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This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimat

This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimate failure. Dunbar's number is every bit as real in a digital space as it is in a physical space. I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly. This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought. Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.

MMS21 5y ago
> I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. joinmastodon.org may interest you
marcosdumay 5y ago
Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those possibilities, but it causes problems there too. Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But I think some people are offended that they might not be as "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about topic based communities[1]. An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time. With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen. Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions. So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough. I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625

MMS21 5y ago

> I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. joinmastodon.org may interest you

marcosdumay 5y ago

Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those possibilities, but it causes problems there too. Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?

blacktriangle 5y ago
My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But I think some people are offended that they might not be as "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about topic based communities[1]. An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time. With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen. Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions. So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough. I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625