I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones.
Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
>Building a community is a difficult endeavour even under perfect conditions, and changing the way a community works once it has been established is even more difficult.
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:
Presumably you could reverse that logic, and say that the problem with online communities is that they are too comfortable, and don't expose you to people aren't easy to get along with. Growth requires challenge...
I don't think so. As an Internet community grows, it loses focus and it changes, which makes it different (not necessarily "bad", but a different one that started). Also, the increase in number of members makes more difficult to follow who the members are, which is one of the key points of making you feel "part of the community" (plus the potential increase in trolls, even if signal to noise ratio is still good)
There are also stuff like repeated subjects, etc...
I've been in enough communities to see the same pattern repeated. I'm not really sure it can be fixed...
I have been part of many online communities. To name a few, the old Usenet, Slashdot, IWETHEY, Perlmonks, and HN.
I long ago accepted that all die at some point. And something new will be created. The new will never be the same as the old. But the fundamental problems are social, not technical.
Your mirror platform is an idea that I've seen tried multiple times, and I've only seen work once. That was when the InfoWorld Electric forums broke, and the core participants moved to IWETHEY as a replacement.
But, generally, the technology isn't what breaks, it is the social dynamics. Usenet, Slashdot and Perlmonks are still out there. They just don't have the same social dynamics that they used to. People enter, others leave, and the community changes. Those who are motivated may agree to meet over there when this goes. But they are always more motivated to be here here now. People who leave here, don't go there because there is nobody there to attract them. And they don't want to form a community over there for a future mass migration because they (probably accurately) project that the people they don't like here will just be part of that migration.
I'll cry a tear if HN falls apart to the point I don't want to be here. But I'll also accept it as just how online communities work. Maybe I'll see people I know in my next community. Maybe not. I'll keep a few personal friends, and I'll move on.
This is just how things work online. And there is no technological solution for what is fundamentally a social problem.
I have never experienced this as a problem myself. What I've often seen, however, is that online communities stagnate or die because their audience gets older and no new members are recruited, because they are too coupled to a specific legacy software, etc.
> don't we have decades of evidence from online communities showing that?
In my experience the community changes as a whole, but not the individual actors. Once a community tips the member base changes. People displeased with the behavior leave and people attracted to it join.
Whilst the founder has credibility in this space, I don't see what the problem is they are solving. There are many communities all across the internet, and also in centralised places like Facebook & reddit. Forums still remain hugely popular for niche community operators.
The only way social is going to work and be improved going forward is through decentralisation and taking our data out of the hands of a central repository where it can be used to target us, and is more vulnerable to breaches. Once we have that baseline the other problems can be solved by the communities themselves.
Yup you nailed it. I've been doing online communities since 1990 in one shape or another. This pattern happens in them all. It is hard for owners / managers of such communities to avoid this.
Perhaps over time communities like this will lead to a restoration of the "long tail" of online communities. I've found myself less than comforted by the homogenization of communities that can result on one-size-fits-all places like Facebook or Twitter.
There is a problem with online communities. Let's call it the problem of "false association". Humans have been forming communities for millennia. Inevitably, in these communities, there are bad apples. However, if there is a child molester that lives in my town, that fact does not (on its own) reflect poorly on me. Even if that molester was my next door neighbor, there may be a bit more suspicion ("how could you not know that was going on next door?"), but I am confident that 9 times out of 10 I would come away with my reputation unblemished.
Of course, before the internet, communities were a more-or-less involuntary phenomenon. They were defined by geography, history, a common resource, or a common industry. Contrast that to online communities that are largely viewed as self-directed, voluntary organizations. This is the view, I think, that will eventually have to change.
This view is poisonous for two reasons. First, as we see here, if anyone, anywhere in an online community (no matter how large) does something offensive, objectionable, or illegal, the knee-jerk reaction of society today is to allow that bad apple to spoil the bunch. Second, this makes it very difficult to form heterogeneous communities online. If I associate with people randomly online, I am a Google search away from being associated with a potential thief/pervert/whatever. The end result is that online communities become insular, or they can only function well under a banner of anonymity, but anonymity has its own problems.
Reddit, it seems to me, struck a useful middle ground: partial anonymity with history (I can create an identity that does not lead back to my real life identity, but can still build up a reputation). Unfortunately, Reddit is still a business. It seems to me that something like Reddit, but based on a distributed model, is what we need.
Has there ever been an online community that improves over time? At best it seems they grow, then they’re doomed to either maintain at a certain level (like HN), or slowly slump into the melt and burn away.
You won't like this solution.. But I think the most effective way to fix the site would be to delete everything and start from scratch as a referral-based invite-only site.
There is a reason communities fork themselves as they approach Dunbar's number. It's not that we lack the technology to talk to more than 300 people at a time, it's that we implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. The problem is sociology, not technology.
> There is a limit where this breaks down of course, but perhaps the solution is to accept the limit and have many smaller communities instead of one big one.
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.
The issue is not online communities per se, it is creating yet another social media site that tries to house everyone. HN is a focused audience with active moderation, that's why it works.
Social media? Completely different story. Scale is off the charts so it is difficult to moderate. Lots of noise, people trying to be brands and brands trying to be people. Idiotic clamoring for blue checkmarks as if they actually mean something. Collective belief in the metrics of the platform meaning something overall. Little pushback against unpleasant individuals, and few people questioning the pace or mechanics of platforms that actually create toxic environments.
But yeah, other than that, social media is great. :)
A well-tended community is constrained by things like Dunbar's Number and SNR ratios.
Soft forking is a common response - IMO reddit is the closest social platform to "getting it right", although it should do a better job of pushing low-value content (/r/politics, etc) down into the "minor leagues" of subreddits.
Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
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