Internet Communities: Otters vs. Possums (2017)

I disagree with the dichotomy presented. People who like a specific, niche culture aren't necessarily closed to other cultures, and people who like mainstream culture don't necessarily like most cultures and don't necessarily get along with everybody. As such, this is the progression I've watched happen:

- Niche possums and niche otters create a small community focused on a specific culture

- Otters from mainstream culture enter the community, and are welcomed by the niche otters, but this opening is disliked by the niche possums.

- The niche possums either try to moderate the community more heavily, or leave the community.

- The community grows in size, being overwhelmingly filled with otters. Mainstream otters dominate as they are more numerous.

- The community's content and culture gets shifted from niche to mainstream culture.

- Mainstream possums join the community as they identify with the community's new, mainstream culture. This completes the community's shift from niche to mainstream culture.

- Most of what remains of the community's original, niche culture is suppressed by mainstream possums, as it goes against the community's current culture.

- Niche possums create a new community, and the cycle repeats.

The way I usually see this solved is by relentless moderation to keep communication on topic, i.e., only things of direct interest to possums. Otters self-select out because they can't talk about group-adjacent stuff. It helps also to point otters to groups where they can talk about this interest and other things.

Examples: I am an an Esperanto language learners group on Facebook. Any posts about anything not directly relating to that topic are closed, and the posters pointed to other, more general groups.

Many phpBB-style topical forums I'm in have a "general discussion" subforum. Any posts not directly related to the forum's topic are moved there, and so follow the otters.

This is a really interesting framing. It feels intuitively correct to me, though for the places I've seen go through change -- subreddits, mostly -- it's hard to divorce what the author is talking about from the challenges of community scale: a community of 10,000 behaves differently from a community of 100, even if the individuals in both cases are broadly similar.

I guess you could summarize it as the process of a group becoming more popular and also less specific, and arguably no longer focused on its original "mission". I can see the Somethingawful forums in that. Originally a website making FPS jokes and mocking amateur websites, the original forum demographics were extremely gamer-heavy and, well, mean. Gamers are still common but not as much the norm, and there's not nearly as much tolerance for offensive behavior or language.

A solution to slow this that doesn't involve chat splitting is introducing friction to onboarding in an otherwise open community. A Discord server in-which I'm active routinely executes arbitrary kicks on new members (not bans) as a matter of course. A determined new person would reach out to pretty much any active member, request an invite, and be allowed back in. Users are expected to carry server invites on them at all times. Users that seem excessively active are occasionally given temporary bans, and told to "touch grass". Nobody's upset by this, because kick permissions are given to all active members, and revoked from members who use them to pursue vendettas. Moderation privileges rotate pseudorandomly among the active members.

This kind of hazing selects for people of good humor, who are willing to work to participate in the community and aren't emotionally volatile, but who are mature enough not to be too upset if they lost access. It's a good culture without too much homogeneity, but it's understood that you miss a few good people to produce the environment.

This isn't the solution to creating an online community, but it's an example of engineering a culture and onboarding process that selects for certain temperaments so that the community doesn't become diluted as is grows, and members who don't fit self-select themselves out of the population.

The core problem here is the shared resource - the group. It is a shared channel of information. When you have people with different backgrounds any message on this channel will be "signal" to some and "noise" to others. That causes a conflict over what belongs to the group and what doesn't.

The most common split is how knowledgeable you are on the topic. Experts are your "possums" and beginners are your "otters". If you don't stop the inflow of the beginners, then you get mostly noise for the experts (Eternal September). If you do stop the inflow - you become beginner unfriendly.

The article's suggested solution to regularly split the group tries to lessen the tension on the shared resource by creating more resources. But it's hard - you will lose members as you try to constantly create new groups.

I'd like to suggest a different solution - let users dynamically connect to people who post "signal" and disconnect from people who post "noise". Imagine a group system where when you upvote a post, you connect stronger to other people who upvoted this post (this includes the author of the post). And if you downvote some content you weaken your connection to people who upvoted it. And then how strongly you are connected to others determines how the content is ranked for you. The stronger you are connected to "possums", the more "possumy" content you get. And if you prefer "ottery" content - upvote it and you will see more content from "otters".

This removes the tension because everyone has control over the content they see and they no longer need to fight over the rules of what belongs and what doesn't. This replaces a collective decision with an individual decision.

And guess what, I am building just such system as a hobby project at https://linklonk.com so you can try it out.

> One idea is to have a periodic ‘chat splitting,’ where every 3-6 months (or when membership hits a certain number) there is a new forum/chatroom made, and people have to choose which group to join.

IMO communities that undergo splitting of this kind will inevitably result in the death of the community.

In my experience there's a third type of group, a subcategory of possums who solved the otter problem to their own detriment: Porcupines. Porcupines use techniques such as "toxicity" to create communities that are more stable on average than possum-led groups. The otters and possums are likely to stay away from the start for fear of being associated with the toxicity of the porcupines. The outsiders may create their own less toxic groups, and continue the possum-otter cycle, but the porcupines remain in the same place they always have, not changing much, always slightly screwing over the reputation of the group as a whole by their very existence. The porcupines quickly develop thick skin and become immune to the toxicity themselves, at the expense of their reputation and potential growth.

Porcupine toxicity can take many forms:

* general abrasiveness and rudeness (e.g. toxic multiplayer games)

* extreme ideological purity (e.g. tumblr) or impurity (e.g. 4chan), usually around popular culture war fault lines

* promoting illegal activities (e.g. hard-drug-using communities)

The advantage of toxicity is that there is no "constitution" or even much moderation needed at all. The main disadvantages, aside from the toxicity itself and the lack of strong growth (which is a feature not a bug), is the difficulty of finding platforms to host the communities, as toxic communities are not very advertiser-friendly, and the reputational hit one takes by being associated with a porcupine-led community

It depends on the site, and especially the modes of user interaction and moderation. Some types will tend towards a purity spiral, while others will become dissolved by casuals. A balance is needed.

It's a thing I've often seen on Discord, actually. Otters will often create a “neighbour” server, which is essentially a one big #general channel. Over time, that neighbour server becomes its own thing, while most of the Possums stay on the main one to actually discuss the Thing.

I am neither an otter nor an possum. I am a cat, I don't owe anything to anyone and I will rally an idea only if it is in my best interest.

If the possums are so keen on moderation and community standards, why not take advantage of this and employ some self-moderation and censorship? Make the community invite-only or if a user reaches a certain threshold of downvotes they are banned for a while. This would discourage Otters who are generally just looking for somewhere to spend time.

This model is incomplete at best. In my view "possums" here are not simply people obsessed with staying on topic, they are people who are deeply invested in the topic. Other terms for possums would include makers, scholars, artists, and founders. So called "otters" are those who have a passing interest in the topic, enough to be entertained by it but who do not participate at a deep level. They are otherwise known as consumers or dilettantes. There is a third group missing, they generally move in after the "otters" have reached a critical mass. To stick with the theme let's call them "orcas". They have no interest in socializing or in the topic, their goal is to monetize the topic and extract wealth from the otters by exploiting the work of the possums.

see also Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

This is called the tragedy of the commons.

I can point at the Lemmings type as well.