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Killing Community
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Yeah, I keep saying this to people when they worry about fragmentation. Like it's important to have all the Baseball fans in the same Baseball forum under one big banner.
No, that's not better, that's worse. What you want is a thousand interconnected forums with 100 people each, not a forum with 100,000 people.
How is community engagement better in a interconnected forum compared to a single forum consisting of all the participants? I'm asking out of ignorance
How would cross community discussions take place?
to start with, ive had more vibrant, long and interesting conversations more often on a site of 300-3,000 as opposed to a sub with millions.
There's the problem of filtering as well -- if I jump into a thread that's a few hours old on Reddit, there may already be hundreds of replies. How do I filter this? How many discussions have you been in where there were several different people all with the same response, simply because someone else had the same opinion 30 minutes earlier?
On the flip side, if you're in a small local sub, how do you get new ideas injected? It's the "joke #243" problem, where everyone's heard everything already. Until more people arrive with fresh insights and ideas, the community can become insular.
I can imagine small communities spread across. By virtue of its size, there are high chances of topics staying relevant too.
I am concerned about small bubbles though. Discussions in single instances that never bounce across to similar communities in other instances but I suppose that's putting the cart before the horse
realistically the same thing happens on reddit, any sub not big enough is very unlikely to ever be featured on the home page, and this is not always a bad thing, some communities are not interested in being featured, some are brigaded as a prize.
@honeyed_coffee For the reasons the OP mentioned. Familiar faces, being recognized in a community instead of being just today's main character.
In a single large forum most participants are silent, as they must be or it'd be a cacophony. Many are silent out of worry that they need to say something good enough to impress a hundred thousand people, not just something interesting to their local 100 friends.
On Fediverse things escape their local instances and their local forum-groups by boosts mostly.
@Zigabyte
As karma mattered more you lost a whole subset of regular posters that felt kamra took a relaxing pastime and made it into a job. Karma was used as a kind of stopgap for the issue of managing the cacophony in a busy thread, which made the points matter even more and caused even more people to disengage.
Personally, I found that karma led to self-censorship of any idea that remotely deviated from the group consensus.
Can you think of alternatives to voting, though? Sorting always requires some curating system that isn't random but I can't think of any that would be robust to group consensus
I don’t think user voting in of itself is a problem. It’s the consequences of large negative voting that causes the real problems. In Reddit, a single unpopular comment on a popular subreddit could send a casual Redditor into negative karma which effectively shadowbans them from Reddit. As a result, you see people deleting their comments to stop the bleeding. Controversial opinions are punished severely.
The way I see it, it's like a small world model with layers and emerging hierarchies, instead of being flat.