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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

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> I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...) I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted

This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?

Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)

This is amazing! I needed to read it today. Thank you.

Interesting. Would this be implementable today but on a larger scale?

"Someone who cares about you on the internet"

instead of

"Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude on the internet"

Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes, but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were meant to interact?

I think sadly the scale becomes less about the size per say and more about the unpredictability. The "vibes" on the internet late 90s early 2000s where very... on point, so it didn't feel like emotional labour. I can imagine being someone who cares about someone on the internet in 2025 would be, frankly, exhausting, in 2002 it was just fun.

Yes: "Better Living Through Algorithms" - https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

It's an interesting relevant short story. Won the 2024 Hugo Award. It was posted a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263876

Corporate social media does not care about its users. They are just biomass to fuel various goals: ad revenue, political influence, etc. In fact, the more addicted you are, the better.

And the weather does not care about farmers either.

It is obviously a completely unfinished thought.

But something about humans innate tendency to self-organise into tribes and villages.

Wow, thanks for the sharing this lovely tidbit!

What advice would you have for someone running a discord community?

1. a community is simply an abstract place people meet around the intersection of a shared interest. It's important to first recognize that. 2. Communities are not people who are all the same, they just commune together for reasons. 3. communities form, they are not built. 4. communities are ultimately selfless, however, good communities know what they are and why they exist, this can be a learning process and can be malleable, but at any given moment in time that should be understood. 5. Good communities enforce strong rules strongly. Community steering and moderation should be as diffuse as possible without losing the next point in fact keeping it central: 6. Good communities look to proactively raise up people who energetically build the community for the sake of the community not for the sake of themselves, for themselves should be the second order effect of any raising up within a community, this is subtle and community leaders need to spend time understanding this. I think that is all.

> Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.

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