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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size.

Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days.

What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.

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It's assimilation speed and has been seen time and time again in various contexts.

If I take my American family and move to Australia, we will become Australian over time.

If I take my family and the entire city I live in to Australia, there will be an American city in Australia.

Eternal September is just when the influx overwhelmed the "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any forum for a length of time can refer to a similar influx (often complaining that everything has gone to crap since then).

It probably boils down to mathematics. If your average interaction is with someone you've never met before, it's very difficult for persistent relations to form.

Assimilation speed versus rate of joining versus rate of people leaving all need to be kept in balance to have a long running, tight-knit community. An interesting example is university clubs: they have the intrinsic property that people's tenure in the club is very finite, typically a maximum of 4 years. Despite this constant turnover of membership, clubs tend to maintain a relatively constant culture. I posit that the main driver behind this is deliberate accelerated assimilation.

Right out of the gates, you have selection bias in who wants to be in your club: probably people who share many of the same interests as the club. Then you have further selection pressure with inviting new membership: existing members are more likely to accept into the organization prospective members who are similar to themselves, or at least, an idealized version. Then, you have rituals, ranging from hazing to positive Big/Little type interactions, which proactively push new members to assimilate into the club.

Those are good points; a university club almost by definition has 25% turn over each year, but it's scheduled, defined, and worked around. People don't usually just disappear; they hand off responsibilities and train, either explicitly or implicitly.

> Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days.

Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.

Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.

Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels.

At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in.

I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.

> At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.

I think you got autocorrected. The name is libera.chat .

> something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

It was a netsplit.

Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor.

The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021

Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.

There were definitely some TF2 servers that felt like familiar bars or chat rooms that happened to have gun mechanics on the side.

That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.

I think the fact that server-based matchmaking is seperated in the way it is lends itself to those types of close-knit communities forming. MMOs with things like instancing implemented cause clusters like that to not form. You get that a little bit in capital cities in games like FFXIV and low-population WoW servers, but it's an unfortunate drawback for features to help with scaling.

That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat systems were using today to build similar communities.

I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.

> I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it.

This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way.

The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain.

The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.

And one more thing to think of, how to make this new good product resistant to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish). Because you want to make it open, this means it's open to multi billion corporations who can throw lots of $$$ and build a nicer client really fast. And from there, well we know how it goes.

In ye olden days the whole world didn’t exist. Maps indicated ‘here be dragons’.

I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific and not broad enough to include the world.

> In ye olden days the whole world didn’t exist

This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with the world? The reality is we live in a certain physical space, we can only see, hear and speak at a certain distance and while technology has enabled a way to overcome that, it does feel like we're overwhelmed by the scale of humans we can communicate with. I want to go back to real, small, private connection. Hence micro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.

Even if the whole world isn't built this way, much of it could be, especially groups and interactions.

You know what’s really truly private?

It’s what you said. The real world. Meet a friend. It’s as private as it gets.

Pick a small friend for true micro experience. :D

Jokes aside, unplug. And it doesn’t have to be that we build things at a world scale. But isn’t it amazing that we can and do build stuff at this scale.

Devs often don’t use tech as much as regular users! They build, and forget the use.

Well yeah, sure.

The world still doesn't really exist. At least not in any where we can comprehend it. Since it is almost certainly incomprehensible and probably not even possible to capture the world as it is, then isn't the second best to build something that is nice?

Aw come on now, don’t play coy, you know what I meant :)

That just as we went from hunting and gathering to farms and now cities, internet grew from a few people having access in universities and some tech corporations, to now phones in the hands of children in villages.

Let’s be more inclusive and dare I say progressive even?

I, for one, am not hankering to gather and hunt.

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