12 ms·

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to see more of my content. When I put it that way it feels banal, but like, you know the “fast-growing subreddits” list on Reddit? There were meetings! Someone worked on that! People literally sat in a room and said effectively, “Hey Fatimeh, what is the status of the ‘make subreddits suck faster’ feature? Management is very interested in delivering that in Q3.” Right? Like this connection from global to personal is just automatically assumed, nobody spends a waking moment thinking it could be anything but that way.

stavros 5y ago
Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.
- tacostakohashi 5y ago
  Don't be such a ñitpicker.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh. A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh. Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?" It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation. But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre. I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep." He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.
  - stavros 5y ago
    A Chinese colleague of mine liked to say that "there are many ways to peel a cat".
    - Stratoscope 5y ago
      Ouch. As someone who lives with three dogs and three cats, that one hits close to home. One of our cats thinks she is my girlfriend! When I go to bed, she immediately jumps on the bed next to me and places herself right where my hand is, so I can scratch her back and tummy. No cat peeling here!
    - pathseeker 5y ago
      I love these idiom screw-ups. One of my coworkers once tried to use an English idiom and it came out, "let's not beat a horse to death."
      - usui 5y ago
        The worst offenders are ones that can be solved logically if the person spent 5 seconds to think. "I could care less" vs "I could not care less" The amount of people who defend the former with their own head-canon is frightening. Ones I have heard are "It's sarcastic" and "I care so little that I won't put the extra effort into caring less"
        Stratoscope 5y ago
        Steven Pinker and other linguists would like a word with you: https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+less https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+l... From Pinker's book The Language Instinct (p.377 or 389 depending on the edition): > A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced: [If viewing on mobile, turn your device sideways to avoid wrapping.] ------------------------ COULDN'T care LE ESS. i ------------------------ I CARE LE ESS. could ------------------------ > The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, “Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about.” But I hear you and sympathize with your point of view. I have been there myself. It didn't make sense to me that people would use a word or phrase in any meaning other than its literal one. Especially a word like "literally", right? Merriam-Webster has a article on that. It's literally the best article ever written! https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  The proper form, when turned to 11, is haban̈ero.
- crdrost 5y ago
  Thanks! Fixed.
dylan604 5y ago
>When I put it that way it feels banal, It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embraced the dark side of social. LOOK AT ME!!! LIKE ME!!! FOLLOW ME!!! Again, with the tweaking of the algos to up the addiction factor. All in the name of "engagement". YouTube already made me nervous, but there's definitely some people creating content there that is not about that at all so I don't lump them in with the others.
- smegger001 5y ago
  >Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, honestly I would love social networks that was just that but as it is now i actively avoid most social media outside of small niche communities (certain subreddits that relate to fairly narrow interest fan communities for a couple of authors that sort of thing [i don't fallow any default subs], hacker news, and a couple of small discord servers for open source projects and small podcasts) but everything for talking to friends and family and keeping up on there lives is either been turned into a politically toxic battleground or monetized into unusability.
- kentm 5y ago
  Anything online funded by primarily by advertising will necessarily turn creepy or exploitive. Advertising always demands more engagement so there will be teams of people trying to game you for that engagement.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  I don't know if it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like a decade ago Facebook really was good at connecting people. I enjoyed it, because most of the content was real people you knew having conversations, or sharing pictures they had taken. I eventually left because it was honestly just boring. My timeline was nothing but shared posts from big content pages, which of course became mostly bad politics over time.
- 5y ago
mananaysiempre 5y ago
This strongly reminds me of Kornhauser’s three levels of social relations (Politics of Mass Society, 1959): > We can conceive of all but the simplest societies as comprising three levels of social relations. The first level consists of highly personal or primary relations, notably the family. The third level contains relations inclusive of the whole population, notably the state. The second level comprises all intermediate relations, notably the local community, voluntary association, and occupational group. Etc., the argument being that much of the socially important parts and ills of industrialization, urbanization, and the ensuing mass society are reducible to the dissolution of the second level and the transferral of its customary characteristics and behaviours (strong attachment, group identity, and so on) to the third. But that’s mostly me channelling my history teachers, not original thought, so maybe someone who actually knows this stuff can say more. Lest this be perceived as doomsaying, let me mention that Russian-language LiveJournal seemed to retain that small-town feel up until the very end (early 2010s) despite the considerable number of readers and commenters (thousands of readers for the most popular post on a slow day—much less than on Facebook, much more than you could ever possibly know). Possibly that’s because the number of writers (worth following) was much smaller, due to the higher effort required for long-form posts. Again, people with more experience in older online communities should know more about this, as that was the only thriving one I experienced personally.
- FabiansSuck111 5y ago
  You can reduce all of this to the simple observation that: There are little consequences when the pool of people you have access to is massive; and there remains no reason to become emotionally invested in a certain "core" of people, when you can easily jump to another if that "core" is not perfect. This leads to a feedback loop that stunts relationship "depth." Or further: when you have options, the default modus operandi is to not become completely invested into any single one -- you can always "jump" to another, and are always on the lookout for "greener pastures." People have more options than they used to. As much as I craved these "second level" (and even "first level") social relations, over the years I've become assimilated and contribute to the aforementioned feedback loop. The "ills" of modern life have been exponentially increasing, but for the future generations they are simply "life."
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Could you imagine if hypothetically, HN suddenly became the world's most popular social network? It would be unusable for it's current purpose and no amount of moderating could ever fix that. This sounds harsh but not everyone deserves to be heard all of the time- myself included.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  To quote David Duchovney: "I think when I was younger I wanted to tell everybody everything, because I thought I was so damn interesting. Then I heard the snoring."
- smichel17 5y ago
  I like browsing HN from the Android app Materialistic because (1) I can't see votes on my posts and (2) it's difficult to find replies to my posts (you can view your profile, but jumping to a post only shows its ancestors, not replies). This combination, plus the annoyance of typing on a smartphone, means I usually * only comment when I have something that adds value to the conversation; I tend to engage more with the content and less "socially". * Of course, there are exceptions, and I actually use hnreplies.com to get emails when someone replies to me, but there's enough of a delay that I usually am able to avoid getting caught up in a back-and-forth argument. Especially since, by the time I see the replies, someone else has already clarified my position :)
  - iszomer 5y ago
    Materialistic used to be able to cache articles and comments when you saved a story (for offline consumption) but that is no longer the case. I've also only been able to export the list of stories *once* before as that feature is more or less broken at this point.
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    That's interesting about the votes. I find myself complying/wanting to fit in to avoid the "dinging" feeling of being down voted ha. I also just use another account. I get it though, there are mental tiers I know where I am. Thankfully I can at least make a decent living/do my own thing. I'm also aware of effort too. Looking into something/asking.
blondin 5y ago
wonderful remark. i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, etc...
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  > i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, This made me think of the quote from Men in Black: > A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. I think there's some major exceptions but they require heavy-handed moderation. Notable among these is the AskHistorians subreddit. You could argue though they're the exception that proves the rule. I will say though, I'm a frequent participant in a few topic-specific forum, and I think if anything the concentration to places like Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord has helped these places quite a bit in the exact way you suggest. They've been insulated because they're too obscure now and that has allowed them all to largely have reasonable organic growth, rather than explosive "hug of death" style sudden growth. I just hope that lasts.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Small communities need less management. Population increase in the community offer chances of acquiring new assets: it has potential. Management is everything: creating an environment and systems that facilitate the best allocation of resources. Of course if your small team of three already contains "the masters", the result can be e.g. the CBM C64. And, they say, "in ancient Athens democracy was easier". But the small team did great thing because of the quality of its members, and a small community is facilitated by a reduced noise. Quality of members and noise control are the problem of management.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
d0mine 5y ago
I'm willing to bet that my fyp on tiktok is much different from yours. Niche subreddits could have been the solution. It is the specific implementation suck, not the idea of openness of a subgroup to new comers e.g., there can be a feeling community while participating in an open source project even if anybody may join.
ramijames 5y ago
Growth is always the default expectation. It's part of humanity at this point. I personally feel that it is destructive. I hate the idea that static and stagnant are NEGATIVES. They are not. They have value.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  In a niche community, even to be stable you need slow growth, even if at a trickle pace. The simple reason is that some formerly active people grow disinterested and move on, some grow old, some die. You need such a stream of newcomers that within their first, say, 500 contributions they get savvy enough to fit in and carry the momentum. You also need enough people who understand and tend to the spirit of the community so they can successfully oppose a famed veteran who may suddenly go renegade.
- b3morales 5y ago
  "Stagnant" definitely has negative connotations; better words might be "stable", "steady", "established"...
- dukeyukey 5y ago
  I think humanity is meant to work to a "grow and bud model", where when a community starts getting unmanageably large, a number "bud off" and form their own. Like how the Greek city-states formed associated colonies across the Mediterranean, or how large friend groups almost always have sub0units within them. It even happens to subreddits, but since it hurts the network effect social media companies strive for they want to prevent this happening.
Buttons840 5y ago
I've thought of creating a social network that groups people into small groups of 100 or so, by interests and location. I would advertise it as a chance to escape the monoculture and explain that the cost if you must participate a minimum amount, like 1 post or comment per week on average or something. And then you could mix up the groups every year or two. It would have its pros and cons, but it would achieve the goal of letting small groups form and create their own cultures. It would also succeed regardless of its size, so long as you have enough users to form a small group.
- capableweb 5y ago
  You're effectively describing Scuttlebutt in a nutshell. Small communities that are formed ad-hoc by peering with each other. "Follow" mean you'll help replicate their content for others who follow them + you. Scuttlebutt is already successful even though it's very small so far. Tags and other things can be used to explore content on the network, as long as you've found an entry-point. I'm a bit split about spreading the word about Scuttlebutt, I don't want to ruin it since it's already so great. But felt it was very related to what you were writing, so here goes nothing :) In case you wanna join: https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ The client I'm using is https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    The name is awful. I certainly don't want to spread the word about "scuttlebutt". So I guess that's a good thing, keeps it small and cosy.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      You sound like the same person who could never work on a ship as there is a "poop deck", and you could of course never refer to it as such, poop is a bad word! Also, never try archery as some people might try to use the word "prickshaft" towards you. The horror.
    - mikro2nd 5y ago
bckr 5y ago
Louis Menand's The Free World, a history of public thought in the cold war era, recently taught me about the relationship of the masses and totalitarianism. The relationship appears to be : destroy classes & traditional relationships -> produce masses & the mob -> totalitarianism arises out of the masses' anxiety and the mob's despotic idiocy. Something like how too many chickens in a big barn can't form hierarchies and so live in a perpetual panic, except along comes a Big Chicken who makes everyone feel better because they finally know their place again. I hope something different and less awful happens. But the early results are worrying. Can we just pull the plug on this experiment, please?

stavros 5y ago

Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.

tacostakohashi 5y ago
Don't be such a ñitpicker.
Stratoscope 5y ago
And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh. A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh. Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?" It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation. But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre. I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep." He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.
- stavros 5y ago
  A Chinese colleague of mine liked to say that "there are many ways to peel a cat".
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Ouch. As someone who lives with three dogs and three cats, that one hits close to home. One of our cats thinks she is my girlfriend! When I go to bed, she immediately jumps on the bed next to me and places herself right where my hand is, so I can scratch her back and tummy. No cat peeling here!
  - pathseeker 5y ago
    I love these idiom screw-ups. One of my coworkers once tried to use an English idiom and it came out, "let's not beat a horse to death."
    - usui 5y ago
      The worst offenders are ones that can be solved logically if the person spent 5 seconds to think. "I could care less" vs "I could not care less" The amount of people who defend the former with their own head-canon is frightening. Ones I have heard are "It's sarcastic" and "I care so little that I won't put the extra effort into caring less"
      - Stratoscope 5y ago
        Steven Pinker and other linguists would like a word with you: https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+less https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+l... From Pinker's book The Language Instinct (p.377 or 389 depending on the edition): > A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced: [If viewing on mobile, turn your device sideways to avoid wrapping.] ------------------------ COULDN'T care LE ESS. i ------------------------ I CARE LE ESS. could ------------------------ > The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, “Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about.” But I hear you and sympathize with your point of view. I have been there myself. It didn't make sense to me that people would use a word or phrase in any meaning other than its literal one. Especially a word like "literally", right? Merriam-Webster has a article on that. It's literally the best article ever written! https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...
dredmorbius 5y ago
The proper form, when turned to 11, is haban̈ero.
crdrost 5y ago
Thanks! Fixed.

dylan604 5y ago

>When I put it that way it feels banal, It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embraced the dark side of social. LOOK AT ME!!! LIKE ME!!! FOLLOW ME!!! Again, with the tweaking of the algos to up the addiction factor. All in the name of "engagement". YouTube already made me nervous, but there's definitely some people creating content there that is not about that at all so I don't lump them in with the others.

smegger001 5y ago
>Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, honestly I would love social networks that was just that but as it is now i actively avoid most social media outside of small niche communities (certain subreddits that relate to fairly narrow interest fan communities for a couple of authors that sort of thing [i don't fallow any default subs], hacker news, and a couple of small discord servers for open source projects and small podcasts) but everything for talking to friends and family and keeping up on there lives is either been turned into a politically toxic battleground or monetized into unusability.
kentm 5y ago
Anything online funded by primarily by advertising will necessarily turn creepy or exploitive. Advertising always demands more engagement so there will be teams of people trying to game you for that engagement.
vlunkr 5y ago
I don't know if it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like a decade ago Facebook really was good at connecting people. I enjoyed it, because most of the content was real people you knew having conversations, or sharing pictures they had taken. I eventually left because it was honestly just boring. My timeline was nothing but shared posts from big content pages, which of course became mostly bad politics over time.
5y ago

mananaysiempre 5y ago

This strongly reminds me of Kornhauser’s three levels of social relations (Politics of Mass Society, 1959): > We can conceive of all but the simplest societies as comprising three levels of social relations. The first level consists of highly personal or primary relations, notably the family. The third level contains relations inclusive of the whole population, notably the state. The second level comprises all intermediate relations, notably the local community, voluntary association, and occupational group. Etc., the argument being that much of the socially important parts and ills of industrialization, urbanization, and the ensuing mass society are reducible to the dissolution of the second level and the transferral of its customary characteristics and behaviours (strong attachment, group identity, and so on) to the third. But that’s mostly me channelling my history teachers, not original thought, so maybe someone who actually knows this stuff can say more. Lest this be perceived as doomsaying, let me mention that Russian-language LiveJournal seemed to retain that small-town feel up until the very end (early 2010s) despite the considerable number of readers and commenters (thousands of readers for the most popular post on a slow day—much less than on Facebook, much more than you could ever possibly know). Possibly that’s because the number of writers (worth following) was much smaller, due to the higher effort required for long-form posts. Again, people with more experience in older online communities should know more about this, as that was the only thriving one I experienced personally.

FabiansSuck111 5y ago
You can reduce all of this to the simple observation that: There are little consequences when the pool of people you have access to is massive; and there remains no reason to become emotionally invested in a certain "core" of people, when you can easily jump to another if that "core" is not perfect. This leads to a feedback loop that stunts relationship "depth." Or further: when you have options, the default modus operandi is to not become completely invested into any single one -- you can always "jump" to another, and are always on the lookout for "greener pastures." People have more options than they used to. As much as I craved these "second level" (and even "first level") social relations, over the years I've become assimilated and contribute to the aforementioned feedback loop. The "ills" of modern life have been exponentially increasing, but for the future generations they are simply "life."

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Could you imagine if hypothetically, HN suddenly became the world's most popular social network? It would be unusable for it's current purpose and no amount of moderating could ever fix that. This sounds harsh but not everyone deserves to be heard all of the time- myself included.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
To quote David Duchovney: "I think when I was younger I wanted to tell everybody everything, because I thought I was so damn interesting. Then I heard the snoring."
smichel17 5y ago
I like browsing HN from the Android app Materialistic because (1) I can't see votes on my posts and (2) it's difficult to find replies to my posts (you can view your profile, but jumping to a post only shows its ancestors, not replies). This combination, plus the annoyance of typing on a smartphone, means I usually * only comment when I have something that adds value to the conversation; I tend to engage more with the content and less "socially". * Of course, there are exceptions, and I actually use hnreplies.com to get emails when someone replies to me, but there's enough of a delay that I usually am able to avoid getting caught up in a back-and-forth argument. Especially since, by the time I see the replies, someone else has already clarified my position :)
- iszomer 5y ago
  Materialistic used to be able to cache articles and comments when you saved a story (for offline consumption) but that is no longer the case. I've also only been able to export the list of stories *once* before as that feature is more or less broken at this point.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  That's interesting about the votes. I find myself complying/wanting to fit in to avoid the "dinging" feeling of being down voted ha. I also just use another account. I get it though, there are mental tiers I know where I am. Thankfully I can at least make a decent living/do my own thing. I'm also aware of effort too. Looking into something/asking.

blondin 5y ago

wonderful remark. i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, etc...

BeefWellington 5y ago
> i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, This made me think of the quote from Men in Black: > A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. I think there's some major exceptions but they require heavy-handed moderation. Notable among these is the AskHistorians subreddit. You could argue though they're the exception that proves the rule. I will say though, I'm a frequent participant in a few topic-specific forum, and I think if anything the concentration to places like Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord has helped these places quite a bit in the exact way you suggest. They've been insulated because they're too obscure now and that has allowed them all to largely have reasonable organic growth, rather than explosive "hug of death" style sudden growth. I just hope that lasts.
mdp2021 5y ago
Small communities need less management. Population increase in the community offer chances of acquiring new assets: it has potential. Management is everything: creating an environment and systems that facilitate the best allocation of resources. Of course if your small team of three already contains "the masters", the result can be e.g. the CBM C64. And, they say, "in ancient Athens democracy was easier". But the small team did great thing because of the quality of its members, and a small community is facilitated by a reduced noise. Quality of members and noise control are the problem of management.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

d0mine 5y ago

I'm willing to bet that my fyp on tiktok is much different from yours. Niche subreddits could have been the solution. It is the specific implementation suck, not the idea of openness of a subgroup to new comers e.g., there can be a feeling community while participating in an open source project even if anybody may join.

ramijames 5y ago

Growth is always the default expectation. It's part of humanity at this point. I personally feel that it is destructive. I hate the idea that static and stagnant are NEGATIVES. They are not. They have value.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
In a niche community, even to be stable you need slow growth, even if at a trickle pace. The simple reason is that some formerly active people grow disinterested and move on, some grow old, some die. You need such a stream of newcomers that within their first, say, 500 contributions they get savvy enough to fit in and carry the momentum. You also need enough people who understand and tend to the spirit of the community so they can successfully oppose a famed veteran who may suddenly go renegade.
b3morales 5y ago
"Stagnant" definitely has negative connotations; better words might be "stable", "steady", "established"...
dukeyukey 5y ago
I think humanity is meant to work to a "grow and bud model", where when a community starts getting unmanageably large, a number "bud off" and form their own. Like how the Greek city-states formed associated colonies across the Mediterranean, or how large friend groups almost always have sub0units within them. It even happens to subreddits, but since it hurts the network effect social media companies strive for they want to prevent this happening.

Buttons840 5y ago

I've thought of creating a social network that groups people into small groups of 100 or so, by interests and location. I would advertise it as a chance to escape the monoculture and explain that the cost if you must participate a minimum amount, like 1 post or comment per week on average or something. And then you could mix up the groups every year or two. It would have its pros and cons, but it would achieve the goal of letting small groups form and create their own cultures. It would also succeed regardless of its size, so long as you have enough users to form a small group.

capableweb 5y ago
You're effectively describing Scuttlebutt in a nutshell. Small communities that are formed ad-hoc by peering with each other. "Follow" mean you'll help replicate their content for others who follow them + you. Scuttlebutt is already successful even though it's very small so far. Tags and other things can be used to explore content on the network, as long as you've found an entry-point. I'm a bit split about spreading the word about Scuttlebutt, I don't want to ruin it since it's already so great. But felt it was very related to what you were writing, so here goes nothing :) In case you wanna join: https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ The client I'm using is https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
- peakaboo 5y ago
  The name is awful. I certainly don't want to spread the word about "scuttlebutt". So I guess that's a good thing, keeps it small and cosy.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    You sound like the same person who could never work on a ship as there is a "poop deck", and you could of course never refer to it as such, poop is a bad word! Also, never try archery as some people might try to use the word "prickshaft" towards you. The horror.
  - mikro2nd 5y ago

bckr 5y ago

Louis Menand's The Free World, a history of public thought in the cold war era, recently taught me about the relationship of the masses and totalitarianism. The relationship appears to be : destroy classes & traditional relationships -> produce masses & the mob -> totalitarianism arises out of the masses' anxiety and the mob's despotic idiocy. Something like how too many chickens in a big barn can't form hierarchies and so live in a perpetual panic, except along comes a Big Chicken who makes everyone feel better because they finally know their place again. I hope something different and less awful happens. But the early results are worrying. Can we just pull the plug on this experiment, please?