>I find that online communities are most effective when strongly policed with unproductive dissent silenced outright. I basically agree but I don't see Twitter

>I find that online communities are most effective when strongly policed with unproductive dissent silenced outright. I basically agree but I don't see Twitter or Facebook for example as communities. Those services are more like everybody at once all lumped together whether they like it or not. In the real world things like proximity and social interdependency force people to be more measured in behavior, interactions are mediated by cliques and groups with reputations and social pressure. In focused online communities you can make assumptions about content because it's opt-in and there is infinite space for alternative communities. I guess what I am getting at is that Twitter and Facebook are bad systems in that they don't give us bearings to make good social decisions on how to act (usually the opposite.) Facebook might actually be worse than Twitter in that it simulates communities but really a planet ruled by a weird dictatorship that doesn't care too much if you kill your neighbors as long as you don't embarrass the government. Twitter is like as if you have an instant 1-1 connection with every other living being which is why you get situations where a million people are each slamming the same person with one insult. It's horrifying but it's also very clearly not recognizable as a natural sort of social interaction so you shouldn't even expect it to be sane. It is a thing that literally should not exist. Something resembling Facebook could exist and be good, just not the Facebook we have now.