4 ms·
where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities. That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read
by seiji 11y ago
where you're part of 15-20 small HN-like communities.
That's the problem though, right? The goal is to have one place to go. That's why posts on HN get read by billionaires and people living in homeless shelters—there's one source of "what's hot right now" ranked on the front page.
If you bifurcate your topics into 100 narrowly focused interest areas everybody individually subscribes around, you lose the inherent usefulness of being exposed to new topics you wouldn't have otherwise found. (it also provides a common social context around "did you see X today?" — you want to be part of the in crowd, so needs to see the same thing, and the same thing everybody sees has to be marginally useful/relevant)
In order to drive that communal "new things we all care about" feeling, you need a (loosely) coherent community, not just being surrounded by everybody who visits the DMV this month.
- dimino 11y agoWell, functionally, that's the experience you get from Reddit via the "front page" -- all your little communities show up together, showing you what's "new". Of course, the problem is now that those "little communities" have 3-4 million people in them, and are basically large cities.
- seiji 11y agoThe overall readership size isn't of great concern (the more the merrier), but it breaks down when people start interacting at scale. It breaks down when posts start getting thousands of upvotes or tens of thousands of comments. At that point, why bother? Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where. All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).