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I think that's just the fate of every online forum. It's comment entropy, and it's inevitable anywhere, everywhere, always. You saw it with Usenet in the '90s (
by mwfunk 7y ago
I think that's just the fate of every online forum. It's comment entropy, and it's inevitable anywhere, everywhere, always. You saw it with Usenet in the '90s (especially after Eternal September struck), you saw it with Slashdot in the late '90s, and you see it just about anyplace really. The bigger a community is, the more diluted it gets, and the more comment bike shedding happens: people posting for the sake of posting, and not putting any more thought into what they post than they do in most casual conversations (or even less thought), etc.
What happens when a forum or medium expands to basically the entire population? Twitter, at least for people who read both popular posts and reply chains that those posts inspire. It makes Eternal September look like a book club full of the world's most articulate English professors sipping tea and politely conversing about complex plot points while taking care not to say things that could be misinterpreted or incorrectly seen as a personal attack on someone else.
When people post good things (not necessarily positive things, but at least negative things that spark good conversations), those posts may or may not inspire other good posts. They probably won't inspire bad posts, worst case is that they don't inspire any responses but that's OK- good posts stand on their own and not everything needs to be a conversation.
Similarly, when people post bad things (not necessarily negative things, just things that spark bad conversations), it will hardly ever inspire good posts in response, but it's very likely to inspire many more bad posts.
So, good posts inspire more good posts, bad posts inspire more bad posts, but IME bad posts are like 10-100x more likely to spark followups. Going back to Usenet, you could have the greatest newsgroup in the world, but it could all collapse due to an influx of shitty posting from a teeny tiny subset of the people reading the group. It's like a virus that infects a forum. The bad posts explode in response to each other, the good posters slowly drift away altogether, and all of a sudden you find yourself in Slashdot or Usenet circa 1999. It's basically nothing but people insulting each other or using bad faith arguments or just writing at great length about how much they think stuff sucks.
- ethbro 7y agoThe greatest loss to an online community is when an informed, thoughtful, pleasant person decides they're not going to post anymore. That should be the single endpoint that every community optimizes itself to avoid. Because typically, they have better things to do. And once they decide to leave, they're not coming back. And once the ratio of those folks : total users drops below a certain point, there's no coming back.
- sankalpb 7y agoI'm really interested in the point that you are making about 'there's no coming back' at the level of the community (i.e. ratio of 'those folks : total users) and the level of its members (i.e. deciding to leave) - do you think they both register with members/community in the same way, as either are happening? As in, other members in the HN community may not be aware if another member decides on 'not coming back' at any one point in time, whereas it could be the case that all members of some certain relation to the community (i.e. 10 years of membership or longer) knows when the HN community is not what it was once. By contrast, is there a case to make for when 'an un-informed, un-thoughtful, un-pleasant person decides they're not going to post anymore'? If so, what would you say that tells us about an online community?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoSomeone wrote a post and called that "evaporative cooling." Edit: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=evaporative+cooling https://hn.algolia.com/?q=evaporative+cooling Of course, Eternal September also applies and HN likely suffers from a low level case of it. If you aren't familiar, it's easily found on Wikipedia.
- Multicomp 7y agoIf I may, doesn't lobste.rs try to push against the Eternal September effect by still being invite only? I have been on HN for years but as I've not done much DMing and don't live in the Silicon Valley geographical area, I've never had an invite to join. Which is not a complaint as such, more like an acknowledgement that if there is a HN user who feels he's done at least okay in the effort to be a good HN user, yet has not been invited to lobste.rs, it probably would result in a more rarified user population for that site. Exclusive clubs seem to correlate to good reputations, and for good reason.
- JohnL4 7y agoOn Twitter, I tend my feed somewhat aggressively, following folks who post worthwhile stuff, unfollowing those who devolve or who drop below some signal-to-nose threshold. On Usenet, there was always the killfile and thread branch pruning (although the dedicated could somehow just create a new id, I suppose). My takeaway being that it should be possible (or easy, even) for a user to shape their experience. If we were designing a new community, which I guess we're not. :-\