Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

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Is there data to back this up? I'm skeptical.

I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".

Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group that advocates for the homeless.

I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a uniform thing in a city with differing interests and stakeholders.

I think the key difference is that online communities are "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A great example is ideological differences. Lefty political groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity politic leftist groups, and on and on.

A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference. This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.

If the activation energy to form and join a community needed it's also really easy to just churn from the community. Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of hyper-specific communities which lead to things like radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)

Subreddits and Slack "communities" do not form communities. Bonds created in such groups are as ephemeral as the nature of communication enabling them.

In the same way bunch of individuals do not exhaust the meaning of the concepts of society and nation.

Subreddits, often yes. Though some have meetups, etc.

I'm in a lot of slack communities around local activism where I see the people and slack is just an organizational tool.

I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are filling the niche that was previously served by smaller organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.

But are these reflective of the communities themselves? Or the tools used to organize community? If slack disappeared tomorrow wouldn’t many just move to another tool?

I agree with you, I live in Sydney Australia and there are plenty of small orgs and communities to participate in.

I wonder whether this post is just a reflection of Terry living in California, which from where I sit looks like an end-stage capitalist hellscape.

If you read between the lines of what Terence Tao is saying - which, by the way, the most charitable summary is, "Isn't Dunbar's number interesting?" - he is really saying, "It is hard to make friends as an adult." Extra so if your day to day is something esoteric like academic theoretical math (read between the lines: really boring to most people), and if you are right leaning or libertarian (read between the lines: unfriendly as a matter of policy).

It's extremely expensive to get a physical space these days, there are no old warehouses or cheap community centers where you can just run a community event. They cost thousands of dollars to rent for a day, so anything short of a ticketed event or selling lots of alcohol is not viable.

The places that do still have a physical location are often almost grandfathered in where the organisation bought the land decades ago and now pulls in enough from investments to continue perpetually, but could not afford to buy or rent the space at market rate today.

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