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Killing Community

• tetromino_ 3y ago
  Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• marginalia_nu 3y ago
  I posted the core idea in a comment here as I was finishing editing the post, generated interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295239
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    Interesting model; it probably doesn't help moderation effort if mod team members start to feel like they've gone from village elder to mall cop.
    • mtrower 3y ago
      It absolutely doesn't. A friend of mine was a [player authority] (I forget the term) in the early days of Asheron's Call. As I understand it, that's basically what happened to them, and most of them went from passionate volunteers to just throwing in the towel. He's still bent about it if it comes up in conversation for some reason.
• UberFly 3y ago
  This is insightful and really beautifully written. Thank you.
• ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  Hold on to your villages. Support them with your wallet if you care about them.
• hexator 3y ago
  How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a huge group of villages and not one big village? Will they be able to continually grow by adding more servers without destroying the community? Is that model more sustainable?
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Discord has other problems, but it can be a decent village for community purposes. However it has the "too easy to reuse an account" problem that has its own issues, too.
  • riskable 3y ago
    Nothing is worse than joining a Discord server and finding out it's enormous. You go to any given channel and the discussions are flying by so fast only people who are regulars can catch all the content but even then it's basically just noise. Thread support was added to alleviate some of the noise problem but in communities that actually use them there's so many threads it's easy to lose track and everywhere else they're basically just strange ways of isolating yourself from the rest of the people in the community.
    • at-fates-hands 3y ago
      Conversely, I had a YT snowboarding person I followed start a Discord server with a few channels for chat, meetups and equipment swaps. Really cool, lots of good discussion and the community was really welcoming. I stepped away and came back like a month later. It had grown so fast, with so many users, there were suddenly like 50-60 channels, it was unreal how hard it was to keep track of anything happening. Even the original three channels were completely overrun with so many discussions and chats, I couldn't keep track. So I had the experience of joining a small server, only to have it blow up when I came back and I just had to give up and moved on.
    • TillE 3y ago
      I'm not even sure what the point of a giant Discord server is. Like, I use Discord for organizing (online) activities, asking a question and getting it answered by a real expert, hanging out with friends, etc. None of this scales, it's totally unworkable if you have 100+ people actively chatting, let alone thousands.
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  A while back, I posted this[0] on a Mastodon story. It applies here, as well. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545049
• the_shivers 3y ago
  I desperately hope Reddits recent changes kill it. It's nothing personal towards reddit, but I can't think of anything else which will dissuade enshittification of other online places.
  • AceJohnny2 3y ago
    Don't count on it. I'm afraid Steve Huffman made the correct calculation that Reddit's network effect is large enough that the wound it'll sustain with the API lockout won't be enough to imperil the platform. On the scale of other platform enshittification (Digg in particular), this one isn't directly user-hostile enough, and the aren't any good enough alternatives. Enshittification is basically inevitable for (venture)capitalist-funded online platforms. My biggest disappointment is that Reddit went that venture-capitalist (or adjacent, whatever) route, I thought/hoped their "Reddit Gold" approach was good enough to be sustainable.
    • shmatt 3y ago
      People (for obvious reasons) like to compare Digg to whats going on at Reddit. It seems a lot closer to Facebook Facebook has always lead the fight to monetize users to the max. If its sudden API changes or shutdowns, or suing 3rd party app developers. Yet they still generate Billions and people are fine using them, instagram, or Whatsapp, even though they fully understand the enshitification the timeline has gone through throughout the years, and how aggressively they monetize their user base I also see Reddit as extremely similar to Facebook groups, which can also have millions of users, and are moderated for free by volunteers
      • _urvc 3y ago
        Unlike Reddit, most of Meta's apps are commonly used on mobile. Furthermore, all the apps you listed actually bring long term value in the form of real life social and business relationships. Emotionally and economically Reddit has not nearly as much of an impact.
      • Macha 3y ago
        I think it's a mistake to confuse the health of Meta, the company, with Facebook, the platform. I think as a company they made the right decision in the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp because they captured some of the platforms that were stealing their important demographics. I think if they hadn't made these acquisitions and were still just Facebook.com, we'd be looking at Facebook the company not as a FAANG giant but as a Yahoo or IBM or similar.
• thot_experiment 3y ago
  You can make a village in some interesting ways. 4chan is a village, that's why it's one of the best resources/communities on the internet today. I've learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on /g/. The toxicity/chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village for all these years. There's more than one way to shear a sheep, and I don't think the 4chan method is the best way to make a village, but a village make it does. I just mention it here because it's probably something that doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet Except for all of the hate, vitriol, prejudice, and disregard for the basic humanity of others, it's egalitarian and accessible??
    • brookst 3y ago
      Well, sure, if you’re not one of those people, the abuse isn’t even targeted at you.
      • GenerocUsername 3y ago
        Not true. As a member of one of the largest, mainstream segments of America, I constantly feel attacked while browsing 4chan. Your choice to engage is entirely based on your ability to filter and rationalize
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • 3y ago
• SweetestRug 3y ago
  > You’re in a train station, you’re not part of it. Thank you for posting this. This captures something that I had trouble putting into words. As someone who started using Reddit back in 2006 pre-Digg migration, this is probably one the best explanations of the immense loss I have felt in experiencing Reddit change over the past decade and a half. All the parts I enjoyed were pushed to the periphery, and while you could still find "villages" there, the bulk of the experience was "just passing through". This isn't a "get off my lawn" sentiment, it's about what value you place on the places you inhabit, whether in person or online. Whether I kept returning to Reddit out of habit or because I was still looking for that old experience almost doesn't matter, because it's not there anymore.
  • QuiDortDine 3y ago
    As someone who was on reddit for about as long, I miss that. But I wonder if it's really reddit I miss, or the naive web we had back then, that allowed people to get excited? Back when everything was not engineered specifically to grab the most attention, I felt more like we were actually communicating. Nowadays we're just collectively filtering noise it seems.
    • chinchilla2020 3y ago
      I miss the long posts that explain a thoughtful, technical, essay on a subject. I vaguely remember from the ~2010s internet reading some very informative posts on bulletin boards and reddit. Mostly gaming stuff, but there was some great work on math, science, and DIY. Today even the "Reddit gold" posts are garbage by the standards of those days.
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        I remember a lot of similar thoughts and remarks at the time about the Internet ca. 2000, so I feel like maybe people are just getting older. When people dig up old Something Awful posts from 2002 they aren't as funny or engaging as I remember but I was a kid when I first saw them so they isn't surprising.
      • 3y ago
• lolinder 3y ago
  This really resonated with me, and I'm wondering what the practical implications are for the development of a sane social landscape for the modern internet. We seem to all agree that VC-funded platforms are the wrong bet, and I would take it further and say that that means that no centralized platform can be the answer. You simply can't run something on the scale of Reddit with any other funding model. I would like to think something like the fediverse could work—instances can in theory function as small villages, they can gate membership so that they can control the rate of new additions. An instance can be small enough in scale that it can be paid for out of pocket by a single admin, maybe with help from the members, which eliminates the perverse incentive for growth. Federation can (in theory) provide links between communities that aren't possible with a traditional bulletin board forum. I do wonder, though, if the fediverse is going to suffer for straddling the middle ground between village and platform. A lot of people seem to want all the benefits of the village without losing the intensely-connected feeling of a place like Reddit or Twitter. Is such a thing possible, or are they mutually exclusive?
  • constantcrying 3y ago
    Villages used to be the norm on the internet, when far more communication happened on forums. The great promise of the fediverse is that you can have both, even at the same time. You can be part of a single small group where you know the people around you and would notice someone new. But you can also have massive instances without any of those connections.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
    I think social networks and community driven websites/applications simply have a lifecycle. They all eventually crash and burn, only for a newer (note: newer is not the same as better) one to grab the share of users. It's a slightly stretched analogy, but each social network is a bit like a country/state. With a long view of history, it's rare for one to last a long time. History is riddled with failed states or once grand countries that everyone thought would last forever.
  • ranger207 3y ago
    Maybe the solution is to have the Fed keep rates high so VC firms don't get good enough returns to invest in social media /s
• seydor 3y ago
  villages scale up to cities successfully, however. Some media like reddit do not grow beyond the village culture. The villagers are imposing their politics on every subreddit, even if it is about obscure crafts. Maybe there is something wrong with the medium, or it is too simplistic.
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    are there any examples of for-profit villages actually scaling up to cities successfully?
    • seydor 3y ago
      Hm . Facebook started with college networks and pokes but they got removed as it grew Youtube started with piracy and pranks but it got contentID over time
      • 082349872349872 3y ago
        Sorry, should have been clearer: I meant for-profit physical villages ("company towns") turning into real cities.
      • Karawebnetwork 3y ago
        The poke feature is still there, just hidden away. If you do find it, using it will send a poke notification to someone bringing them to the page where they can then poke others.
    • getwiththeprog 3y ago
      London comes to mind.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > villages scale up to cities successfully, however. This is true, however "community" is typically lost when that happens.
• williamcotton 3y ago
  “Online community” has always felt like an oxymoron.
  • ranger207 3y ago
    Why do you feel that way? The important part of a community is the people, so it seems to me that any area where people can meet can form a community
    • williamcotton 3y ago
      Yes, the people, not disembodied anonymous avatars. It is too easy to ostracize members of a group in online forums, too easy to silence dissent. My physical neighborhood has a diversity of lifestyles, backgrounds and opinions that just does not exist in a place where people are quick to act on their shallow judgments. A middle eastern immigrant family, an elderly black couple, a flag and sign maximizing Trump supporter, a Black poet and his African Studies professor wife, a Facebook PR team lead, a retired HP programmer. To me, this a community. People living together in peace with very different opinions and lifestyles. We’ve all got each other’s backs. A couple of months ago I marched over to the Trump sign household and had a three hour long conversation with the wife… who surprisingly happened to be a bit of an old hippie and pot head and said she didn’t realize how upsetting some of her husband’s flags were to people. Since then it’s just been an American flag with a “Jesus Loves You” flag beneath. No more crossed AR-15s with skulls! Try that on Reddit!
      • ranger207 3y ago
        I'm not sure how that implies that the term "online community" is an oxymoron. As I'm typing this comment I'm watching some friends in a Discord server engaging in a passionate discussion with varying viewpoints on an issue close to them. I'd consider most of them good friends despite the fact that I haven't met half of them in real life. What makes that not a community?
        • williamcotton 3y ago
• btown 3y ago
  From the article: > The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers [...] A slow trickle of strangers is tolerable, a brief large influx is fine; the strangers’ average interaction is eventually stabilizes and biases toward the a stable group of members, and they quickly find shared values and become villagers too. The tragedy of Reddit is that I believe this thesis is fundamentally wrong. Reddit has shown that villages can tolerate a sustained large influx of strangers if they are given the tools to scale the onboarding process - ensuring people understand those shared values, and ensuring that bad-faith actors are identified and prevented from destroying the fabric of the overall community. These tools exist - they are the ecosystem of API-based moderator tools! People have been iterating on them for years to serve the needs of the moderators of Reddit's diverse communities. And these are the very tools that Reddit is destroying without providing sufficient replacements, without providing time to adapt, and with a remarkably sardonic and vitriolic corporate communication strategy. I'm a member of multiple subreddits that are shutting down indefinitely because the thinly-stretched moderation staff is constantly under attack - by everything from karma bot farmers to politically motivated aggressors (including would-be infiltrators applying for moderation positions). The moderators' ability to use third-party apps was the only thing keeping the effective DDoS at bay. And I truly don't think that those moderators would ever say that the number of strangers was the problem, because the tools did scale, and they were able to provide supportive and positive communities to thousands of those "strangers" who would never have had access to those communities before. I always saw Reddit as a model of how communities could scale beyond physical constraints - and how some of the learnings of scalable community governance could perhaps be ported to real-world scenarios. Now, people will read posts like OP's and simply think that this was always impossible, and that's just sad.
  • andrewflnr 3y ago
    Interesting. I had a superficially similar thought, which is that subreddits look like a path to keeping "villages" while letting the platform grow. That would tend to entail multiple "villages" for the fast-growing interest groups, which is weird. I don't know how well that could work/be worked around.
    • 3y ago
• caseysoftware 3y ago
  Is this an allegory for mass immigration?
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    It is not.
• koromak 3y ago
  There needs to be a way to incentivize long-lived, stable corporations. Maybe going public simply makes that impossible, but the target of consistent profit rather than infinite growth is so much heather. I guess that don't make VC money though huh. The problem is, theres just no ramifications for pumping a company to its death.
  • pram 3y ago
    This is what B Corporations are for I guess, they're relatively new. As in within the past decade. The legal framework is in place though.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    I think corporate involvement is part of the problem, not part of the answer. Corporations have very different, and sometimes very opposed, goals to those of community.
    • marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Still need to solve the problem of how to fund these public services. Not really plausible to expect their devs and admins to live like the desert fathers.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        There is a large range of ways to do this that exist in between corporate involvement and no funding whatsoever.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      A corporation is nothing but a community. I expect what you mean is that when one community operates a service and a different community uses the service, there will be competing interests? That is certainly to be expected. Although, there is a clear solution: The community who uses the service can also run it.
      • 3y ago
• pmontra 3y ago
  If you want to know what's a Harlow's monkey, here's the story https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/harlow-monkey.html
• mjfl 3y ago
  People seem to be under the impression that Reddit is a good place, unless the new API changes take place. I'd like to take a stance... contra to that? - Reddit is a collection of echo chambers where users pile on and moderators ban those who disagree even on fair points. - Reddit is a politically biased organization that banned the subreddit associated with former president and current candidate Donald Trump. - Reddit uses shady tactics to hide the fact that they are banning a subreddit that has content they find disagreeable such as clearing out the moderation team and replacing them with a hostile mod that bans the normal users of the sub. - Despite all this censorship there remains tons of creepy behavior hosted on Reddit such as adults hanging out on /r/teenagers pretending to be teenagers and trying to lure teens into sharing nudes and such.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
    The difference between a well run subreddit in a niche topic or with a smaller community vs. a huge default sub can be huge. Both can have their problems, and moderation is always an issue with online communities; but I think people are less insistent that Reddit is a "good" place and moreso that as it currently exists, warts and all, Reddit is useful and provides an enormous amount of utility to the internet, for better or worse. For some people using Reddit is "going on the internet" and they'll go to very few other websites --- the two are linked. The recent changes to Reddit, to a certain extent, highlight a trend in the internet where the things that people find extremely useful end up transitioning in a way that seems actively user hostile.
• krono 3y ago
  If I were a VC with investments in Reddit who saw it was going nowhere, and on top of that learned that my other investment OpenAI had been gobbling up all its data entirely free of charge for the purpose of fencing it without any significant legal consequences, I would: 1. Try to cut off any upstart rivals of my better performing bet from playing the same trick by sabotaging easy data extraction 2. Cut my losses and rid myself of future ones by somehow sizing Reddit down a notch, not so much that it dies though - I'm a sentimental guy, bite me 3. Ensure no one finds out I had anything to do with this by throwing someone else under the bus and buying them off if they ever figure it out (lucky for hypothetical VC me, Reddit's CEO seems arrogant, impulsive, and greedy enough that he probably wouldn't even realise having been played before its too late + easily convinced to take the fall for far less than that'd actually be worth) Wouldn't it be something if I could have the subject of step 3 take care of step 1 and 2 for me, perhaps together in one single master-stroke of a go? *evil laugh*
  • r00fus 3y ago
    That... is both quite evil and is amazingly consistent - if you happened to be a large enough whale to make this happen. There aren't so many players who have the vision, evil and money to do this, right? Any guesses?
    • krono 3y ago
      > There aren't so many players who... About the same amount as the number of wheels on a tricycle ;) Just to be clear it wasn't meant as an allegation and no proof exists. I consider to resemble something closer to a terribly written fanfic more than anything else, really. The very first YC fanfic perhaps?
  • getwiththeprog 3y ago
    You assume that Reddit forms the core of OpenAI's data mining. While it may be large, I suspect that OpenAI has read alot more of the internet than that. What would be great is an LLM trained on that pirate library we all use, Z Lib I think, with all the books of the world, not just forum opinions. To me, the data cat is out of the bag, and no single corp will ever put it back again. laughs evilly for sweet ideas none the less
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• devjab 3y ago
  Is Reddit a village? I’m part on some of the “smaller” (maybe less large?) communities like the Blood Bowl subreddit, but it’s still mostly just a bunch of strangers talking with each other for a while. It’s frankly similar to this place isn’t it? Chances are you’ll read this post of mine, and then never see another of my posts again. That’s not really what I’d consider a village, or even a real community. I think a lot of the things a lot of people miss about the “old web” is really just things being smaller. You’d go into an IRC channel and it would be the same people that was there every day. This made it possible to actually create a community, where people knew each other. Sure it’s fun to be on HN or Reddit or similar and sometimes bump into someone “famous”, but it’s not like it’s really “social” when you’re just talking to a new bunch of people every time you post. That is, if what you post is even read by anyone.
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    I'd say no, at some point maybe it was, and some niche subreddits may still be, but for the most part it's not.
  • ddq 3y ago
    Sports reddit is the most village-like, and in my view one of the few topics that actually scale within the reddit framework while maintaining that quality. Each league has its main subreddit, each team has its own sub, and the usual adversarial nature of reddit tribalism is far more subdued and good-natured, as at the end of the day it's all about games.
  • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    I think this site is somewhere near the boundary, IMO. I don't recognize every commenter, but in most comment sections I'll see posts from someone I recognize. There's also a pretty consistent culture (or, more accurately, two cultures, devs and tech entrepreneurs), though, compared to say a Reddit comment section. It's definitely not an intimate social space like my private Discord servers are, either, though.
  • charlieyu1 3y ago
    HN is a lot more like a village than Reddit though. I doubt people who don’t have any interest in tech would know what is HN.
• RagnarD 3y ago
  The premise is wrong. New York City is hardly a "village" and any given person knows a tiny, tiny fraction of anyone else there - but to the extent it's adhered to a capitalist model (ever decreasingly), it's been extremely successful. That's because strangers trading value for value (i.e. the essence of capitalism) without the use of force, is peaceful and productive. This extends to the entire planet. You're reading this on a computer using at least some components made halfway around the world, sourced from materials acquired all around the world, from people who don't have any idea about the people who make stuff from them or ultimately use them. It's the system and people able to act peacefully within it - not their personal relationships. The problem with Reddit is that it's run by a guy who doesn't respect the people who make it possible. He isn't a trader of value for value - he's a parasite.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    > sourced from materials acquired all around the world Without the use of force?
    • RagnarD 3y ago
      Sadly, force has certainly been used, but that's ultimately to the detriment of all involved. Voluntary trade for mutual benefit is what grows economies and resources.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• musha68k 3y ago
  VC angle and usual shortsightedness that comes with boundless profit motive one correct angle in there. OTOH I don’t think the train station analogy holds as eg funnily enough NYC subway stations to me usually show everything that can be great about “big city scaled up village culture where strangers meet strangers”. I’m not sure if still the case but I do miss NYC just for this sense of belonging, everyone being in conversation with everyone and general readiness to help out (“I <3 NY” isn’t just marketing). To me a clear testament that this can work IRL and it probably works online as well (and did, for a long time, on Reddit actually). Although not “permaculture” per se these “free open / public spaces” remind me a lot of it (again, even / especially NYC): No over-bearing central organizing force (VC/capitalist, what have you) will be able to “let go” enough in order to “let it grow” from common experience so far. Fediverse etc hence to me the only potential way out at this point.
• BashiBazouk 3y ago
  Reddit seems to be dying for me for completely different reasons. Meme dependency for lack of a better word. Not the images with one liners though there are an annoying amount of those as well, but a standardized repetitiveness of responses to any input that tend to linger toward the top of the thread if sorted by best. This is much more prevalent in threads off r/popular or r/all than smaller subreddits, but as an example, any rape or sexual assault story on r/news or r/politics will always have the Brock Turner SEO peppering within the top five threads, sometime multiple. Any Trump thread will have the long, long list of misdeeds with links and then some one liners that the wording has become standardized. This then extends in to related subreddits where the meme pops up when the triggering subject is talked about. It just becomes so boring and predictable.
  • moron4hire 3y ago
    This kind of thing is what kept me off of Reddit all these years. People would say "you just need to find the right subs", but any of the ones in topics I was interested in were all like that, and I was never interested in using Reddit just to use Reddit. Reddit is what Reddit is, and there is no finding "the right sub" if that metaculture is what you don't like about it.
    • ranger207 3y ago
      I don't disagree. There's a few subs that are (were) distinctly different, like /r/askhistorians, but most mods don't put in the effort to cultivate a distinct community so it trends towards the metaculture. The few subs that do (did) have their own distinct culture were often pretty great though.
  • cjs_ac 3y ago
    Reddit has been a place for clever people to talk, but as it and its reputation grew, it started to attract not-so-clever people too. Cleverer people don't respond as well to advertising, so if you want to make more money from your users, you want more of the less intelligent ones, and fewer of the more intelligent ones. The standardised comments you mention are a way for the less intelligent to participate, and the upvotes they attract reflect the numbers of these users. The ones you've mentioned sound like a case of aping one's betters; the ones I see most often are the vacuous 'Putin must be defenestrated' comments that litter the Ukraine war daily threads, and are the worst kind of performative virtue signalling. Reddit as a loss-making assembly of communities is dying; Reddit as a profitable set of curated feeds, a sort of TikTok that's not just for short video, is rising.
• nicbou 3y ago
  Wow, that was one fantastic writeup. I appreciate that the author is a familiar face in this community.
• dahwolf 3y ago
  It's true that as a small and intimate community grows, it will deteriorate. Once upon a time there was this optimistic idea that as we add voices to the internet it becomes exponentially better, like a super brain developing. This has become true in some parts (Wikipedia, open source software, stackoverflow, the like) but it doesn't seem to apply to social networking. On social networks, the larger it gets, the worse it becomes. The large size making it an attractive target for scammers, divisive posts, trolling, dunking, pile-ons, influencer tactics. It ends with the worst of us winning, the unreasonable ones. The size of the social network is a factor, its algorithms (what is amplified), but also the underlying dysfunctional political system. I've come to the conclusion that a large scale social network is near impossible to keep healthy, stable, useful. Or this slowly becoming clear at this point in time. My advise would be to not obsessively search for the next new thing, instead to pause and critically evaluate what you're getting out of it anyway. Make your goal as narrow and tangible as possible. As an example, say you have a particular professional/hobby interest. You follow experts on social networks. Instead you could just subscribe to the endless amount of newsletters that come weekly. Find the good one. Read it once per week and you're up to speed. No need to spend hours per day listening to noise. I cannot recommend this enough, it's so calming. The perhaps more controversial tip is about people "finding community". I respect and understand that in particular situations, people can find like-minded individuals that they would otherwise not find in the real world. Fine, but I'd also argue that this isn't true for many people, and "finding community" strongly aligns with being chronically online. If so, now would be a good moment to ask hard questions about this "community". Do you even know whom they are? Have you ever met any of them? Would they help you if something happens to you? Have they ever shown an active interest in you? Has the community in any shape or form tangibly improved your life? Do they like you unconditionally or drop you like a stone when you say the wrong thing? Perhaps your community is just a bunch of randos that do not care if you live or die, that happen to have the same suspiciously precise opinion, and you're just there to see it validated, for hours on end, day by day, without this making any difference whatsoever to anything at all. My point being, optimize your social network usage. Go to direct sources, exit communities where there is no real personal stake, then walk the dog in the nearby forest. Reclaim your real life. And yes, I'm hypocritical for posting here. I'm just as flawed in wasting time online. But I genuinely believe I should just exit 90% of it for the simple reason that it offers no tangible value, and quite a lot of negative value (lost quality time). What comes after Twitter and Reddit? How about fucking nothing?
• titzer 3y ago
  One of my first online experiences (around 1996 or so) was the chat room that my local (dialup) ISP hosted. There might have been a couple dozen or a hundred people that hung out on that chat room back then, but it was fairly diverse in terms of age ranges and experience...at least as far as tech/net early adopters could have been back then. I think I only met one person IRL from that chat room, but it was, in comparison to today, surprisingly chill. Not only that, but people just as a matter of course used pseudonyms and were careful about privacy. Knowing someone's (temporary) IP address was already a lot. But as the internet grew forums and news sites and blogs, I bounced around, and through, many. I lost interest in most of them before they got enshittified, but it does, in retrospect, seem that most suffered either of two fates: irrelevance, stagnation, and evaporation, or enshittification to one degree or another. I count among my past lives the past online communities that I participated in. I don't long for those pasts but I do feel a loss that not only are those specific ones gone, but the striking inevitability of them all dying. It seems like a law--a tragic one at that. Anyway, RIP <nostalgic online forum>.
  • nologic01 3y ago
    I remember some MOO circa 1992 or 93. It seemed a fantastical something. It incredible how badly malformed the "future" has become.
  • banana_giraffe 3y ago
    This brings back memory of one of the first BBSs I ever joined. It was a tech support/news/sales channel for a local computer store. It was fairly heavily moderated, but still, it had a small community. At some point, the moderation stopped, and the community flourished. It also, for some insane reason, had an upload area that would cycle files on its own, which because a great source of games. I only meet one person from it IRL, and that was the moderator that vanished one day. And I only meet him when he sold a fancy modem and told me about the BBS being a great way to test it out. I eventually moved away, but still dialed in (with long distance, even) and felt like I knew people online, if only via pseudonym. One day it all died. No doubt either the PC it was running on finally died, or someone said "what's this computer in the corner do, anyway?" I sometimes still miss TechBBS.
• wly_cdgr 3y ago
  Right on
• nologic01 3y ago
  The problem of online communities is not solved. We have a lot of data points of failure but I am not sure we have a good overview of why everything failed. There should be like a wikipedia table like this one [1] but where explanatory factors (funding model, corporate structure, moderation tools, algorithmic timelines, discovery modes, anonymity, upvoting/downvoting mechanisms etc etc) would be tabulated against failure modes (toxicity, inanity, obsolescence etc etc) You then run an ML model and find the pattern. The problem is that our sample is totally imbalanced. We don't know what good looks like. The solution might be to take life expectancy before enshitification into account. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  I can't claim to remember this personally, but I've heard that Usenet, in the pre-Web days, had a period every September when a big rush of new college students joined up, and had to be taught the rules. That was before it turned into a cesspit, I guess.
  • mtrower 3y ago
    Not only USENET, but the internet in general. It's where Eternal September comes from (as in, you're describing the pre-cursor). When AOL came along, that September influx never ended... For better or worse, the net was overrun. Given the size of things back then, it actually seems a decent example of the article topic.
• collaborative 3y ago
  I rarely visit Reddit or any other panopticon (this one however - HN - keeps tricking me into posting) Anyway, I recently contacted the mods of deGoogle to see if they would like to add to their side bar the ad-free search engine I have been working on all the time for a couple months now They basically said they didn't trust me (again, no karma) but asked me to post on the board to see feedback The post quickly drew ire from a user who accused me of disrespecting the community (although he later calmed down once he learned that the mods had "given their blessing" for me to post) Anyway, even though the post largely received positive feedback and was really upvoted (and user retention from that post has been amazing), the mods ended up dismissing me in a pretty cold way That's why I fail to feel sympathy for anyone involved in these "villages". As a "stranger", I fail to comprehend their struggle for fairness and virtue. As a side note, HN is starting to feel a bit alienating too. Lately, I find myself not posting for fear of being downvoted - or worse - downvoted and search indexed Here is the post I am talking about anyway (subreddit is currently on strike) https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/13qpzy4/a_new_search_engine_to_filter_adridden_sites_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/13qpzy4/a_new_sea...
  • hypron 3y ago
    Sounds like the village did exactly what it was supposed to do - criticize a stranger who only wanted attention for themselves
    • collaborative 3y ago
      Thanks for the free accusation. I did try to join the community because I don't want to simply post and leave. For example, I posted on the sister subreddit deMicrosoft and engaged other users on how to best set up my daughter's first linux PC I suppose you failed to read the bit where the mods specifically asked me to create the post. Either way, the overwhelming majority of the village enjoyed the post
      • nocontextpls 3y ago
        [flagged]
• EGreg 3y ago
  Finally, all you HN people are coming around to my critique of capitalism and venture capital. It leads to this almost by design, and much more… also leads to the polarization of our society: https://rational.app https://rational.app I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model. Yes, it is called “extracting rents” in economics, and it is why, say, Uber drivers pay 50% of their salary to a company with 1 worker per 1 million people. It’s the shareholders. You see, to build Uber requires a few million dollars, but the “dream” is sold to entrepreneurs that they can become billionaires. VCs discover the startup and “reduce friction” with money-losing economics until it goes IPO. Then the whole thing is dumped on the public, and everyone who bought at X dollars a share wants the price to go up, and that means extracting rents from all the sides of the market. There is a far better model of funding projects without this failure mode of shareholders, namely utility tokens, where the community owns the network. I know, I know… “web3 sux” and all that. Well, it doesn’t have to be Web3. Check this: https://qbix.com/Twitternomics.pdf https://qbix.com/Twitternomics.pdf If you’re interested in joining us in building an open source alternative to all this venture-funded stuff, email me (details in bio).
• bad_alloc 3y ago
  > You’re in a train station, you’re not part of it. This makes a lot of sense. Then again, people flock to the largest communities because that where they are most likely to get quick answers or just find a stream of novelty. Being in a small forum feels like "missing out". I think the fediverse can solve it, if it allows for aggregated communities.
• _madmax_ 3y ago
  >The only way to make money is to grow, and the only way to grow is to kill the community Word.
• none_to_remain 3y ago
  We're told that the man who has to say out loud he is king isn't truly king, and more and more I feel like if you have to keep saying "the community" in some setting, then there isn't one.
• jacooper 3y ago
  Huh, that's weird, when I used to use reddit often, I didn't care at all which users are posting the content. Its a part of why I liked it, if the content is good, it doesn't matter if you have zero followers, or a superhero, you just post it into the right subreddit. I needed subreddit-specfic user descriptions to know that a user is the developer or whatever, the person posting the content was never important. Same thing with HN, there are always exceptions, but the user posting the comment/link doesn't have to be important on such platforms, reddit isn't Twitter.
• girvo 3y ago
  I miss the Atomic MPC forums. Facebook effectively killed that village, rather than huge growth; the print magazine it was ostensibly based around died, Facebook groups took off, Reddit killed forums for good, and my 2004-onward online experience disappeared. And now Reddit is doing it's best to kill Reddit, which is amusing but sad, so the remaining villages I'm a part of online (various smaller subreddits where people know each other) are going to die too. I wonder where people will go next.
• zouhair 3y ago
  > The only way to make money is to grow Can someone explain this to me like I'm 5? This feels like some religious dogma more than a real thing.
  • stinkytaco 3y ago
    A corporation's obligation is to generate shareholder value. Not user value, but value for the owners. This can be done a variety of ways but the two big ones are: generating profits and distributing those as dividends or raising the stock value. Technically the former doesn't require growth, but the later definitly does. VC funded companies are basically founded with the promise that the value of the stock will rise and that the VC can cash out its ownership eventually, either through a sale or an IPO. Also, growth doesn't necessarily mean size, but it does imply long term increase in value for owners. If I buy stock in a company, I want to get richer for owning that stock and that means either the dividends need to be high enough to recoup my investment or the stock needs to rise in value, making me richer when I sell it (starting the cycle again). Both of those outcomes sort of imply some sort of growth over time. If I expect that time to be short, as one might with an internet company, I'd like that timeline accelerated so I get as much value as I can in as short a time as possible. That's what leads to moves like this.
• zajio1am 3y ago
  > "Everyone stays strangers, ... It’s no longer a village, but something like a train station. The default mode of being is passing through. People come and go, and there’s no real sense of belonging." > "It’s an oppressive, alienating, and disempowering environment." Strongly disagree. For me, the absence of 'social baggage' in large stranger-to-stranger boards like HN is liberating, while village-style boards are intimidating. I do not want to 'build community', i want to discuss topic.
  • charlieyu1 3y ago
    HN is a lot more like a village. HN users may be strangers, but share a large common denominator, namely people with at least some tech knowledge or background. This enables more intelligent discussions that you don’t find in other online boards.
• xanderstrike 3y ago
  > the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before. This finally made it click for me why I stopped playing online multiplayer games when dedicated servers were abandoned in favor of matchmaking. All the villages were gone.
• jdkee 3y ago
  Eternal September. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
• tycho-newman 3y ago
  I don't understand how anyone can believe an argument that doesn't have a single fact in it.
  • system2 3y ago
    I've used reddit since 2007. Anyone who was part of it over a decade agrees with this argument. No facts needed.
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    I deliberate refrain from using facts in most of what I say. They make people stop thinking and questioning. I want you to engage with the idea and find out if it's right on your own.
• bearon 3y ago
  Nice.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  > If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible. the paper, "Optimizing human community sizes", abstract: We examine community longevity as a function of group size in three historical, small scale agricultural samples. Community sizes of 50, 150 and 500 are disproportionately more common than other sizes; they also have greater longevity. These values mirror the natural layerings in hunter-gatherer societies and contemporary personal networks. In addition, a religious ideology seems to play an important role in allowing larger communities to maintain greater cohesion for longer than a strictly secular ideology does. The differences in optimal community size may reflect the demands of different ecologies, economies and social contexts, but, as yet, we have no explanation as to why these numbers seem to function socially so much more effectively than other values. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381730209X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
• ajani 3y ago
  > This is one of the great things about the Internet. It’s so large that no matter how weird and unconventional you are, there’s always more poeple just like you. ... The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers. A stranger in this context is a nothing more or less than an unfamiliar face. How can I meet my mirror image freak if he's in another village?
• emodendroket 3y ago
  I really dislike "enshittification" suddenly appearing in essays everywhere. Why don't we use established words to describe this concept that aren't going to date the piece and make it embarrassing to read in a few years?
  • tommit 3y ago
    I'm not a big fan of the word per se but it has been coined to describe the _exact_ concept that's happening here. What would be an established word for it? Deteriorating? Diluted? I'm not an English native, but the internet has always been a bit of a vulgar place and all that so enshittification seems about right.
    • emodendroket 3y ago
      "Degradation" or "crippling" are some that come to mind. My issue is less that it's vulgar and more that I think it's going to read in the near future the way people calling everything they liked "teh secks" years ago online reads now.
      • tommit 3y ago
        Fair enough. I've never come across that saying and spend a considerable amount of time online, but I get what you mean. Well, seeing the path many of the big social media players chose, I could imagine that the term enshittification will be around for a little longer, unfortunately.
        • emodendroket 3y ago
          Based on Urban Dictionary that one had its heyday around 20 years ago so it's understandable if you haven't.
      • marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Some of the most lasting culture is laden with references to contemporary culture and events. This goes for Shakespeare and it goes for Dante Alighieri. We're all a product of our time and circumstance. Trying to wash that away in order to write something timeless means we just write something bland instead.
• totetsu 3y ago
  8chan is the real killing community.
• red_admiral 3y ago
  The theory here has similar ideas to Chapman's classic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths The main argument is that (sub)cultures have to do at least some gatekeeping to stand a chance of not dissolving into the mainstream, and being replaced by "$thing lite" that's more amenable to the average passer-by.
• sacnoradhq 3y ago
  Don't make forever home out of sand on a corporation's beach.
• practice9 3y ago
  At first glance the focus of the post is Reddit, but it applies to Twitter so well
• amykhar 3y ago
  The sad thing is, people won't do the one thing that could probably create the community or village they crave. They won't pay a fee to belong. If the business model was a small profit - not growth - paid communities could offer a lot. One that comes to mind is the old BB The Well. It definitely had community and longevity. People want free, so they flock to the new free thing that replaces the old free thing that got bad because it either had no business model and collapsed, or the business model drives it to sell user data and eke out every dollar it can for its investors. Inevitably, the free things go bad. Sometimes, people tolerate it for a very long time, but it seems eventually they all implode.
• vjk800 3y ago
  Human communities DO NOT SCALE, which is counter to the usual tech startup ethos. If you take a human community of 100 people and grow it to 1000 people, it's not the same community anymore. I sometimes think about this also when people are hostile towards other people who want to limit city/neighbourhood growth via NIMBYism. If a city is somehow so nice that more people want to live there, it's not going to be the same city anymore after you double the population. People who are against building more housing in their neighbourhood have a point; they don't want whatever it is that they find likeable in their neighbourhood to be killed.
  • aristus 3y ago
    This was the remarkable thing about Facebook. It felt like, and encouraged people to act like, it was only you and Dunbar's number of your friends. A 10^9 machine with a 10^2 interface. That also explains the wounded anger from users whenever the mask slips or the abstraction leaks.
  • welfare 3y ago
    I'd like to add to this; I believe it's more based in the fear of the unknown. People are generally very resistant to change, good or bad, "better the devil you know" and so on. That's why some people stay in abusive relationships, dysfunctional families and lousy corporations. Sometimes resisting change in a community, a startup or organization is more a case of very strong risk-aversion than anything else. Same with products, most people say that their favorite brand of a consumer product is what they're currently using, this is why telco's incentivizes switching carriers, because people stick around...
  • captainpiggies 3y ago
    I forgot where I read about it, but there are some limits to certain human social groups we all share (paraphrasing from what I remember): --------------------------------------------- Best friends: 2-3 Close Friends: 15-30 Friends / "Friends": 100-200 Acquaintances: 1000-2000 --------------------------------------------- Something along these lines. With the biggest kind of aha moment for me being that the army (notorious for optimizing everything to the highest degree) has organized itself in similarly sized groups: --------------------------------------------- Squad Section Company Brigade ---------------------------------------------
• probe_drone 3y ago
  > The best thing that could happen to Reddit, in terms of the website not being shit from a community perspective, is that it stops growing, maybe even shrinks a bit. This will let communities stabilize and become more like villages again, and the site will be better for it. This is what happened to Tumblr. After the large exodus, the community was a lot smaller, the site got purchased by another company (Automattic, the guys behind Wordpress). They did revert the rule changes that started the whole mass-migration, and now it's again a village with a coherent and shared culture. Smaller than before, but somehow cozier.
• isykt 3y ago
  This line really didn’t resonate with me: > Many people go online to find a sense of belonging and community, and in the right circumstances, they can find it while they may struggle to do so offline. I understand it’s true, but it doesn’t apply to me. I find it sad that people struggle to get a sense of belonging offline and have to resort to ersatz communities like Reddit, which commodify the users’ identities and are generally low trust. Reading that line puts a flicker in my mind, a thought that I might be an “enshittification accelerationist” when it comes to Reddit (Facebook too). Let it kill itself, because it’s not that good anyway. I was a fairly avid user of Reddit as a late teen / early 20’s person, when I was forming my identity. But now I’m done doing that, and I find Reddit overall to be of low value, especially now that LLMs have scraped most of the good stuff.
• mystertea 3y ago
  Inadvertently, this guy also perfectly described the problem with large-scale immigration.
• captainpiggies 3y ago
  This opinion may be unpopular, "gatekeeping" is good, at least to a certain degree. It essentially forces people to integrate. Now this can, of course, be really toxic, but on the other hand, it can help to preserve quality (and culture). Most "communities" nowadays aren't gate kept, and they actively try to tear down gates and general entry barriers, maybe it should become more acceptable again to put barriers up for self-preservation.
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