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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Exclusivity and elitism get a bad rap. The most important ingredient for a high-quality community is high-quality people, and to keep out the lower-quality people you need to have barriers to entry. I suspect that most Gemini users are smart enough to realise that, whether they'd admit it or not.

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I strongly disagree about "lower-quality people". Yes, some people post low quality content, say horrible things and behave antisocially. Yes, in a community you want to restrict destructive behavior (by excluding people if need be).

But deep inside we all are, at times, selfish and evil, and at times, beautiful and wise. You can learn something from everyone. But you need to meet people at their terms. For some, it's over an esoteric internet protocol that you need to be a geek to use. And for some, it's over a glass of cheap lager in the backyard of an auto repair shop.

> You can learn something from everyone.

That’s... extremely charitable.

Perhaps. And if so, it is charitable to those whose closed-mindedness prevents them learning something from anything and anybody.

It's just the way it is. You can learn something from the biggest idiot, they make mistakes that you never thought possible. You just have to watch and learn.

This may be true ...

... but if idiots are merely mistake-generating engines, then any one source of entropy (or representative sample) is equivalent to any other, or at least so long as interaction, longitudinal, and scaling effects are excluded, and even those can be reasonably easily acquired. Representations are readily obtained.

Expertise and skill are definitionally rare, expensive to acquire, expensive to assess, and readily discouraged or convinced a nonproductive platform or environment simply is not worth their bother. Rare, hard to find, hard to assess, easily spooked.

I don't know... This argument makes sense to me in theory but in practice I find it hard to implement successfully, as someone who manages a medium-sized online community. It reminds me of the "You only need 1000 good customers" article. Sure, but unless you bring in 100K you're not going to find those 1000.

So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community which I think is also essential, and instead of the 1000 good members you have 100 and they're all clones.

As a result I've opted for the opposite approach where I'm very welcoming to everyone and try to only get rid of the worst of the worst, and we have a great, diverse set of very skilled and interesting people but a lot of them leave rather quickly because they don't want to deal with the 90k less well-behaved members.

So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community

If the community consists of people who are uncomfortable with the feature creep and privacy loss on the modern web, I don't consider Gemini to be an artificial barrier.

To try to explain my reasoning, to join the Vegan community you need to stop eating animals.

The barrier to entry described in the post is technical, it's orthogonal to the properties you cite. For example look at signal, it's also made for people who are uncomfortable with privacy loss but it's still accessible to non technical people.

I would argue that the early web had similar technical barriers. Not to gatekeep but because it was young.

I also think that setting up Nginx or Apache is only considered easy because we know how to do it.

As far as I know, nobody has written an easy blogging app for Gemini. Ironically, if someone did do this it would likely be web based because of the need for an app like experience which Gemini does not support.

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