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Comment by sigil | Hacker News Reader

I think you nailed it. This isn't about ads; Facebook is an ad business and it's 6x twitter. This is warrens vs plazas.

Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all warrens. Twitter is a plaza.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...

Even 5 years ago it wasn't clear whether warrens or plazas would win. They were betting human behavior would change under different constraints -- maybe we'd move beyond our tiny friend networks, come out of our warrens, and have a global party in the plaza. It looks like either we're not ready for that yet, or we'll never be ready for it, because it's suboptimal.

That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren.

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I consider myself rather good at vocabulary, but I have no idea what a "warren" is...sure I could look it up but I find it odd that such an opaque reference is used in such a casual way.

I was a little surprised by this so looked up how common a word it is.

This Google dataset puts it as the 5,109th most frequent word, between cached and slip

https://github.com/first20hours/google-10000-english/blob/ma...

This one from the British National Corpus puts it 7,702nd between "pro" and "frontier"

http://www.wordcount.org/main.php

The Google dataset might not be the best for measuring this. Names and abbreviations rank highly. I think Warren Buffet might help contribute to the high ranking of 'warren'.

A warren is where rabbits and/or other burrowing creatures live. aka rabbit hole, burrow. It's common enough in children's literature like Watership Down.

What?? It's a perfectly ordinary very common English word.

A rabbit warren

It's a common word? Rabbit warren.

Loads of little hidiholes of separate content that are connected by a larger network.

The web is setup like a so-called plaza so obviously any time spent in a warren on the web is also in the plaza of the web.

>That's not to say plazas don't have their place. It's just that right now we prefer to spend most of our time in the comparative safety of the warren.

Reddit (plaza) is 7 on alexa. Well below Facebook's 3rd place ranking, but high enough that I don't think we can say anything meaningful about the warren/plaza distinction outside the simple fact that facebook has implemented user engagement extremely well. Twitter (plaza) is 10th.

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

But note the average time on the site. Reddit outranks Facebook. So I'm not sure that each individual could be said to be spending most of their time in a warren.

Of course I think all this doesn't include hits from mobile apps which is probably the majority of the time for all of these sites so you can probably ignore this whole post.

reddit is most definitely not a plaza. It's a large website with lots of warrens, each of which is its own echo-chamber.

Reddit most definitely has aspects of both. Some subreddits are niche/echo chambers, but for example the main front page subs have a lot of overlap and fair amount of cross-talk, creating a distinctly plaza-like atmosphere. Heck, a single big public sub probably qualifies as a plaza.

You don't need permission to join almost any subreddit. You can see anything you want to see. So it's a plaza.

but at the same time, subreddits are generally pretty insular. Reddit isn't a flat bazaar like twitter, it's a series of cathedrals. There are a few subreddits (generally the defaults) that are more bazaar-like but they are the exception rather than the rule, and are still constrained by a subject and strict rules.

>Reddit isn't a flat bazaar like twitter, it's a series of cathedrals.

You're mixing metaphors. This discussion is using plaza/warren as defined by GGP's linked block post:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the...

"A warren is a social environment where no participant can see beyond their little corner of a larger maze... A plaza is an environment where you can easily get to a global/big picture view of the whole thing. "

You cannot see any content you would like on facebook; hence it is a warren. You can look at almost any subreddit on Reddit, hence it is a plaza. By the blog post's definition.

Cathedral/bazaar is ESR's metaphor for [F]OSS software development happening either behind closed doors or in the open.

I'm well aware of that - I was referencing the open/closed concept behind the cathedral/bazaar dichotomy to point to the closed nature of most subreddits - the "warren/plaza" metaphor is pretty crap. Sure, they may be publicly visible, but they're closed in the sense of being a social in-group with norms that require acclimatisation. They're like old-school programmer forums - if you just jump in as a non-member and try to engage you may well be told to GTFO or lurk more.

I agree that the distinction between warren and plaza is crap. That's basically my point above: there's not much to say about the distinction seeing as FB and Reddit are both extremely popular and users on Reddit apparently spend more time per day than FB users. So I think we agree on the conclusion, we're just disagreeing on how we get there.

>They're like old-school programmer forums - if you just jump in as a non-member and try to engage you may well be told to GTFO or lurk more.

That's not my experience on any subreddit so I can't agree on this part. But maybe I'm in an echo chamber so I no longer see the distinction. Do you have any tips to see if I'm in an echo chamber? Or does this just involve intentionally crossing norm boundaries and how is it distinct from trolling? /semi-rhetorical

I think a good way to tell if you're in an echo-chamber is to express an opinion that is counter to the group and see if the community engages in active debate or just tries to shun you. Not to the point of trolling, but just expressing an ordinary or commonly-held belief that is in contrast to the accepted group belief. Every group has them - aside from politics, consider e.g. expressing the idea that "Uber as an organisation is not immoral even if it has some bad employees" on HN right now. For the record, I think HN's actually pretty good at debating contrary opinions, a lot more so than most subreddits.

humans are social animals...they need other humans around them that are in the same tribe...it's the global vs nationalism debate (that the media avoids) recapitulated...

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