Back in the 90's, it was a great place to hang out. In the 2000's, you had fun sites with great user commentary like Fark, Digg, Slashdot, and Reddit.
Now everybody and their kid has a cellphone with internet access. Your average person is an asshole, so that's reflected online because of how saturated it all is now.
Any community that comes in contact with a larger community that does not respect their customs has problems, but it Usenet, email conventions, Burning Man, victims of imperialism, or a local book club.
We have lots of evidence of this. The unfortunate thing is that I can't come up with examples of anything positive coming about as a result: The smaller community is either destroyed or weakened, and the larger community rarely replicates the strengths of the smaller ones.
We can talk about the strength of diversity, and I'm all for it! But this isn't a melding to create something new, this is tearing apart the "other" and continuing on barely altered.
Humans are poorly built to handle large communities, and we've not really come up with an artificial means to deal with such situations.
this is a great article on the stages of this phenomenon: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
My general thought was influenced by various communities (RPGs, IF, Usenet, coding, etc) I've been part of or witnessed, and how they were unable to survive the swarm of slightly-interested. A few interested are good and healthy: You need the fresh blood to both replace those that leave and keep old-timers engaged. Too many and your norms and conventions are crushed and at a minimum you lose the sense of community, most often you lose the ability to communicate effectively.
There are plenty of historical parallels as well, or at least they seem to be - history is not my strong suit, so while I'll suspect the parallels line up, I won't go asserting it too far and will stick with the communities.
Usenet in the face of AOL is one example (I was there, it was tragic, and though we live in a wonderful age with a lot more information available, I think it's harder to FIND an in-depth discussion). Another example is, say, Slashdot. Originally it was the haven for techies, which made it popular, which made it NOT the haven for techies. After /., I moved through a few attempts communities and currently HN is one of my sources for discussion. While every community has it's nostaglics, I definitely feel like the last 2-3 years have had an increase in people talking about the decrease in quality comments. At this point, I've come to expect that eventually HN will fall prey to popularity and I'll have to find somewhere else to go.
In light of the article you linked, I'm not really sure how it links up. I guess too many "mops" are attracted, and even if you don't get any "sociopaths", just throwing the ratio of people that want it close-to-the-way-it-was to people who this-is-nice-on-my-terms off too much can drown the community in noise.
The disturbing thing is that I feel like the tail of the "mops" there. I'm not the creators, I'm usually not a fanatic. For example, while I'm _willing_, I've never gone through the trouble of contributing to any open source project beyond the most thin of bug reporting or the rare cash contribution. OTOH, I don't think I qualify as entitled, and I try to learn and abide by the norms of each community, so maybe this is a variation of Imposter Syndrome, maybe I just know my limitations, or maybe I'm a mooch.
I will ponder this. It dovetails in disturbing ways with some thoughts I've had about societal futures in a Fifth Wave sort of way. Thanks for the link, I'll have to look into "The Gervais Principle" he mentioned as well.
Usenet was tiny. Probably ~50k users, maybe 500k, back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. (Email discussion with Gene "Spaff" Spafford, one of the Usenet Cabal (TINC) members.)
I remember Slashdot ... before there were userIDs. I ... had a pretty low-digit-count ID, and remember when the site hit 100k and 1 million users.
Today, an online service with 5 million to 10 million active users is ... considered a failure. (I was ... kind of responsible for giving a good count of Google+ public user activity.) Facebook is over 2 billion users, and something like 500m regular users.
Those are big networks. And scale matters.
This isn't just a matter of the Eternal September, though acculturation is certainly a big part. I don't think Usenet could have sustained a network of this size, even with four weeks of mandatory on-boarding every September. The scale is simply too large.
One of my hobbies has been to look at how dynamics within various groups change with group size. That matters much more than the group composition (though that also matters). No matter what, a group of 5 people, or 20, or 100, or 1,000, or 10,000, has a fairly distinct feel.
Even before I'd estimated G+'s size, I had a fairly decent intuitive sense (generous, as it turned out), for the userbase size (I'd thought perhaps 20-50 million).
Reddit's various subs also give good examples of how community varies from sizes of ~1 to about 15 million (the largest subs).
My suspicion is that ~50 - 500 users is probably a relatively good sweet point, though I'm not sure how that an be utilised to make scalable discussions possible -- collecting the best from many groups, but keeping the discussions generally smaller.
Do you have a link? I went to your ello page, and now I have 7 tabs open, lol. I saw "Conversation doesn't scale very well", but that was only a tiny conversation; unless I missed something.
"My suspicion is that ~50 - 500 users is probably a relatively good sweet point, though I'm not sure how that an be utilised to make scalable discussions possible"
Just a thought after reading a couple of your ello posts. I wonder is the sweet point is related to "The basis of trust should be local reputation by peers who actually know who you are and that you play fair." [1]. Meaning it might be beneficial to limit discussions to those that are considered experts by their peers? Yet, sometimes outside perspective can be beneficial. As mentioned in [2]. I guess what I'm saying is, are scalable discussions possible? They seem to branch off into many tangents. Just brainstorming here :)
Ello is, as I've just noted in a post there, very search-resistant, which is becoming a major pain-point. My post index (see my profile page there) is very sadly out of date, though it has a few items on it.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw
I'd put some thoughts together on Reddit and community and what seems to work, or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...
In the spirit of Thomas Edison, a long list of things that don't work: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1w73g4/on_comm...
You've found two of the better items I'd put together on trust and dialectic discussion at Ello.
Though not directly related to size, I've also suggested standardising topical "channels" of discussion: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ftpx7lwnfjtopygu5xrkhg
Somewhere amongst my writing is a suggestion for a tiered set of vaguely Dunbar's Number sized network clusters. Say, 50-150 people per group, themselves organised into clusters of perhaps 50 groups themselves. A small level of tiers gets you to current global population size (5-7 levels as I recall). If each group surfaces, say, 10 - 100 items per day of choice public content, and the filtering is applied upwards, then ... maybe there's a way to have both local and global discussion.
Topical interests might be overlays on that, based on net interest. A topic with a 1:50 interest level would draw from all 50 neighbouring clusters for its own base level. A topic with a 1:2500 interest would scale to two levels up -- this retains some level of "locality" whilst also allowing for broader discussion.
And branching out between clusters would be possible, but effectively with some additional cost -- UI/UX-imposed or other. Not large, but present.
There's an existing (or was) network that was organised somewhat on these terms, though I believe it's not done much. Building initial interest is difficult.
You know Sturgeon's Law? Something along the lines of "90% of science fiction is crap, because 90% of everything is crap?"
Well, if you more or less agree with that, there is just so much more of everything that there is so much more crap.
Another commenter expressed this as a signal-to-noise ratio problem. It is that, but it is also that O(N) is bad news for very large values of N.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...