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I don't know... This argument makes sense to me in theory but in practice I find it hard to implement successfully, as someone who manages a medium-sized online

I don't know... This argument makes sense to me in theory but in practice I find it hard to implement successfully, as someone who manages a medium-sized online community. It reminds me of the "You only need 1000 good customers" article. Sure, but unless you bring in 100K you're not going to find those 1000. So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community which I think is also essential, and instead of the 1000 good members you have 100 and they're all clones. As a result I've opted for the opposite approach where I'm very welcoming to everyone and try to only get rid of the worst of the worst, and we have a great, diverse set of very skilled and interesting people but a lot of them leave rather quickly because they don't want to deal with the 90k less well-behaved members.

papaf 6y ago
So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community If the community consists of people who are uncomfortable with the feature creep and privacy loss on the modern web, I don't consider Gemini to be an artificial barrier. To try to explain my reasoning, to join the Vegan community you need to stop eating animals.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  The barrier to entry described in the post is technical, it's orthogonal to the properties you cite. For example look at signal, it's also made for people who are uncomfortable with privacy loss but it's still accessible to non technical people.
  - papaf 6y ago
    I would argue that the early web had similar technical barriers. Not to gatekeep but because it was young. I also think that setting up Nginx or Apache is only considered easy because we know how to do it. As far as I know, nobody has written an easy blogging app for Gemini. Ironically, if someone did do this it would likely be web based because of the need for an app like experience which Gemini does not support.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

papaf 6y ago

So then we implement artificial barriers to entry but at the cost of destroying all the diversity in your community If the community consists of people who are uncomfortable with the feature creep and privacy loss on the modern web, I don't consider Gemini to be an artificial barrier. To try to explain my reasoning, to join the Vegan community you need to stop eating animals.

ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
The barrier to entry described in the post is technical, it's orthogonal to the properties you cite. For example look at signal, it's also made for people who are uncomfortable with privacy loss but it's still accessible to non technical people.
- papaf 6y ago
  I would argue that the early web had similar technical barriers. Not to gatekeep but because it was young. I also think that setting up Nginx or Apache is only considered easy because we know how to do it. As far as I know, nobody has written an easy blogging app for Gemini. Ironically, if someone did do this it would likely be web based because of the need for an app like experience which Gemini does not support.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]