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As a permaculture fan, I say well kept gardens die by being too homogeneous and rigidly ordered, rather than alive, organic, and vital. Layer plants in space a
by einhverfr 14y ago
As a permaculture fan, I say well kept gardens die by being too homogeneous and rigidly ordered, rather than alive, organic, and vital. Layer plants in space and time and select them appropriately, and you can leave them unattended for months on end.
Well-layered gardens (like food forests but also my own flower gardens which never get weeded) also better support their members as each plant fills functions which help the other plants.
We need well-layered on-line communities, ones where each layer supports all others in an interdependent web. In such a community, trolls just simply don't show up. There is no room for them. As the permaculturists say, all of life's problems can be solved in a garden.
Lest you doubt my bit about troll-free communities, six years in, I have yet to have to take action against trolls in the LedgerSMB community. I have also never seen trolls on the PostgreSQL email lists.
- JoachimSchipper 14y agoI'm confused - tightly focused groups with high entry requirements may be able to get away with less moderation, but how would you create something more general-purpose, like HN?
- einhverfr 14y agoI think the question isn't general-purpose but "what is the purpose?" If the purpose is collective economic advancement through developing awesome software, all you have to do is support new members of the community in getting going. If the purpose is having fun, spirited debates, then this becomes harder. However the same rules apply. These are: 1) Stratify the community so not everyone has an equal voice in everything. 2) Every strata has an obligation to help every other strata stay civil and grow the community and norms together.
- Revisor 14y agoI like the metaphors in your comment but cannot imagine anything specific. What do you mean with the layers that support each other?
- einhverfr 14y agoOk, so think of an open source community. You may have the following layers (analogies to layers in a food forest): Core committee (canopy) Committers (understory) Non-commiter developers (vine layer) non-developer consultants (undergrowth) end users (groundcover) A food forest is productive when all these layers are providing support to all the other layers. Similarly that open source community will be productive when the core committee is serving the community by providing infrastructure and governance, the committers are writing code that benefits everyone else, etc. The goal is shared economic support and interdependence between the layers, and in this regard open source communities thrive when this works well. So what does this mean about intellectual entertainment sites like Slashdot or Reddit, or to a lesser extent HN? I guess the first thing you have to do is to have a group of people (Pg and others here) who decide what the goals of the site are (they are the canopy), but the next step is to ensure that there are different tiers with overlapping responsibilities to the community as a whole. HN for example seems to have officially a three tier system but unofficially a four tier system at least as far as I have seen. Maybe there are 5 or more tiers, if we count YC hopefuls, those who found firms funded by YC, etc. I actually think this sort of stratification can be a good thing even though it cuts against modern notions of perfect democracy or egalitarianism. The fact that you have more strata here also means I find it is a more supportive community than a place like Slashdot with fewer strata.