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What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?

• awinter-py 9y ago
  IMO forums & listhosts are richer, healthier & better-moderated than the platforms. I think this author is right to link community to ownership & governance.
  • Animats 9y ago
    Yes. If you can't vote to fire the leadership, you're not a "member". You're a customer at best.
• just_one_time_ 9y ago
  r/bitcoin
• headsoup 9y ago
  To me the greatest issue with the Facebook 'community' is that it is the conglomeration (the umbrella) of sub-communities which, in not being a Facebook member, excludes me from accessing any of them. It's basically like having to obtain a passport just to enter the neighbouring town's pub. A specific example: a local tabletop gaming store has a 'Facebook community' but no alternative forum. There is potential friendship and worthwhile discourse to be had by joining the community, but it is not accessible without joining Facebook. This problem just doesn't seem significant because so many are already in the 'Facebook community' already. It's not that Facebook set the rules or defines the community, it's that they own the front door and you need their key to enter.
  • dmead 9y ago
    yea, but they're also handing out keys for 'free'.
    • pjlegato 9y ago
      It's not free. The price is agreeing to allow your private data to be mined forever. You're the product, not the customer.
      • headsoup 9y ago
        I think you may have missed the quotation marks around free there ;)
      • BurningFrog 9y ago
        What private data do you need to submit to only participate in some forum?
      • blhack 9y ago
        So don't give them your private data. Just lie to them. https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ This will give you everything facebook wants.
        • danmaz74 9y ago
          You can't do that if your goal is to participate in a real life community like the op was saying...
          • blhack 9y ago
            Give them your real name, and then lie about everything else. This is where all of the anti-facebook sentiment loses me. Just put fake data in there.
            • quickthrower2 9y ago
              You can't lie about the groups you use, or the sites you visit that track you via FB, or the friends you add.
              • 9y ago
  • denimnerd 9y ago
    Facebook killed my favorite real community's local discussion forum on their own hosted website. Everyone just uses the Facebook group now and so I can't just leave facebook which leaving the communication I have with this group.
    • tokyodude 9y ago
      I had an active forum before facebook and twitter. the forum died and was not transferred to facebook. Rather it seems like people’s free time to participate in tb forum got occupied with their time on fb and twitter. Unfortunatelt neither fb nor twitter are really designed to support forum style interaction. No list of topics and threads
      • sharemywin 9y ago
        My understanding is marketplace is killing a lot of neighbor garage sale facebook groups.
  • golergka 9y ago
    You have to own an internet-connected device and have internet access. My point is, Facebook is a de-facto standard for almost any non-technical community these days, and if not Facebook, then it's some other social platform, like Whatsapp or Telegram. Turns out, centralized platforms are much more user-friendly, have better network effects and easier to set up and administer for majority of users.
  • codeulike 9y ago
    I agree with your sentiment, its a shame to see Facebook displacing independent forums. But, just to offer another aspect to think about: I have a child with a rare and serious medical condition. There is a facebook group for that condition, and nearly every family in the UK who is affected is in that facebook group. Its very powerful to be able to share notes like that, between us we are able to zero in on best practice and then suggest things to doctors. I suspect that without Facebooks reach we would not have been able to get so many people in one virtual space. I notice there are facebook groups for practically every rare condition you can imagine. tldr: Facebooks ability to reach beyond the sort of people that sign up for forums can be very useful in certain important scenarios.
    • gregknicholson 9y ago
      A single communication network with wide reach is very valuable, for exactly this reason. It's not necessary — and I think it's harmful — for that network to be controlled on the whim of one person (assuming you accept that Zuckerberg isn't a robot or a lizard or something).
      • dfxm12 9y ago
        Do you really think Zuckerberg is personally concerned with the "Rare disease - UK" Facebook group to the point where he personally will wipe it out arbitrarily? What if this group was in Reddit and all of a sudden the mod, on a whim, locked all the threads? What if this group met in the local community center and the building owner, on a whim, decided to sell the building to someone who didn't want such groups to meet there? Someone has to be in charge of a "single communication network". If your community owes its existence to it, they are at their whim, and in a way, that's the cost of doing business. This isn't unique to Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg. If the community is strong, they can find a way to overcome such whims.
        • gregknicholson 9y ago
          > Someone has to be in charge of a "single communication network". This is false. Pen, paper, English and walking is a communication network. If there are multiple competing implementations of a shared spec, in practice no one group can control it. (This is why it's important to have multiple competing web browser engines.)
• sudoscript 9y ago
  >> There’s an association that still lingers between a “community” and a physical location — the idyllic small town, say, or the utopian village, real or imagined. It evokes a cozy, friendly, simple place in which people live in easy harmony and cooperation, each with a role to play, each mattering to the whole. >> “Community” makes everything sound better. It makes “the activist community” sound approachable; it makes “the skin-care community” sound important; it makes “the Christian community” sound inclusive and kind; it makes “the medical community” sound folksy and skilled at the bedside; it makes “the homeless community” sound voluntary; it makes “the gun rights community” sound humanistic; it makes “the tech community” sound like good citizens. All these "communities" that we're told we're part of all the time are really just labels. Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have. They exist, but are much fewer and far in between than everyone uses the word for.
  • dmead 9y ago
    it makes the <racial group> community sound what..?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • smallnamespace 9y ago
    > Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have There is a tradeoff between freedom and community. Organic bonds with real feeling come from a true alignment in interests. One of the simplest ways of creating interest alignment is making sure everyone has a long-term commitment. But the flip side of 'commitment' is that people can't be free to leave whenever they want. A highly mobile society where everyone is largely free to join or leave any virtual community, neighborhood, is one where nobody feels any form of permanent attachment to that institution or to their fellow community members, because there is no long-term commitment, either from themselves, or from their fellow members. A neighborhood where everyone has the ability to freely come and go is one where nobody has a strong incentive to sacrifice for their neighbors, because who knows who your neighbors will be tomorrow, or whether you will still be there? You can see one aspect with the rise of no-fault divorce; in the past, perhaps many people were trapped in unhappy marriages, but by the same token, the lifelong commitment may have encouraged many couples figure out ways to make it work. Nowadays, it is no longer possible for both members to bind themselves to one another. And since both partners can walk out at any time (and both people know it), why go to extraordinary lengths to make it work?
• magpi3 9y ago
  Well written and makes a lot of great points, however... I am no fan of Facebook, but you have to give it and other social networks some credit for giving communities - real communities - tools to organize. For example, we've rapidly gone through a generational shift in how people view lgbtq persons in the past 20 years, and I entirely (admittedly without any hard data) attribute that shift to the tools the internet and social networks have provided that have allowed lgbtq communities to connect, organize, and educate non-lgbtq folks like me.
  • headsoup 9y ago
    Perhaps, but those tools do exist anyway. Facebook increases 'discoverability' of groups/communities, but a forum/blog/etc aggregation/search capability would do the same without requiring login to a different service. Facebook is the lazy way, with side effects.
    • PeterisP 9y ago
      For most non-techie communities, the pre-social network tools (e.g. having someone set up a website and a forum for that community) had a so high barrier to entry that they did not use them. The few communities who happened to have a skilled member eager to volunteer would use such tools, but the rest of them could not. Being able to reliably use social networking tools made and maintained (though also controlled) by others was important to make this accessible to them. The non-"lazy" (as you call it) way simply is not a realistic alternative for most of the population.
  • pjc50 9y ago
    You can't give Facebook credit for lgbT acceptance when for a long time they banned trans people. They're also bad at moderation due to not understanding language; https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-hate-speech-policies-censor-marginalized-users/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-hate-speech-policies-c... The internet may well have been great for lgbt acceptance but it's despite not because of Facebook.
    • votepaunchy 9y ago
• EGreg 9y ago
  It seems every other day something on HN makes me glad we built an open source platform to empower people and unite communities. Open source removes a lot of the criticism in this article. The trick is to make it powerful and easy to use enough to compete with Facebook. Like Wordpress or Discourse do a great job doing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
• ziotom78 9y ago
  When I read the title, I thought it was an essay about the European Union...
• stretchwithme 9y ago
  Someone else is always making the rules. Because we are always only one amongst billions. Why would I expect to make the rules? And many of the rules we have to follow are handed to us by nature. What matters is what we do within the rules that exist. Which can potentially be a lot if you don't hobble yourself with self-made rules that aren't really valid. The rules in your head are the biggest challenge.
  • dannyw 9y ago
    Rules of most groups are, directly or indirectly, decided by the same group. Such as professional associations, your local tabletop gaming group, homeowner associations, or democracies. They’re not perfect, but at least there is a chain of input. For Facebook, that group has opposing motivations to this “community” – its lets and requirement is to exploit this resource, ie your cold hard data. This is not a critique of capitalism – it is an argument that large corporations cannot create communities.
    • watwut 9y ago
      Local tabletop gaming groups have rules set by store that hosts the meetings. It is not members setting rules, but the place setting rules. Professional association have rules set by few companies with others not having realistic chance to change the rules. In many places, homeowner associations is something you have to be member of, whether you want it or not.
      • Lionsion 9y ago
        In all those examples of communities, the members have real channels of influence over the rules, they are not merely subject ones handed down by a distant authority. HOAs have boards that members can petition or join, etc.
• 8bitsrule 9y ago
  That's not a community, that's a 'congregation'.
  • chillingeffect 9y ago
    or even just "population." we used to have this debate over and over in grad school. People would invent things and hope for a "community" to form--- that was the ultimate validation. But it was naive and pretentious to expect that any single invention could lead to community, especially within the time frame of grad school.
    • Lionsion 9y ago
      It's sort of like the idea from Peopleware: a manager cannot create the social bonds that make a real team, but he can destroy them. You could generalize that to: a leader can't create a community, but he can destroy one.
    • 8bitsrule 9y ago
      LOL. I seem to recall spending a grad school time sitting in a cubicle in a remote corner of the library with a pile of books and papers. Not too conducive to 'community' except for the 2 or 3 people who -had- to read my scrivening.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• tempodox 9y ago
  If someone else makes all the rules, it's more like a cult than a community. A community would have decision mechanisms for making their own rules.
• paulmd 9y ago
  See: Ethereum. Boy, I really want a 17-year-old making all the macroeconomic decisions for my currency! I guess we're doing a deflationary currency now, because he did a "joking not joking" April Fools "prank"!
• usermac 9y ago
  China
• noir-york 9y ago
  Well written article with excellent points. "community" is another instance of using language to frame or spin an issue, with the consequent diluting of what a real community is. "Community is the spoonful of sugar that makes the othering go down." was particularly evocative.
• dfxm12 9y ago
  Nobody feels any personal kinship with "community" of billions of fellow Facebook users That's kind of disingenuous, no? I'm sure this fits some dictionary definition of "community", but it is quite different from the context the rest of the article is using. That's like comparing my kinship to a human across the world I've never met because we're humans vs my kinship to my gaming group, whom I meet with weekly. These two "communities" are very different, and yeah, even in my offline gaming group, we are beholden to the gaming store (and to a lesser extent, the companies who make the games we play) who set rules, in a similar way to the way Facebook users are beholden to Facebook. I don't think this is unreasonable, as they are providing a service. I also don't certainly feel like a loser for playing by these rules, even if the gaming store, or Facebook, is winning (I guess by profiting more? or asserting their rules? I'm not really clear on what the author's premise is here).
  • acobster 9y ago
    The premise is that FB is the target of lots of recent scrutiny about how they've exposed your data and that of many, many other FB users, even turning a blind eye to companies collecting that data in violation of FB's own terms of service. While being beholden to standard terms-of-service arrangements are to be expected, it's very different from your gaming example where you've paid someone for a product and must simply abode by certain community guidelines when interacting with other users. To FB, you are the product. If you're really not aware of this dynamic, googling "Cambridge Analytica" is a good place to start. The way FB and others have capitalized on people willingly giving up personal info so that advertisers can pay for more effective ways to manipulate its users is rather disengenuous given all the talk about "community."
• JulianMorrison 9y ago
  Your problem is capitalism, subset: private property. The idea that essential mass communication infrastructure can and should be owned and fully controlled by its owners, and that outweighs the wishes and intent of fully a quarter of all humans alive. I simply disagree with it.
  • ataturk 9y ago
    State owned mass communication has been an utter failure, too.
• rdlecler1 9y ago
  In response to the title, nation states and employment and companies is not that much different. We may gravitate to certain countries or companies because we like the culture those rules create. I don’t see why online social networks should be different.
• tmaly 9y ago
  What I find interesting now is many people do not know their neighbors in a physical location. I know a few people in my neighborhood, but for the most part everyone is a stranger. I happen to live in an HOA where a select few make rules for everyone else. This idea of an online community and the draw back of rule makers seems to extend to the real world in this situation.
• Ohsayingnothing 9y ago
  (To abstract by yourself:) Once upon a Time I thought: 'Addiction seems to be the only Thing connecting People'. Today I am thinking about the traditional Perspective of Maleness; Domination, Strength, Submission, what - in many Cultural-'Imaginations' - seems to be equatable (sry, for picking 'equal' here) to entitlement Eligibility, and why to Inflate it as a Subject of Discussion, could alter Attention... Maybe an Anecdote of "Economic 'Warfare'" will help explaining: Foreign Investors which enjoyed that'em were granted a say, can also lose this Right in the Future, and that there also can be a Fee for canceling their 'old Contracts'. And if the Question is 'If a totalitarian China or a democratic elected Female-American President has an easier Job of doing it...' Never mind... -It's Sunday... -smalltalk (-;