusters (villages) could be statically defined or dynamically recomputed, or even human-curated. Dynamic formation of villages by an algorithm might give the most organic feel. Nobody would be locked out when growth happens, but instead of one mega-metropolis a new village gets spun out once the user base exceeds a threshold.

Users would be associated with their "home village", and they could move villages (which costs karma, like a real move). Browsing beyond one's own village should be possible, but posting in stranger land imposes hurdles.

#2: Limit the newly created logins? Someone could need support from a "village elder" to get the right to post for the first time. The right to post could be temporary, and one could get a trial membership and karma (village citizenship) to prove they are a considerate villagers.

#3: HV could be P2P if it wanted to restrict itself to real hackers: only people who contribute to its hosting by permanently running a HV process could become a village elder (karma boost). A distributed site is also harder to take down, which would protect political discussions (hackers need/thrive in spaces of freedom of expression, as often their ideas are radical/non mainstram).

#4: Which other offline social mechanisms are useful to model in an online community?