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Re: The Black Sun The only communities I've witnessed that maintained or increased their quality over time were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a

Re: The Black Sun The only communities I've witnessed that maintained or increased their quality over time were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator. MUD-Dev was like this in its heyday. JCL invited people based on their rec.games.mud.* postings, and existing members could invite new ones. Then it went public around 1998 and that started its initially slow decline and later rapid descent into chaos and noise. The last few years of its existence there was barely any technical content, and the design talk was too high level and disconnected. As it happens, Heroku cofounders Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry were early members and Adam in particular wrote a lot of great posts. I've been a member of another private forum since 2004. It's somewhat secret, so I can only speak in generalities. Current members can suggest new ones for consideration, though not everyone is accepted. The owner is a well-known industry figure who bootstrapped the forum with his personal network. The membership count never exceeds more than a few hundred, and there are periodic purges of non-posting members; lurkers are not allowed. You can make anonymous posts but personal attacks in that form are deleted. The tone is generally professional and brutally honest, but there is still room for shooting the shit (if there is a lull with too many casual threads, the moderator will start to lock them). It works very, very well.

6ren 16y ago
Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling. The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation". It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree (i.e. each level could have many immediate higher levels, so there's competition). I think there's something in this, mirroring the hierarchy in which human communities naturally organize themselves (karma/seniority works that way a bit here), but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.
- psykotic 16y ago
  Communities that are so large they require webs of trust to be managed hardly deserve to be called communities. No matter what you call them, they don't offer what I'm looking for.
  - 6ren 16y ago
    er, how is what I described a "web of trust"?
    - psykotic 16y ago
      We can call it a tree of delegation if you like. It sounds reminiscent of how Linux development is managed. At least to me this suggests a scale that's distinctly beyond a community.
      - 6ren 16y ago
        The tree is just me getting carried away with elaboration. The basic idea is you have one community higher than the first one. The lower one can be completely open; the higher one can be invite-only. (Oh, there's that essence I wanted.) Maybe the two levels are a little like a freemium model, where the analogue of free vs. paid is anyone vs. invite-only. One is a recruitment centre for the other. Perhaps the same submissions and comments would be presented to both but rated by their own communities; or perhaps it would be like subreddits, totally distinct in their stories and discussions. The difference from subreddits is it's not flat and not all-welcome, but hierarchical (in both a logical and political sense). Maybe SO does this a little with karma-based privileges, but there isn't a higher-level forum (at least, not one that I'm aware of...)
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling. The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation". I think a system of such levels would be very useful for creating new connections. It's similar to what happens when leaders from one country meet leaders from another country, or when leading researchers in one field meet leading researchers from another. It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree...but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it. If you can take the "friend" graph and identify leaders and place them at the root of various trees, then you could use the distance from such roots to determine the general "level" of any given node. Then, all you'd need to do is to somehow lubricate communication between users of generally the same level. You could do this right now on a site like Stack Overflow with private IRC rooms or forums for Stack Overflow users, with access restricted by Karma. (Already been done?)
stcredzero 16y ago
The only time I've seen communities maintain or increase their quality over time has been when they were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator. I've also had some thoughts with regards to an idea like this. I wonder if the dynamics of private forums moderated by respected and benevolent dictators can be captured in entirely emergent form? qqygh is kind of like a de-facto moderator of reddit.com. The power he wields as a submitter is entirely emergent. There are also other redditors who start their own moderated subreddits. I wonder if moderated subreddits could emerge out of some kind of karma system? Twitter is somewhat like this as well, but it only includes the "submission" part without direct moderation. (Does that take the form of un-following?) What Jacques proposes basically has the same filtering dynamics as networks of personal connections in real life or on sites like Facebook, but without so much of the isolation and insularity these networks produce. I posit what he's proposing would end up being much like a "fuzzy" version of the friend graph.
- psykotic 16y ago
  I'm skeptical of technological solutions. Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement. If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute. Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated. A private community doesn't have to be insular. In the example I mentioned in my original post, with every turn of the purge cycle around 15% of the members are kicked out due to inactivity and replaced with newcomers.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement. I'm not talking specifically about up/down voting or even about karma, really. Karma systems are just the closest existing thing to what I'm thinking of, so far. (That and maybe Twitter.) If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute. Agreed. The trade-off is that you've limited the pool of members. Jacques is wondering, in part, if there was a way to get the benefits of private communities with less of this trade-off. What if there was a way to somewhat merge similar small groups where, "external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution?" It seems like there must be a way to attract such groups or have them emerge from a larger population, then find similarities between such groups and flow information between them. Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated. Again, agreed, but what is going on with, "information that is normally only divulged over beers?" What are the dynamics here, and is that compatible with a "Black Sun" sort of forum? By compatible, I don't mean that the forum has to have all of the same dynamics. (How could it, absent actual beer?) Could a site with the qualities I described become a useful form of offline communication for such associates? Evidently yes, since similar offline communication is already implemented in the form of your private forum.
unsigner 16y ago
Hmmm let me take a guess based on your post history... The well-known industry figure's name, when typed in lowercase with a single space between first/last name, md5 hashes to 02ff1bf7102845c6224536b758c80dd6?
- psykotic 16y ago
  Hashing adds a touch of mystique but doesn't serve much of a security purpose when the list of candidates is so short. :)

6ren 16y ago

Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling. The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation". It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree (i.e. each level could have many immediate higher levels, so there's competition). I think there's something in this, mirroring the hierarchy in which human communities naturally organize themselves (karma/seniority works that way a bit here), but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.

psykotic 16y ago
Communities that are so large they require webs of trust to be managed hardly deserve to be called communities. No matter what you call them, they don't offer what I'm looking for.
- 6ren 16y ago
  er, how is what I described a "web of trust"?
  - psykotic 16y ago
    We can call it a tree of delegation if you like. It sounds reminiscent of how Linux development is managed. At least to me this suggests a scale that's distinctly beyond a community.
    - 6ren 16y ago
      The tree is just me getting carried away with elaboration. The basic idea is you have one community higher than the first one. The lower one can be completely open; the higher one can be invite-only. (Oh, there's that essence I wanted.) Maybe the two levels are a little like a freemium model, where the analogue of free vs. paid is anyone vs. invite-only. One is a recruitment centre for the other. Perhaps the same submissions and comments would be presented to both but rated by their own communities; or perhaps it would be like subreddits, totally distinct in their stories and discussions. The difference from subreddits is it's not flat and not all-welcome, but hierarchical (in both a logical and political sense). Maybe SO does this a little with karma-based privileges, but there isn't a higher-level forum (at least, not one that I'm aware of...)
stcredzero 16y ago
Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling. The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation". I think a system of such levels would be very useful for creating new connections. It's similar to what happens when leaders from one country meet leaders from another country, or when leading researchers in one field meet leading researchers from another. It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree...but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it. If you can take the "friend" graph and identify leaders and place them at the root of various trees, then you could use the distance from such roots to determine the general "level" of any given node. Then, all you'd need to do is to somehow lubricate communication between users of generally the same level. You could do this right now on a site like Stack Overflow with private IRC rooms or forums for Stack Overflow users, with access restricted by Karma. (Already been done?)

stcredzero 16y ago

The only time I've seen communities maintain or increase their quality over time has been when they were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator. I've also had some thoughts with regards to an idea like this. I wonder if the dynamics of private forums moderated by respected and benevolent dictators can be captured in entirely emergent form? qqygh is kind of like a de-facto moderator of reddit.com. The power he wields as a submitter is entirely emergent. There are also other redditors who start their own moderated subreddits. I wonder if moderated subreddits could emerge out of some kind of karma system? Twitter is somewhat like this as well, but it only includes the "submission" part without direct moderation. (Does that take the form of un-following?) What Jacques proposes basically has the same filtering dynamics as networks of personal connections in real life or on sites like Facebook, but without so much of the isolation and insularity these networks produce. I posit what he's proposing would end up being much like a "fuzzy" version of the friend graph.

psykotic 16y ago
I'm skeptical of technological solutions. Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement. If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute. Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated. A private community doesn't have to be insular. In the example I mentioned in my original post, with every turn of the purge cycle around 15% of the members are kicked out due to inactivity and replaced with newcomers.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement. I'm not talking specifically about up/down voting or even about karma, really. Karma systems are just the closest existing thing to what I'm thinking of, so far. (That and maybe Twitter.) If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute. Agreed. The trade-off is that you've limited the pool of members. Jacques is wondering, in part, if there was a way to get the benefits of private communities with less of this trade-off. What if there was a way to somewhat merge similar small groups where, "external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution?" It seems like there must be a way to attract such groups or have them emerge from a larger population, then find similarities between such groups and flow information between them. Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated. Again, agreed, but what is going on with, "information that is normally only divulged over beers?" What are the dynamics here, and is that compatible with a "Black Sun" sort of forum? By compatible, I don't mean that the forum has to have all of the same dynamics. (How could it, absent actual beer?) Could a site with the qualities I described become a useful form of offline communication for such associates? Evidently yes, since similar offline communication is already implemented in the form of your private forum.

unsigner 16y ago

Hmmm let me take a guess based on your post history... The well-known industry figure's name, when typed in lowercase with a single space between first/last name, md5 hashes to 02ff1bf7102845c6224536b758c80dd6?

psykotic 16y ago
Hashing adds a touch of mystique but doesn't serve much of a security purpose when the list of candidates is so short. :)