I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make.

There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums.

But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that.

I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's.

There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.

That's a bit reductive, perhaps. The way I see it, different styles of 'forums' or 'communities' can foster different types of interactions. it's a bit like how in the 'real world' we might have a gathering where everyone sits in a circle, or small separate tables, or a bar area, or a conference-style 'lecture + hallway-track', etc. each have their advantages and drawbacks.

I totally agree. My suspicion is that reddit and other community driven content feed sites are a symptom of the influx of people showing up online. They became popular as they're a shallow enough community to work with a large population of participants. More in depth community can only be sustained meaningfully up to a certain amount of participants. Even in teams, there is a limit to how many people can be part of a team effectively and humans naturally break up into smaller groups within larger ones.

It feels like there's a certain number (maybe Dunbar's like you said) at which people stop seeing a community as a group of disparate individuals and start seeing it as some sort of a collective hivemind.

You see this regularly with comments like "HN/subreddit/etc is so hypocritical. One day they're in favor of X, the next day they're against it", in which the poster seems to fail to realize that in a community of tens of thousands of people, chances are it's entirely disjoint subsets of the group taking those positions.

I don't see that kind of thing as often in smaller message boards. When you recognize everybody's name (or at least their avatar), it's a lot clearer that it's just Bob and Alice who support X and Eve and Mallory who don't.

It seems natural that such a failure to see the individuals that make up a group would lead to a decline in civility.

In some marginalized communities, there is a tendency for the most marginalized people to impose their needs upon the entire group, which drives away many others. As a result, many physical LGBTQ resource centers and online forums are the fiefdoms of a few people who are easily “triggered” and create strange rules to manipulate people. These places tend to be especially unwelcoming and intimidating to people who recently discovered their identity.

Reddit’s mod system (and the fact if the mods go nuts you can easily create a new sub) actually helps protect against some of this by allowing subs to avoid excessive moderation of “marginal” content (usually discussion that brings up legitimate issues that may upset some members of the group). It’s easy for users to join anonymously, so no fear of your family finding out that you’re trying to figure out your same-sex attraction.

Users also tend to gravitate toward the subreddits with the most permissible rules, then filter out into smaller, more specialized subreddits as their interests grow. To look at a subreddit as consisting of the subreddit itself is limited; you also have to look at the other subreddits it’s users post in to get a real feel for the “community”. Reddit allows these Venn diagram relationships between spaces and communities in a similar way to how they occur in real life.

Also, Reddit has a big advantage for marginalized communities in that the site admins are relatively responsive to (and has provided moderator tools for dealing with) harassment, and Reddit is large enough it won’t wilt under a sustained DDOS like many independent LGBTQ forums periodically do.

The forums I’m talking about are really more “community support” for people dealing with tough personal problems (both through actual conversation and shitposting of memes). Because it’s very easy for users to enter and leave communities, Reddit is fantastic for a community that by its nature is a bit of a “revolving door” (as many LGBTQ subs are).

All that said, the idea of independent “forums” is all but dead at this point. Existing ones will continue to exist, but new ones don’t exactly pop up anymore. The use case has largely migrated to Discord, which is even more difficult to discover because it’s not searchable with Google.

Very interesting - a friend forwarded me a piece about another online community, The AV Club, which is quite relevant to this discussion. It looks at the nature of Community, Cliques, and Cesspool behavior. Might be a good companion, informal study to consider:

https://medium.com/@LongTimeLurker1stTimePoster/the-av-club-...

with the utopic assumption of infinite moderation, I don't see a problem here. Different houses will have different rules and levels of moderation (a meme community will have different standards from a more sensitive topic). As long as the moderation informs newcomers of the rules, they behave under that sub-community if they choose to participate (while respecting global community rules, and of course server country laws).

This is all under the assumption that "sub-community" is distinctly defined. For something truly monolithic like Twitter, the only choice seems to be to leave control to the individual, and perhaps allow private groups to be formed.

IMO communities that undergo splitting of this kind will inevitably result in the death of the community.

Splits are happening in small-ish communities too. People don't know why, but they have to have Discord, facebook, reddit, etc. And if you join all of them -- which you often do in case they are similar but not exactly the same ("Why are you asking this? The answer was posted to the facebook group! Oh, but we are in Reddit, never mind, here's a link to fb") -- you'll see some of the same people in all of them. The one caveat is that the "owner" of the community (say, the game devs if this is about a game) are likely to be more active in only one of the platforms; Murphy's Law dictates it likely won't be in the one you prefer.

Which really raises the question, if (almost) the same bunch of people is posting in Discord/fb/reddit/whatever, do we really need all those platforms? What purpose do they serve?

But indeed it's doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. You have no control. You can be sure someone will create that goddamn Discord.

There are plenty of subreddits that have communities of their own.

This is an interesting idea, I wonder how it would work out.

quoting DIRECTLY from the post

> the ideal solution would be to [...] have some way to create "forum-like" instances where no accounts can be created but where specific and highly moderated discussions can take place.

Once I started to consider (because it's been pointed out) that Reddit outsourced their moderation to community volunteers this "fediverse" thing started to make more sense in principle. To use analogy phrasing I learned in school: "federations" is to "subreddits" as "fediverse" is to "reddit".

I've heard of, e.g., Mastodon having performance issues, even in a way that could be maliciously exploited, but that's in the implementation details. The theory seems rather sound for future internet communities. It's exciting in a certain way; it feels like the birth of a new internet.

I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, but do you consider HN a "large Internet community?"

That one wouldn't be actually bad if people stuck to good solutions in terms of usability. I mean, half of the forum boards on the Internet would be an order of magnitude better if the owners started them as a subreddit instead.

You could probably even compare social media sites to schools or prisons really. Tons of people with different, wildly incompatible viewpoints or philosophies stuck in a place they don't really care for.

Maybe, but different demographics produce ideas and conversation of different character.

There's a term of art in philosophy called universalizability (Kant). Basically, what would happen if everyone followed a principle or strategy. Locke spoke of the social contract - civilization is not compatible with unlimited individual freedom.

Reddit already has an interesting user sorting and self-selection process: sub-reddits. People can more easily congregate around common interests. They don't even have to buy a domain, learn HTML, or pay hosting bills. Which would seem to reduce flame wars. But this can result in groupthink and safe spaces for extreme views.