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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Reddit is not a discussion forum, it's a marketing platform. It's actively hostile towards any meaningful discussion through upvotes, downvotes, and aggressive moderation. These principles cannot apply to reddit since "possums" will be repelled by reddit's structures and never form groups there.

Yeah I kind of agree. I've modded a couple popular subreddits, and while you can have reasonable discussion and disagreements when the subreddit is only slightly popular, as it scales up that rapidly becomes more difficult. Anyone disagreeing with the consensus doesn't get one person engaging them in argument, they get twenty, which feels overwhelming. And of course, the downvotes.

I think the aggressive moderation is necessary, but it doesn't really solve the problem, it just keeps the peace.

That said, plenty of subreddits are still useful. It's just really hard to get any real sense of community.

I think a lot of online communities, Reddit in particular, are prone to the "purity spiral" dynamic.

> Anyone disagreeing with the consensus doesn't get one person engaging them in argument, they get twenty, which feels overwhelming. And of course, the downvotes.

Yeah, unfortunately I 'abandoned'* Reddit because of that. Either your comment is downvoted to oblivion, or you get a lot of people being aggressive towards you

* I still use it, but almost only for browsing memes, and a few useful subreddits

These principles do apply, there is a constant churn of small subreddits being created where you can see some deep, slow discussion of stuff despite Reddit being actively hostile to it. Eventually they grow to the point where they get a few posts showing up on the default front page and then there’s a big influx of new readers who are much more casual about the subject, and much more likely to shitpost. Within the year there will be at least one new subreddit trying to recreate what it was like before that happened.

Yes, correct. I think the bottom line is that on some level we celebrate growth and popularity, but it seems to strangle more nuanced, meaningful discussion and community-building.

Very yes.

I run a Mastodon instance and very quickly got to the point where new accounts are only available if you ask me for one, and if I decide to let you have one. Which is not a thing I do lightly for strangers.

The last thing I want is growth. Then I'd have to treat it like my full-time job and deal with managing an ever-more-unmanageable number of users, finding ways to deal with ever-huger bandwidth, storage, and CPU requirements, and somehow making enough money off of it to pay for all that, plus my own rent. Fuck growth. It's a little gathering for a few friends and that's about all it needs to be.

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