To understand how group dynamics work online, look no further than Numtot | Hacker News Reader

To understand how group dynamics work online, look no further than Numtot

nytimes.com

67 pointsjosephpmay15 comments

I joined a popular video games forum back in about 2000 which, at the time, had some industry folks. Everybody was generally very polite and reasonable but as time went on and more people joined the forum it became more and more tense and the industry people got berated for their games or their commentary and slowly left. The quality of discourse degraded to the point where there was an outright rebellion against a certain set of trolls who weren't being "dealt with" which led to a mass banning and an exodus that included me.

Most of the refugees wound up at another forum which repeated almost the exact same pathologies over the course of the next few years. I eventually left that community as well.

The conclusion I came to was that I was not gaining anything valuable from my interactions on these forums. I also suspect that pure online interaction that is not backed by in person interaction is ripe for serious problems. Knowing someone in person and interacting with them on some routine basis is a huge bulwark against mistreatment. It's much harder to mistreat someone you have to face in person again soon.

My online interactions are now very limited. I may share an opinion or an answer and I'll read and appreciate the same from others, but I refuse to get into an argument with people that I don't know. I don't think it's edifying to me and I suspect it may not be edifying for most people.

I don't doubt that the bad dynamics would happen regardless, but Facebook is just such a terrible way to have this group. First, it's private so you can't view any of it without joining the group which is a little icky though I guess they do that for moderation reasons. Second, there's just way too much content. I joined and it was producing multiple times the amount of content as the entire rest of my Facebook feed (which I otherwise keep to just actual friends and happily block people who post too much). And too much of the content is filler "look a train" type stuff. Having that crowd out actual friends' pictures etc wasn't worth it to me. I'd much rather have had it a subreddit I could occasionally go through and sort by best in the last month. So I left that group after a week for reasons largely independent of the problems talked about here.

This is the right question to be asking. So many good things are only good at the right scale. If Google or Amazon were not two of the most valuable companies on earth and instead say, even a tenth as large, people would have an endearing trust in the way their whimsical, easy to use products make their life better. Now we view them as omnipotent gods to rebel, almost on principal. Micro socialism (sharing resources in a family for example) is basically the default if not the only model: the concept of "keeping score" is seen as pathological in relationships at the family unit scale, but standard and even necessary the larger the group of people sharing (specialisation and trade). Democracy is a great example too: there are less than one representatives per million people in the US. Early on it was a fraction of this, and therefore much easier to meet their needs. Medicine is can range from a useless waste of money to deadly and in the middle be extremely useful, even within the same order of magnitude. Society and social systems are not immune to these effects.

It's like we have a cultural or maybe even evolutionary aversion to large, powerful, monopolistic authorities. Maybe because so often they lead to human suffering.

Certainly power seems to be a corrupting force in almost all cases, I would just argue that to a certain extent, what we perceive as good (a disregard for the status quo) when small is endearing and even admirable, but once those rebels take over the world we want them to magically fall in line. It's obviously a cultural immune system of some kind.

The story of life - which our kids and their kids will repeat for etenerity “it was good when it was small.”

It’s good when it’s new and unpredictable and you’re in the mindset of “oh let’s see what else is there” (aka, an open mind)

Which “Brutalism” is BIMBYISM referencing? I don’t use Facebook so maybe someone here can answer this. Is it:

- The architectural style?

- The social housing traditions that birthed the architectural style?

- The contemporary literalist misappropriation of the term to reference dystopian urban infrastructure which punishes the needy? (like spikes under bridges)

I’m hoping it’s the first and will be pleasantly surprised if it’s the second. But not getting my hopes up.

It's referring to the architectural style.

Re: spikes under bridges, AFAIk that's referred to as hostile architecture. I've never seen the term Brutalism applied to that.

That’s refreshing. Unfortunately, I have. At least in the past few decades, brutalism has been conflated with being unkind, authoritarian, or Stalinist. But maybe this wave has passed and I’m out of the loop. I also didn’t think brutalist architecture was appreciated in circles like this, so I clearly am out of the loop to some extent.

The first would seem to lend itself well to memes...

“All it takes is one person being like, ‘Oh not all police are bad,’ and it can get very bad,” she said.

It might sound intolerant if she's criticizing the statement itself, but I can see where she's coming from if she's saying it acts as a dog whistle attracting awful stuff regardless of the intentions of the original poster.

I've noticed elsewhere, on a non-political site, where a particular post, say, relates to the military and people drop in with the sort of toxic comments you never heard before the last couple of years.

It's funny this article came up today. I was just thinking about how much the 2016 election and the crypto bubble of 2017 changed the dynamics of HN, mostly for the worst. The article mentions scale as being the problem. I think it's more than that as HN was already a large community. I think it comes down to a community reaching a critical mass of people that don't respect the existing rules. At that point, other users, even those that largely respect the existing order, are forced to a.) break the rules to try and combat the newbs or b.) flee. Either way the destruction of what was is complete.

My difficulty is that every splinter group has a firm set of beliefs that never seem to me to be quite aligned with reality or adaptable enough to be effective. I see all of these viewpoints being based on fundamental structures and technologies that should actually be changed.

“We will not ban you outright for being a capitalist, but don’t expect us to defend you either.”

The sheer lack of self-awareness embodied in this statement. Facebook is not the WELL.

But the issue of the size of a group is well-studied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

A recent study has suggested that Dunbar's number is applicable to online social networks[13]

(As an aside I am getting a "you're posting too fast" warning, my last post was 46 minutes ago on another thread, hmm)

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