4 ms·

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 y

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.
- psykotic 16y ago
  Yes, it's an interesting set of problems. It makes sense to discuss them on a startup-oriented community website like Hacker News. My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work. Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work. Doing that in this discussion. Thank you for facilitating that. Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view. A tl;dr version of my comments is to ask, "What if those could scale technologically?"

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.

psykotic 16y ago
Yes, it's an interesting set of problems. It makes sense to discuss them on a startup-oriented community website like Hacker News. My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work. Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are proven to work. Doing that in this discussion. Thank you for facilitating that. Not everything has to scale, technologically or sociologically. I'm not trying to quell discussion but to offer an alternative point of view. A tl;dr version of my comments is to ask, "What if those could scale technologically?"