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This exactly, and I'd add another thing - online only communities can become dominated by the folks with the absolute strongest feelings / opinions. Most offensive or most offended, most absolute in their thinking. It tends to drive the folks I'm interested in hearing from out. In a social group they'd quickly just not be invited to stuff, or might value other aspects of a relationship and so dial back a bit. Online - not so much.

There's also very little consequence for blowing things up into bigger / click-bait style headlining.

If community is bouncing ideas around, thoughts, etc, then that is much harder online.

I've found getting off social media helps HUGELY in naturally helping get other communities going.

I agree. Sometimes the more reasonable people lose control to the more acerbic folks because the latter are a bit better at dealing with moderation issues (or are willing to take it on) However the bad side is by their nature these people can exercise strong opinions and dismiss other people’s input and they end up shaping the community into their image rather than the of the group. To add to that they’ll violate the principles they set up and use to moderate often without consequence.

The extremists types need to be controlled both online and in real world: the same way as you kick out THAT guy from a party who is trying to convince everybody for the 25th time that the earth is flat, the online platform would have to do the same. I had a few warnings on HN for the way some of my post were written and while initially not quite satisfied about it, I did reflect on it and it made me realise that these rules do make HN better.

This is so extremely true, it’s insane. I’m particularly thinking about these “polymath” guys on Twitter that have a following for reading the Stoics, into Keto, and following Naval and Tim Ferris. They sell their courses and continue to espouse their strong takes on everything.

At a real life event they would quickly be seen as a know it all and too domineering, and taken down a few notches. But online they grow a “community”. It’s not all bad, and they share some good thoughts, but it is very different, for better or for worse.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds the preaching on Twitter a bit weird.

Another issue I've found with online communities is that they generally focus on a single thing.

It's great when you just want to talk about that one thing, but I don't think it's a great way to make friends.

Twitter is interesting to me because it's a network rather than a community, but there often seems to be a weird power dynamic between people which would also stifle friendships.

> The problem with the public communities is that it doesn't take long before they're dominated by those who have the most free time on their hands.

In both online and offline communities you can partially mitigate this issue by employing people to be full-time caretakers of the community.

I think he means dominated in terms of posting as much as dominated in terms of moderation.

Yeah, but you can actively discourage this through moderation (and/or curate content such that these posts get less attention).

Perhaps we need a newsfeed that promotes people who post rarely, and demotes people who post often.

Just create multiple accounts. Hooray!

Any system can be gamed by the determined. Luckily, most people are not that determined.

But we're talking about designing new systems to reduce the influence of people who are ridiculously active. These people aren't quite determined by definition, but they're the best candidates for "that determined".

That arrow doesn't go both ways.

Even if the most determined to cheat people are highly active, I don't think most of the highly active posters are determined to cheat. I think cheaters are a tiny proportion of users.

If people keep creating new accounts, they can't gain any reputation or other social linkages. No karma, no name recognition, nobody knows it's the same person. No continuity, not even a conversation.

Even if new accounts are easy to make, I think that would be unattractive to most people, who are simply participating and happen to post more than others, not being malicious or trying to cheat in any way.

For the few trolls, and advertisers trying to subvert the feed, a different mechanism is needed to keep those down to a manageable level, as has always been the case.

I've found a combination of transparency and a liberal ban policy to be helpful.

I think that more niche communities tend to be more valuable, but they still run the issue of intellectual isolation