What's an example of a major site with a good community?
Honestly, though, I think "major site" and "good community" are in conflict. Facebook's revenue is something like $0.12 per user-day. Twitter's is circa $0.07. It is at best extremely difficult to do effective policing of users with that kind of money to spend.
You can use ML, etc, to do the first cut. But real anti-abuse work basically requires humans. (Or not-yet-existant strong AI.) So my general take is that ad-supported social media is a dead end as far as real community goes. Doing it right takes either real money or dedicated volunteers. And probably both.
For example, had twitter not created a culture of basically brigading, they would be in a different place. But they at minimum allowed and probably incentivized that to become part of the twitter experience, and I don't think it can be recovered from.
As for facebook, if it took you until 2019 to say Alex Jones can't build his business on your platform, you haven't even started to think in any serious way about what behavior you want on fb. Well actually they have: mark wants dollars and doesn't give a shit about anything else.
You may find this interview with former Reddit pm Dan McComas fascinating: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/dan-mccomas-reddit-pr...
If Twitter or Facebook had taken harm reduction seriously from the get-go, they wouldn't exist. Ad-supported social media only works at enormous scale, because of the network effect, because of the high fixed costs, and because of the low per-user revenue.
McComas is right that a grow-at-all-costs mentality is part of the problem. But that's a consequence of the financial situation, not the cause. If they had infinite money, they could have had growth and user/society safety. But they didn't, and they prioritized the things that let them get to the scale where the investors got the payoff that was promised. And where the people in charge got rich, of course.
I disagree, though obviously it's all guesses, and depends on your definition of harm reduction. I believe more strongly for facebook, but even for twitter, I think both hand pretty low-harm products inside them: flirting, hookups, dating, friends, jobs, photo sharing, etc, rather than chasing super high engagement via fake news. I don't include adtech as a harm in my case. I also think facebook had a ludicrously profitable Tencent payments business opportunity, had it not become such a toxic product and not spent all it's mindshare on adtech.
I further think both had a OneLogin opportunity: login with serious 2fa and probabilistic risk is hard, and selling a saas login plus social network import is (still?) a big opportunity.
I also think both would have been protected by the gab or voat-type cesspools: when you explicitly choose the people too vile to be on Twitter or reddit, that reinforces and magnifies itself rapidly.
And finally, FB busts ass for a $0.12/userday in the US: 45/year. I can think of a lot of businesses that are worth $4/month.
https://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi
- Anyone can view the site and its content
- Very clearly putting their rules of the road up (link above) before you can 'join'
- Commenting/posting/membership is a $5, one time fee
- A one-week wait before you can post
- Paid moderation
And it works.
In other words, it didn't actually empower women. It just tolerated women venting about how very, very angry they were at men and, to some degree, taking it out on male members in AskMe who dared to ask questions about their love life. One particularly ugly incident involved a man asking for support resources for himself to cope with his wife having been raped. He was basically told he was an asshole for asking.
I wrote a long reply with actual suggestions which was deleted by the mods as "tangential" and "not answering the question." I posted it to my blog, where he soon found it and private messaged me and thanked me profusely and told me how traumatic it had been to basically be told he was an asshole for seeking support, a comment that got favorited at least 70 times.
There are no perfect communities and a good community experience is partly up to you to craft for yourself. Some Reddits seem to be decent places with a sense of community. I've been on email lists that worked for me for a time.
Hacker News had a genuine sense of community when I first joined. It seems to have less of that these days, partly a product of scale. It's grown a lot and it's hard to keep a sense of community at scale.
Even in IRL communities, large cities rely more on formality to help make up for the inability to know everyone.
The human mind seems able to have a sense of community with a group of up to 150 people. I had access to information from an internal study of one community that suggested that only 20 percent of members were 'active' participants, either regularly or occasionally. Another ten percent participated once or rarely and the rest lurked. This seems to fit with what I have observed elsewhere.
So that means that about 750 accounts gets you about 150 active participants. Anything beyond that and you see challenges in fostering a sense of community.
I've long speculated that HN's leader board ought to be 150 names instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community here, but it's a completely untested hypothesis and not anything I feel strongly enough about to actively campaign for.
Instagram has a pretty positive feeling too.
I get annoyed reading the same smarmy-sounding "Please don't post unsubstantive comments" replies from dang all the time — but it's what makes this site work, when so many others don't.
Personally, I’d rather have the constant out-of-bounds reminders than not. I’ve never seen one of those warning messages on a comment that didn’t deserve it, I’ll take the ‘please play nice’ requests all day if it quells ugly flame bait, and that’s exactly what it seems to do. He’s giving people both notification that it’s out of bounds and advance warning that there could be consequences. Much worse is out there and easy to find. Do you have examples that are much better, on a comparably sized forum?
The thing is I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Now you can have entire threads where the only comments are "lol" or something like that.
Can't see why you were downvoted?
I also find "community" to not fit the bill, but that's another point.