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 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.
I'd wager that those communities that so called "get ruined" didn't grow as their size grew. What I mean is that the rules, norms and the culture that allowed X number of people to thrive in a niche, most often does not translate to much larger Y size. If a community decides to allow growth, it must also be flexible to adapt to that growth. And let's be crystal clear on one thing: communities grow because they want to grow. There exist sites online that have very strict sign-up policies that ensures they are kept small and/or limited to a certain type of users. Some even show long questionnaire on their sign-up forms and you have to wait for sometime to contribute and have to stay active to keep your membership, etc.
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.
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.
That's disingenuous. Smaller communities are better because they tend to be more focused, on-topic, and familiar for their members. When they grow large they can drift off-topic and fall victim to status-seeking and other obnoxious behaviour. The only way to mitigate this (I don't believe it can be prevented forever) is heavy moderation.
HN has survived due to the tireless efforts of some very smart moderators. It continues to creep away from its sense of community, however, and political flame-wars seem to be becoming increasingly common.
Early sites on the internet had not developed the appropriate tools and social norms to moderate effectively against the deluge.
It's true that as a small and intimate community grows, it will deteriorate.
Once upon a time there was this optimistic idea that as we add voices to the internet it becomes exponentially better, like a super brain developing.
This has become true in some parts (Wikipedia, open source software, stackoverflow, the like) but it doesn't seem to apply to social networking. On social networks, the larger it gets, the worse it becomes. The large size making it an attractive target for scammers, divisive posts, trolling, dunking, pile-ons, influencer tactics. It ends with the worst of us winning, the unreasonable ones.
The size of the social network is a factor, its algorithms (what is amplified), but also the underlying dysfunctional political system. I've come to the conclusion that a large scale social network is near impossible to keep healthy, stable, useful. Or this slowly becoming clear at this point in time.
My advise would be to not obsessively search for the next new thing, instead to pause and critically evaluate what you're getting out of it anyway. Make your goal as narrow and tangible as possible.
As an example, say you have a particular professional/hobby interest. You follow experts on social networks. Instead you could just subscribe to the endless amount of newsletters that come weekly. Find the good one. Read it once per week and you're up to speed. No need to spend hours per day listening to noise. I cannot recommend this enough, it's so calming.
The perhaps more controversial tip is about people "finding community". I respect and understand that in particular situations, people can find like-minded individuals that they would otherwise not find in the real world.
Fine, but I'd also argue that this isn't true for many people, and "finding community" strongly aligns with being chronically online. If so, now would be a good moment to ask hard questions about this "community". Do you even know whom they are? Have you ever met any of them? Would they help you if something happens to you? Have they ever shown an active interest in you? Has the community in any shape or form tangibly improved your life? Do they like you unconditionally or drop you like a stone when you say the wrong thing?
Perhaps your community is just a bunch of randos that do not care if you live or die, that happen to have the same suspiciously precise opinion, and you're just there to see it validated, for hours on end, day by day, without this making any difference whatsoever to anything at all.
My point being, optimize your social network usage. Go to direct sources, exit communities where there is no real personal stake, then walk the dog in the nearby forest. Reclaim your real life.
And yes, I'm hypocritical for posting here. I'm just as flawed in wasting time online. But I genuinely believe I should just exit 90% of it for the simple reason that it offers no tangible value, and quite a lot of negative value (lost quality time).
What comes after Twitter and Reddit? How about fucking nothing?
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.
Absolutely, and additionally to this, it's not forming a well-behaved community, it's forming a community that behaves in the way this particular person likes. It's just as likely to be full of snark and bitching.
Isn't communities being uncomfortable with new members and change as much of an all-kinds-of-communities throughout history thing than an online-in-2023 thing?
This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.
I was part of a large forum a number of years ago, before a scuffle between a group of members and the forum's leadership caused a mass exodus. Being a (minor) part of that group, the event led me to create a new forum that was less dictatorial in its approach to moderation, as well as less intent on enforcing the silly minutae that dogged the former site.
Compared with the former forum, our own has a minuscule and stagnant userbase, but everyone is on a fist-name basis despite the absence of a naming policy. Our last trolling incident was over a year ago, though arguments do occur. There is always a conversation going on somewhere, and it's almost always entertaining.
I think the secret to the "perfect" community is a poison pill: you have to make sure it stays small; i.e. growth, and therefore success, has to be limited.
The more a community grows, the less familiar you are with everyone, and the less incentive you're going to have to be civil. Unless you're an *hole, people don't generally randomly insult people they consider to be their friends.
I don't think this is exclusive to online communities, but all societies, in general, as seen in the big city/little town dynamic/trope. After a certain population level, the friendliness of the early history of your community will inevitably degenerate.
(The current population of the aforementioned forum is 51, but will decline soon as I delete unused accounts.)
That in a community you experience something doesn't necessarily imply that it's related to the core ideology of the group being different - there often are other factors which cause the change and would independent of that core ideology. "With this, therefore because of this" is such a common fallacy, it has a name in Latin: cum hoc ergo propter hoc. [1]
Further, my experience with online communities, which dates over a decade - and the experiences of my friends managing both large and small internet communities - implies that there are two correlations: a larger group will tend to have more problematic actors, who tend to be overrepresented in the number of comments, and that a group which focuses more on the behavior of members will tend to have better behaving members (if only because they ban the others).
Without controlling for two well known internet community effects, arguing that your community is somehow special is the height of improper reasoning.
The OP seemed to be speaking more broadly about any community being able to grow without ruin, and there are plenty of examples of communities that grew and improved in quality for arbitrary amounts of time. When we talk about online, fast growth, low-indoctrination, easy-to-join communities (i.e. they grow from without vs. within,) those are prone to the eternal September effect and to losing/changing identity. There are all sorts of circumstances that can effect a groups growth dynamic, like how hierarchical it is, how communications are prioritized and presented, etc.
I think fast growth and low barrier to entry are a recipe for becoming a microcosm of general human behavior/cooperation issues, but that there are mitigating factors that may allow it to work better or worse.
A community grows and eventually reaches the point where users cannot recognize who they're interacting with nearly every time, where the submission queue is trailing down too fast for any single reader to process. When that happens, it can no longer function as a cohesive community. It becomes about as personal as a magazine about the very same topic. Furthermore, the incentives to post change due to the higher potential for "karma" (and posts therefore become more like clickbait), and the barrier for the admissibility of submissions becomes lower as a result of the "expert" or "enthusiast" segment of the population becoming a tiny minority.
In my experience, these larger communities typically grow less tolerant of antisocial behavior, most likely due to acceleration of the process known as "dogpiling". Trolls get more exposure, and better reactions, in small-to-medium communities.
It's still conjecture, but I think I prefer my hypothesis.
That is then opposite of what I find appealing. Every community I have ever been a part of on the internet has only gotten worse and eventually unacceptably bad by growing too large.
I also don't like the convergence of online identifies with real identifies in communities which also tends to ruin the point of an online community for me.
So having different groups for different purposes is precisely what I do want and having every human on Earth on one platform is the exact opposite of what I would want.
Creating more selective communities with stricter guidelines seems to be the wrong approach to dealing with trolls, especially based on the scenario pg lays out. As pg says, the larger a community grows, the easier it is for trolls to be accepted and the harder it is to mod (prune) the community. It seems that critical mass is just when the pruning community becomes smaller than the trolling community, and that by creating new communities with more stringent rules, you are just delaying the date (hopefully indefinitely) when trolls come in. I understand that the yc community is special, but even the comments here show that it won't work for much longer as the community grows beyond yc. To answer the question of "Will it scale?", I think its already a no.
If you've ever hung out with a lot of girls (from a guy's perspective), you can beging to understand the trolling community. 1 on 1 with a girl and you can get intellectual conversation, but the minute 3 or 4 girls get together, they start talking about clothes, guys, dramas, and all other stuff that just isn't interesting. I bet girls see it the same with guys too (5 guys together = WoW, DOTA, girls or crude jokes).
Solutions? Keep it small. This fails to keep in line with the existing goals of news.yc (advertising for existing startups, attracting smart people, etc). Another solution? Maybe try to preserve the small community feel as the site gets bigger. One way to do this would be to use user upvotes and downvotes as community boundaries for each user - ie: making their community presence only to those who rate them up, and to make their personal community those who they rate up. This is speculative at best, though.
Causation is the other way around. The default(s) will become lower quality, as a direct result of the additional, unfiltered attention. They will get firehosed with a larger audience, and the number of participants will grow in a way not compatible with maintaining a consistent community or personality. Additionally, the switch in community growth from a "pull" model (I'm interested enough in X to actively search for communities about X on the internet) to a "push" model (X was pushed in my face, and I care enough to respond) will tend to dilute the focus and quality of the community.
Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation).
And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in many cases, there are groups and communities who simply physically cannot use the same platform (those on complete opposite sides of the political spectrum for example).
I believe that if a community grows big enough it gets ruined, but “enough” may be bigger than you think.
> Have you ever seen an example where anything became better than before when it grew big.
Yes, many times.
When your community is too small it’s boring, there isn’t enough user-generated content. As the community grows bigger users produce more content. Popularity encourages creative people to join and existing members to put more effort into their work (motivated by a larger audience and more competition), creating better content.
I think Geometry Dash and Trackmania are examples of communities which seem to be doing better than ever despite growing a lot the past couple years.
The issue is, when a community grows it creates disagreement: some users like different content than other users, users start to fight over which rules / goals / overall direction the community should go. Usually the overall community ends up in the middle ground, where everyone is only partially satisfied.
Case in point: Hacker News with informative / political articles. Some people only like learning, some people like tech drama and even general politics. The result is half informative, half opinionated pieces on the front page.
But it helps when the community focuses on a niche topic, and sticks to that topic even if it grows. Because that means everyone just talks about the niche, and people who aren’t and don’t get interested in it won’t join. It also helps when said topic is non-controversial and non-political, so there’s not much to disagree on and get mad about.
Trackmania’s community is still close because it is a very specific game: racing on a custom track to get the best time possible. There’s not really much else to do in Trackmania, so if you don’t like making custom tracks, trying to get the best time on one of them, or watching people do those things, you won’t like Trackmania. It’s also clearly not provocative.
Hacker News is kind of a niche because it focuses on tech from the perspective of professional software engineers. Nowadays Hacker News does get controversial, but I know it has systems and moderators in place to limit flame wars and politics as much as possible.
Large subreddits, Discord communities, Facebook groups don’t really feel like “communities” because the users’ interests are too diverse: many of the posts are uninteresting to many of the users, because it’s hard to imagine a post which can interest a majority of the users at once. They also get a lot of drama because people post about politics and those posts get encouraged and upvoted and reposted.
I've been in enough communities to see the same pattern repeated. I'm not really sure it can be fixed...
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