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> I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't
by flukus 7y ago
> I hear you that it doesn't work the same way offline. But there is a good reason for the difference. If you had 1000 people in your house, bump order wouldn't work either. Even 30 active people in a chat room gets too hard to follow if everyone is talking.
If you've got 1000 people in your house you'll have a couple of conversations going on in the kitchen, a couple in the lounge room, a couple outside and people will be wandering between the different sections and conversations. This seems pretty familiar to traditional forums where you'll have specific sub forums, and topics in those sub-forums, if you wander from one forum to another you'll see the most recent topic/conversation taking place. Sort by new in reddit seems to be the opposite, you'll see the newest topic but you want see the active conversations, at the topic level you'll only see the latest top level post not any ongoing conversations.
There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
- ehnto 7y ago> There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one. I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.
- Aeolun 7y agoThat’s true, but at that point you don’t have a thousand people any more. You have 20. The OP is talking about a situation where there are a thousand people in a room all talking at the same time. I don’t see an easy way to split interaction on a forum like Reddit in the same way as a thousand people in a house.