Idea dump, February 2011
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
The only communities I've witnessed that maintained or increased their quality over time were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator.
MUD-Dev was like this in its heyday. JCL invited people based on their rec.games.mud.* postings, and existing members could invite new ones. Then it went public around 1998 and that started its initially slow decline and later rapid descent into chaos and noise. The last few years of its existence there was barely any technical content, and the design talk was too high level and disconnected. As it happens, Heroku cofounders Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry were early members and Adam in particular wrote a lot of great posts.
I've been a member of another private forum since 2004. It's somewhat secret, so I can only speak in generalities. Current members can suggest new ones for consideration, though not everyone is accepted. The owner is a well-known industry figure who bootstrapped the forum with his personal network. The membership count never exceeds more than a few hundred, and there are periodic purges of non-posting members; lurkers are not allowed. You can make anonymous posts but personal attacks in that form are deleted. The tone is generally professional and brutally honest, but there is still room for shooting the shit (if there is a lull with too many casual threads, the moderator will start to lock them).
It works very, very well.
I've also had some thoughts with regards to an idea like this. I wonder if the dynamics of private forums moderated by respected and benevolent dictators can be captured in entirely emergent form?
qqygh is kind of like a de-facto moderator of reddit.com. The power he wields as a submitter is entirely emergent. There are also other redditors who start their own moderated subreddits. I wonder if moderated subreddits could emerge out of some kind of karma system? Twitter is somewhat like this as well, but it only includes the "submission" part without direct moderation. (Does that take the form of un-following?)
What Jacques proposes basically has the same filtering dynamics as networks of personal connections in real life or on sites like Facebook, but without so much of the isolation and insularity these networks produce. I posit what he's proposing would end up being much like a "fuzzy" version of the friend graph.
Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated.
A private community doesn't have to be insular. In the example I mentioned in my original post, with every turn of the purge cycle around 15% of the members are kicked out due to inactivity and replaced with newcomers.
I'm not talking specifically about up/down voting or even about karma, really. Karma systems are just the closest existing thing to what I'm thinking of, so far. (That and maybe Twitter.)
If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute.
Agreed. The trade-off is that you've limited the pool of members. Jacques is wondering, in part, if there was a way to get the benefits of private communities with less of this trade-off. What if there was a way to somewhat merge similar small groups where, "external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution?" It seems like there must be a way to attract such groups or have them emerge from a larger population, then find similarities between such groups and flow information between them.
Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated.
Again, agreed, but what is going on with, "information that is normally only divulged over beers?" What are the dynamics here, and is that compatible with a "Black Sun" sort of forum? By compatible, I don't mean that the forum has to have all of the same dynamics. (How could it, absent actual beer?) Could a site with the qualities I described become a useful form of offline communication for such associates? Evidently yes, since similar offline communication is already implemented in the form of your private forum.
My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work. Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view.
Doing that in this discussion. Thank you for facilitating that.
Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view.
A tl;dr version of my comments is to ask, "What if those could scale technologically?"
The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation". It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree (i.e. each level could have many immediate higher levels, so there's competition). I think there's something in this, mirroring the hierarchy in which human communities naturally organize themselves (karma/seniority works that way a bit here), but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.
Maybe the two levels are a little like a freemium model, where the analogue of free vs. paid is anyone vs. invite-only. One is a recruitment centre for the other.
Perhaps the same submissions and comments would be presented to both but rated by their own communities; or perhaps it would be like subreddits, totally distinct in their stories and discussions. The difference from subreddits is it's not flat and not all-welcome, but hierarchical (in both a logical and political sense). Maybe SO does this a little with karma-based privileges, but there isn't a higher-level forum (at least, not one that I'm aware of...)
The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation".
I think a system of such levels would be very useful for creating new connections. It's similar to what happens when leaders from one country meet leaders from another country, or when leading researchers in one field meet leading researchers from another.
It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree...but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.
If you can take the "friend" graph and identify leaders and place them at the root of various trees, then you could use the distance from such roots to determine the general "level" of any given node. Then, all you'd need to do is to somehow lubricate communication between users of generally the same level.
You could do this right now on a site like Stack Overflow with private IRC rooms or forums for Stack Overflow users, with access restricted by Karma. (Already been done?)
The well-known industry figure's name, when typed in lowercase with a single space between first/last name, md5 hashes to 02ff1bf7102845c6224536b758c80dd6?
Modular Laser Launch (Mostly reposted from another comment. If you've already seen it, sorry, just move on.)
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:uMWQ_kQFvKcJ:w...
Use lasers to remotely energize (zap the bottom surface, all of which is a heat exchanger) lightweight craft carrying hydrogen. The hydrogen wouldn't burn. Instead, it would just act as a reaction mass of very low weight, thus producing very high exhaust velocities. Basically, this would give you the exhaust velocity (read: fuel efficiency) of the upper theoretical end of solid core nuclear rockets, but without the heavy nuclear equipment onboard, making the craft even lighter and more efficient. And while hitting fast moving craft with a laser isn't trivial, it will be moving on a fixed track and can be designed deliberately to be hit. (retroreflectors, telemetry, etc)
But that's not even the clever bit. The clever bit of Jordin's proposal is that the laser tracking/energizing system can be built modularly. You can build one prototype module that can launch one toy craft. Then you figure out how to mass produce it and build a whole bunch of these puppies that can lock onto and zap a much larger heat-exchanger carrying craft.
What you get is very cheap access to orbit without ungodly huge R&D and infrastructure costs up front. (In this case "ungodly huge" = price of a space elevator.) Even if it's never safe enough to be man rated, the ability to send bulk cargoes up cheaply would be a massively disruptive technology. I bet a good start on this proposal could be funded by just a handful of dot-com multimillionaires.
I'm thinking about how one would bootstrap such a system. When the first users have to level up to create a new level, they are in some sense starting from scratch. It's an opportunity for them to shop around, move to a more cliquey venue (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242542 suggests this happens on HN). Why would they stay on to use the original forum? There'd have to be a compelling reason.