6 ms·
>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998. And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the socia
by JonnieCache 16y ago
>I've been watching this same story play itself out since Slashdot circa 1998.
And every social subculture in history. See: the constant evolution of the social scenes around music genres. It's just a fact of social psychology we have to live with.
"Dubstep was sooo good back in 02 before the students found out about it! I mainly go to future-garage raves now man..."
- mkr-hn 16y agoAnd Linux was so cool before the Ubuntu kids showed up.
- jacques_chester 16y agoGood point. On reflection it resembles flocking behaviour. I imagine that website members can be modelled as simple agents with two rules: 1. A cool site has few, impressive members. 2. Move towards the cool sites. Given an arbitrary distribution of "impressive" members, this should cause a constantly moving flock of members to move from site to site regardless of its purpose.
- JonnieCache 16y agoAdd to that: 3. A member's threshold of minimum community coolness below which they will leave, is correlated to their impressiveness.
- jacques_chester 16y agoI figured I'd covered that in rule 1, but upon inspection, it's really two different rules. Your rule 3 is a better statement of one of them.
- groby_b 16y agoIt strikes me that a logical step to prevent #2 is "allow only new contributing members that have been vouched for by n old members". Yes, I'm that elitist. And yes, I'm well aware I probably wouldn't get voted in :) But here's the other part - keep the site open for reading. That means it (hopefully) self-selects for quality, and other people can observe a high-quality discussion.
- mkr-hn 16y agoDo you have any examples of a site where treehousing has improved things?
- rapicastillo 16y agoApple comes to mind, app-wise.
- mkr-hn 16y agoI was thinking in terms of communities.
- steveklabnik 16y agoMetafilter is often cited. They have a $5 fee for accounts. Then again, Something Awful is $10...
- mkr-hn 16y agoThat's clubhousing, not treehousing. Treehousing would be putting social barriers on entry. Clubhousing would be financial. These terms are 100% arbitrary and invented an hour ago, but these seem like good definitions.
- steveklabnik 16y agoDribbble, then.
- mkr-hn 16y agoIt'll be interesting to see how that model holds up to another 2-3 years. The few invite-based communities I've been a part of started to degrade as the social graph grew out and started to pick up the occasional undesirable. It was harder to get rid of them because they knew someone who knew someone, and trying to push them out had a network effect. It might be obvious to someone removed by 3+ levels that a bad element is bad, but the person who invited them might not see it.
- tastybites 16y agoLet's not forget it happens in the actual cities we live in as well! Hipster-ism gives way to gentrification and then the cool kids move because there are way too many yuppies. Same things happens with suburbs - they get too crowded and people start moving to the country to make new suburbs. This is just human nature, it manifests itself in the clothes we wear, the cars/bikes we drive, the places we live, it certainly also applies to social websites. I'd be surprised if it doesn't - we'll see how facebook fares, or if there will be a coolkid exodus as the rest of the world gloms on. It's basically a (sub)cultural arms race that everyone fights in.
- malandrew 16y agoRent control has been a pretty effective way of preserving the identities of communities in cities. It's not perfect, but it helps. Concepts similar to rent control can and should be applied to sites trying to preserve certain characteristics.
- tastybites 16y agoIn my experience (SF, LA) the rent control is there to prevent the gouging of yuppies, not to keep the poor people in. The idea is the city wants to keep rent just high enough to retain the rich people for the tax and spending base but low enough that the landlords to squeeze them out, which they most likely would do if given the chance. It might be different in places other than California though, like New York.
- natrius 16y agoYou can't squeeze out rich people by raising prices without ending up with empty units, which landlords don't want.
- tastybites 16y agoLots of landlords are stupid and will raise rent beyond the market clearing rate just to make a quick buck, resulting in empty units and shitty communities.
- orblivion 16y agoBig mistake mentioning future-garage, now I looked it up on Google and know what it is. Pretty soon I'll be showing up uninvited to your raves.