I'd like to go in a little more depth with JTHipster's idea, because quite frankly I like it. Of course a lot of us here are funding projects, businesses, and research out of our own pockets but I'm sure we would be able to do something for those people, like a non-payment membership whitelist. Definitely something to consider if we begin to feel the pressure of Eternal September... (I feel weird saying that. But the money could go to keeping the site up, charity, and community projects.) Feel free to give me a slap in the face.
I'm confident right now in the site's architecture. We had a sizable influx of shitheads in late December, and they pretty much went away after a few days of nobody noticing them. The point is that pretty much everyone who got one of those boneheads on their feed ignored right away, and the problem was isolated within a few days. A few days of only having their little troll troupe to converse with apparently wasn't interesting so they crawled back under the bridge whence they came never to be heard from again. I think most Huskiers didn't even realize what was happening, which is awesome. Hopefully the same can happen in the future, even on a much larger scale.
That was really encouraging, I agree. One thing that I also found encouraging, that I've mentioned here before is that a number of those people that started off as "trolls" ended up changing their interactions and posted good content and had some great comments. It was as if they came over, saw the culture, and changed accordingly. I think that also bodes well for future growth.
Yeah I completely forgot about that actually. The unfortunate thing is a lot of those people were friends of mine from Reddit, and though they act immature there simply because the websites cesspit, I somewhat expected them to be chill here and partake in some interesting discussions. I was disappointed.
See my comment above, a lot of them did act appropriately after realizing that Hubski isn't Reddit. Some of them are still here, and I went from ignoring them to following them.