Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

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> Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community.

I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise.

After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf?

If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet.

Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.

> I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community.

Around 2004/5, it wasn't too big or too diverse. They didn't even have comments at first, much less subreddits. Once comments showed up , I figured "oh well -- now it's no different from slashdot." Of course I was so wrong. I enjoyed coming to the comments after reading the article and seeing lots of interesting commentary.

Right you are that subreddits span quite a spectrum. I chuckle to myself when I overhear conversations about reddit pro/con. It's clear that some people judge reddit by the default front page and they have a very different experience from mine. I've had no thumbnails as the default for probably almost as long as the user preference was available. The combined difference in content and UI between "old" reddit-no-thumbnails-my-subscriptions and new reddit-popular is night and day. It's two vastly different sites.

I can confess to being a part of the problem, though. I started the bad habit of reading the title then the comments and skipping the article. And once imgur appeared, I upvoted the onslaught of mindless memes while never taking the time to consider thoughtful articles. They are after all, the "it" that we have supposedly "redd". I'll put in a plug for /r/TrueReddit - there's often interesting content there.

Everyone's threshold will be different, but for me, a community is lost when it's impossible to avoid the fundamental attribution error.

For example: I might get into a mood. I rant, I take the least charitable reading of a situation, I move away from people. I know I'm not always like that, I just get like that sometimes, and I move on.

When someone else does it, if I don't know them, I might think "Wow. White t-shirt brown shorts is an asshole. Stay away from them." See what I did? I said they are an asshole, not that they're in an assholish mood.

(Side note: This is one reason E-Prime, an English without the verb "to be", exists.)

The cure for the fundamental attribution error is knowing the person in multiple moods. Some people, OK, are snippy little shits who will self-aggrandize and look for every opportunity to start a fight, but most people have ups and downs. Knowing a person means seeing beyond any given mood or action to the person beyond the moment-to-moment.

Make a group big enough and there's no effective way to do that. You can't keep track of 50,000 names. You can't keep track of 50,000 unique images attached to names. Everyone fades into the mass, unless they're Power User level celebrity scale, and then they're reduced to a few broad strokes in your head. All you have to relate to them is what they're doing at the moment. The fundamental attribution error is the entirety of your social context.

That means you can't give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Are they arguing in favor of an unpopular opinion? Downvote and move on. They're an asshole because right at this moment they're taking the asshole's part. The biggest voting block wins, and the space is a hive mind, since there's no way to make a good argument for an unpopular position and have it be heard, whereas bad arguments for popular positions are promoted.

> community is lost when it's impossible to avoid the fundamental attribution error.

In addition to the problem of maintaining community when the number of people increases, I also think that it’s a function of communicating in writing, rather than in person.

I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.

In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.

> I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.

People can make "I know" sound like anything from a death threat to an erotic tease using everything which doesn't come through in text.

> In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.

Even within a language there's plenty of room for people to misunderstand: How much swearing is necessary to avoid sounding like a stuffed shirt, and how much makes you sound like you're too ignorant to be worth reading? Which specific words are comradely and amusing, and which ones are going to derail everything the moment they appear?

If two people have a relatively slight disagreement on that, you can end up with a rather loud argument over a horrible perceived insult, on one side, and some weirdo who got extremely bothered by an adult talking like an adult, on the other.

While I agree that writing has its limitations and that a lot of non-written info is lost, I don't think the written part is the problem.

For if that were the case, YouTube would be a thriving beacon of clarity, when it clearly isn't. And as an effective counter-example of a only-written-yet-successfulish-conveying-meaning you have HN.

So no, communication by writing is not the problem.

But HN seems to be the exception, rather than the norm. Whether that's because of good moderation, or demographic, or something else, I'm not sure.

It's certainly easier to get the 'road rage' mentality when writing, than when conversing in person. As well as losing information, communicating through text makes it more difficult to relate to other people as people. It can lead to people behaving in terrible ways that they'd never do in person. Road rage does a similar thing: ordinarily nice and well-balanced people can be enraged by other road-users, but would never have such a response walking down the street. (This was captured rather brilliantly by a comic [0].)

I wasn't the only one who was surprised to see that real-names policies (such as on Facebook) fail to get people to behave themselves.

[0] https://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off

That's a pretty cool thread.

I guess I should find friends in real life (also known as 'meatspace')

Note: that's literally what I think, I'm not trying to sound smug , neither am saying this ironically. Stupid limits of written communication, haunting me even here!

I agree about 2004/2005. Back in the early, early days of Reddit, a lot of the content wasn’t even real. I remember those days. It was remarkably different from today. The two versions aren’t really comparable in terms of user base and content. That’s just the way it goes I guess.

I do think it has become a tire fire disgrace but that doesn’t matter much.

I remember this one user... robotrecall? Something like that. She was really intelligent and her insight and opinions on things were such a joy to read. When she left, I remember thinking that was kind of the end of it for me. It coincided with a lot of other changes as well. Whenever I go and check it out it’s kind of jarring how weird it has become in comparison. None of the content really seems real on the main subreddits (like the early days but so different); the site seems like an enormous native advertisement or subversive troll playground.

I think of Reddit like New York City, it’s huge and there are many thousands of neighborhoods with plenty of heterogeneity. Almost anything you can think of can be found there if you know where to look.

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