> Even writing it down here I'm worried I sound like I'm trying to curate a closed community of ego-boosting yes men.
There's this weird trend that's been happening for some time now that tries to make non-fully-open groups look wrong, but honestly, has anything ever actually been done by such open groups? As far as I can tell, "closed community" is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for any kind of quality creative output (this includes individual projects as single-person closed group). Having a core of creators surrounded by distinct group of fans and secondary contributors is a natural organization that forms spontaneously.
> Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints.
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.
>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:
> 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.
> i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends,
This made me think of the quote from Men in Black:
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
I think there's some major exceptions but they require heavy-handed moderation. Notable among these is the AskHistorians subreddit.
You could argue though they're the exception that proves the rule.
I will say though, I'm a frequent participant in a few topic-specific forum, and I think if anything the concentration to places like Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord has helped these places quite a bit in the exact way you suggest. They've been insulated because they're too obscure now and that has allowed them all to largely have reasonable organic growth, rather than explosive "hug of death" style sudden growth. I just hope that lasts.
That's the primary factor which would determine the outcome. As a community, you probably want to attract currently undervalued people and help them to uncover their potential. If it's just invite-only community, I expect it to stagnate and never reinvent itself for the better.
There are a few good public forums (like lobste.rs) which require invitation to comment, and I inevitably end up ignoring them after I want to contribute to the conversation and realize it's not possible.
> The community can be built using an invitation based model, where a user shares the responsibility for moderating the other accounts they invited to the service. The moderation actions are kept public and presented in an anonymized layout.
This is an interesting idea, I wonder how it would work out.
>so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies
On the other hand, reddit's ability to have user-defined sub-groups has given rise to good communities. To come at this from a personal perspective (though I believe it to be true from many other perspectives), there are a whole bunch of communities on reddit centered around various facets of being transgender. I think in a lot of ways, this kind of community has replaced the old siloed bulletin boards we used to have ten, fifteen years ago, and there's both advantages and disadvantages to that - but either way, I think the point I'm trying to make is that user-defined sub-groups can be a legitimately useful feature that benefits people's lives in a meaningful manner.
What reddit might get wrong is making it _easy_. Have you considered a system like stackexchange use, where setting up a new site is a big deal that requires use cases to be drawn up, example content, users who pledge to partake and maintain the site in accordance with the network's standards, and so on?
I participate of some invite-only communities for a while and you have a point, being a dissent it’s quite challenging and demands extra reasoning to express that.
On the other side, the real issue moderating any closed invite-only community is that the false positive cost is too high and it can fall apart the entire thing, e.g. 90% of the people stops to post/share/interact.
> Is it true that any community that grows big enough, gets ruined?
Well, you know what they say - nothing lasts forever. But, glibness aside:
I think the answer is yes, ultimately. But I don't think that it is bigness per se that dooms a community. This depends on how you define community, of course - is "all of Facebook" a community? Does everybody have to know each other for it to be a community? In my opinion, no; what defines a community is what it unites around - what it believes to be worth defending, specifically.
So the real killers are whatever influences force the community to sacrifice exclusionary principles - the places where the members of the community will draw a line and fight for a side, so to speak. A growth imperative is such an influence, since less exclusion = bigger TAM, hypothetically, and as other commenters have pointed out, people change the communities they join.
Interestingly, I don't think monetization as such kills a community; after all, there are plenty of communities that rally around monetization in itself as something valuable and worth defending, and many others might tolerate it as one of the exclusionary principles that keeps out the trolls.
Closed communities is where it's at... But they have the obvious inherent problem: they don't scale. If a closed community lets in too many people, it becomes a somewhat obscured open community, with all the downsides. And if it doesn't, well, you are unlikely to get in on a topic you are interested in.
It's been plaguing non-interweb groups since always. The dynamic goes something like:
- A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing.
- the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it.
- if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun
- if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry.
- Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community.
Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
>I'd propose a general rule that the more focused the board, its heights of brilliance will be lower and further between at the same time as the average level of discourse increases.
It seems to me that there seem to be some ideal community sizes when it comes to creating interesting, novel, and useful content. Back when 4chan was much smaller, /b/ (random) seemed to be generating new memes more frequently and with a higher average quality. But as 4chan grew, /b/ has tended to slide into more lowest common denominator content (e.g. porn and gore).
I think there was something similar on /v/ (the video game board). At a certain point, the community grew too large to have a coherent collective consciousness. The solution in this case was to create an entire board of "containment threads" for the popular video games and subcultures. This freed /v/ up more to discussing what was trending in the video game world without having to deal with the pesky people playing games and talking about them.
Today, some smaller boards like /mu/ and /fit/ and /k/ seem to be at just the right level of activity to support a vibrant, evolving culture complete with "localised memes" which sometimes cross-pollinate to other boards or outward to the general internet.
> and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough
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.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
Rather, I would say that tightly-moderated communities of experts tend to produce better reference material ("wikis"). But this type of structure is "toxic" to discussions ("forums") and novices.
The SO founders and key contributors built a wiki. The site's incentive structure pointed in this direction so everyone was complicit in this outcome.
Now, site management seems to be saying that they want a "help-everyone" forum. They are -- like all big orgs with something to lose -- soliciting ideas, forming interdisciplinary committees, and giving "<3"-warming (yuk) speeches.
Given how ingrained the current culture is, I believe that meaningful change would entail significant risk.
> I have a feeling grass is greener on the other side and people in either case.
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 believe the idea is that people get in by invitation; if a member ends up being a problem (i.e. gets down-voted too often or something) then not only are they booted but so is the person who invited them.
This being the case, people need to exercise some care before sending an invite since that person's behavior will be reflected back on them.
It's an interesting approach to growing a community.
>you eventually hit a wall where different sub-communities will simply have different standards for what is acceptable to them
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.
There's this weird trend that's been happening for some time now that tries to make non-fully-open groups look wrong, but honestly, has anything ever actually been done by such open groups? As far as I can tell, "closed community" is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for any kind of quality creative output (this includes individual projects as single-person closed group). Having a core of creators surrounded by distinct group of fans and secondary contributors is a natural organization that forms spontaneously.
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