What Makes a Community? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

What Makes a Community? (2020)

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27 pointspanic17 comments

The #1 thing I've learned from the covid-19 pandemic, is that online channels are not, and never will be, an adequate substitute for IRL. At best, they are a temporary half-measure, to keep the relationships on life-support until they next meeting IRL.

I think of a community as sort of the inverse of a mob. A mob shares a space for a short time, unifies around a single shared idea or emotion, and destroys the awareness of the individual. A community shares a space for a prolonged time, unifies around a hodgepodge collection of ideas, and maintains the level of individual thought and awareness.

The quality and persistence of the space is critical. Online communities certainly do exist, but the space is ephemeral and lower fidelity than shared physical space because the range of possible forms of communication is constrained.

Do you feel this way about all kinds of online interactions? Or are Zoom calls or group chats better than, lets say, your Twitter feed or Reddit threads?

My top issue with Zoom, which I find absolutely aggravating, is that most of the time there is a scheduled meeting window, and once it's over, the meeting is closed, and there is no way to continue a conversation with someone you are interested in conversing with. It resembles a prison visit more than a community meeting.

Zoom calls and group chats are definitely less bad than Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, but they are nowhere close to as good as IRL.

Note that I have worked mostly remote jobs for a couple years now, so I'm not opposed to partially remote, but frequent visits to the client IRL are necessary, and if you're part of a team it's even more important to meet together.

Only a few more months!

Have we flattened the curve yet?

People aren't going to put up with this anymore , I suspect once most get a vaccine they'll be out enjoying bars / clubs / etc.

It's getting there.

Prior to vaccinations, California had 40,000+ new daily positive cases.

One month into, that's down to 6,000.

Nice piece, was talking to a friend about this yesterday, particularly regarding online community. Our conjecture ended up being that communities don’t scale, which is why Twitter fails, and Facebook too with the exception of groups, which often seem to work well. We were riffing around the communities we’d belonged to that really had a sense of “belonging” attached to them, and the common thread was that smaller sized groups seemed more likely to “work”, and certainly remained more sensible and civilised.

HN is one of the few large online communities I know that still remains really civil, however I don’t ever feel like I “know” anyone on here, which I think is about the specifics of the UI - you don’t follow people, you follow ideas.

All of this reminds of of Derek Powazec’s book which is easily the best one I’ve read on fostering and growing online communities: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Community-Derek-Powazek/dp/073...

What particularly resonated in the article was where he mentions how a group needs an individual or a few individuals to push it along, as a sort of binding, driving element. This is absolutely my experience, both in running tech meet-ups and barcamps but also in online groups too.

This is very interesting and insightful. I 100% agree with the notion that small communities require an organiser to keep things going.

I personally believe social media can be a positive force in building better human connections online. Because I think none of the existing platforms are optimising for this (better connections and discussions), I've been working on it myself. I believe group chats with a small circle of friends are the rare form of social media that actually works well today, so we're trying to build something where you could be connected to group chats with people you may not know in advance. In this way, the social media app would act as the "organiser" of these micro-communities, which would hopefully grow into real friendships.

Thoughts? We're looking to launch a landing page next month, and the app itself (which will run on the web browser) in a couple months.

I thought you were going to take your pitch in a different direction.

I have found myself a part of a community organizations which practically live in the stone age. There are a lot of people and groups who are GREAT at organizing, but there aren't any technologies (besides phoning, text, and email) that one can use to enhance their ability to organize.

My best advice would be to unplug from the engineering community - see what real people are living through. Use technology to enhance arms length organization. I feel like you are doing what MeetUp is doing - creating a platform for human connections. I apologize in advance, I'm certain that I don't have the full picture.

People are tired of platforms. Give them a tool and let them use it how they see fit. Consider the blog post author. Think of a tool that allows them to better organize and communicate with their community of hobbiest painters. Tool to engage with other humans, not platform to spread your seed.

Ideas like this come and go every month. If someone open sourced something like that, so I could host it myself, I'd be down. But these ventures always either fail completely, or are bought up by some big company, which guts the core product and leaves it to whither into obscurity.

I would love something like this, I just wouldn't trust it to last more than a few years. I'm sorry to be negative about your venture, and I truly do hope it works out, because the world needs a small scale technology platform for sending chats and files easily.

Needing a place IRL is a myth, and HN is the prime counterexample. So many people have celebrated great personal and professional successes here. So many people have found intellectual collaborators and business partners. Many have attained even deeper, more fulfilling benefits by finding employers, employees, or business opportunities. I easily know 10-15 people by their username here, and my day feels more positive when I read something they posted -- and maybe even consider responding! For many of us, HN is the only social outlet we need.

As someone who has run a user group for over twenty years this rings quite true.

I take as personal inspiration the Gandhi quote:

Be the change that you want to see.

Think of a community as a viral meme. The idea of making art together, the idea of a PhD seminar. You need to have a “patient zero” who can pass the meme on. Depending on the virality of the meme and the number of contacts, the meme either gets passed on enough that the people being “cured” are replaced or there is a need tor a persistent source of (re)infection in the form of the originator of the meme.

Some of the best online communities I have been a part of tend to have a strong founding member / figure head. At advrider.com we have that in Chris MacAskill.

Started with the intention to share info and ask questions because he had no where else to find the info he needed.

He developed a culture around sharing of knowledge, experiences and empowered a team of moderators.

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