Attacked from Within (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Attacked from Within (2009)

atdt.freeshell.org

59 pointsjacquesm13 comments

This goes to an illusion found in social groups. Even very large communities are actually tiny - only a fraction of the members matter. For example, Hacker News is read by who knows how many thousands of people. But a huge amount of damage could be done to the quality of the community with a couple of tens of users being removed. The effect turns up a lot in companies too - very small nerve centres, large and powerful surrounding apparatus in which everyone struggles to take useful action.

There isn't really a principled or ideological way to approach managing that small core. The only models that seem to work well are to form a community around a powerful dictator who gets to eject people from the core group (a moderator in the online setting, owner in the corporate setting, leader in a social setting, etc). Then pick one option out of:

1. Maintain a rigid and traditionalist culture that tries to keep the core pure of external ideas (I argue academia is a good example of this).

2. The hydra of democracy that lurches between catastrophe and farce, somehow usually getting good results as people rapidly reorganise around what works for them.

3. Collapse when the core group becomes corrupted or moves on.

I was trying to imagine a perfect system: several dictators that control access to their own chunks of scarce resources, plus several dynamically formed groups that operate by consensus, funded by one of the dictators.

I think it ends up hard to distinguish from #2.

I’ve heard it said that “The best form of government is an absolute monarchy. The worst form of government is an absolute monarchy.”

It depends -entirely- on the monarch.

I’m not sure I buy the premise of the article, but I also don’t have a viable alternative, which, in many communities, means that my opinion is worthless.

I just got finished watching -yet another- documentary on WWII, and was struck by how so many of the reasons for the start of the war, were because a very few individuals had poorly peer-reviewed, anecdotally-tested philosophies, that they nonetheless were successful in making mainstream, by sheer force of personality (and arms).

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."

-H. L. Mencken

It's #2 with freedom for people to express themselves on the channels that will accept them and organize themselves over channels, even creating new ones if needed. That basically creates a marketplace of ideas, that I guess it's what you wanted from the beginning.

Beware of cancellation culture and power concentration.

I just looked at a HN comments dataset, for May 2018.

Empirically the number of commenters, c, needed to "start x%" of conversation is sqrt(c) %. So 144 commenters gets you 12% of "conversations started".

Where I define that as there being 144 commenters whose comments are the parents of >=12% of all comments.

At 2500 commenters, 50% of all conversations are accounted for, etc.

Note, this is just an empirical formula for 0 to 3k commenters on this dataset, ie., its just very close to sqrt(c) for this range. The general formula will be different, but approximated by sqrt(c) within a small range.

Interesting statistic, but does it mean that much? A board where the same 144 assholes agree or argue with each other all the time isn't likely to be that much fun for anyone else. 2500, not much more so.

The community is the thousands of people that make up the long tail and usually say very little, individually. The sufferers of verbal diarrhea who stand tall in your statistics are just something you get in any community, not necessarily reflecting a larger opinion or leading it, just decorating.

The counter-intuitive point to me was that registration keeps out good posters while not limiting bad ones. But wow, yes, it's consistent with the SSC "asshole filter," concept where poorly enforced rules mainly reward rule breakers and directly disadvantage people who follow them. The emphasis on conversation over points seems smart, if still gameable the way search engine optimization games them with links.

There is another incentive I think we've seen come to the fore since this was written in 2009, which is that crapflooding forces moderation, which creates governance, and this centralizes oversight and reduces the number of people you need to pressure to control the forum. No new divergent or decentralized forums can exist very long because it costs states and political parties themselves almost nothing to subvert it and install, or compromise, moderators and governors who can be leveraged to use the forum for their messages.

I can't help but suspect the flood of porn, spam, racism, and hostility you get if you leave any method on a forum open is at least partially driven by political operatives who poison your archives, and then when you fix it, they can say, "hey, so you're the one responsible here, we need this favour from you, and if you don't give it to us, we are going to make sure your name is synonymous with all this content we may or may not have posted. Such bad luck."

This is a fascinating read, and should be printed and kept in the Library of Congress as a mile marker. The arguments the article makes and suppositions for how large communities eventually devolve describe perfectly what I'm seeing today; more peers turning away from social media and back towards smaller forums, abandoning followers/followings in favor of small, intimate and personable group chats on services like Signal, Telegram.

slashdot and kuro5hin's leadership decisions directly led to the downfall of their communities, as did dig.

Rusty's fundraiser was a kick in the nuts to some of the last people trying to keep k5 alive and functioning. He hadn't wanted a "community" so much as caught one by accident when Slashdot went full cult. I've always thought that the SXSW trip showed them what being a "media darling" was going to be about, and they bailed out of that as quickly and safely as they could.

This was an incredibly enriching read. It's too sad that such an article results in much fewer comments on HN than less insightful but more provocative ones.

My main question is, since this was published in 2009, has anyone tried to apply these recommendations? And if so, what has been the result? A priori it sounds like a very plausible model, but it needs to be tested.

It's funny that the first part of your comment is in a way proof that the article is correct!

As for the second, Metafilter did, iirc with some success.

My goodness, this was a good read. Whether I agreed with all the points or not, I found it well worth the time to read and think about

(2009)?

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