This blogpost started out as a bunch of notes and links, and I found myself sharing it with people over and over again so much.
Here are a list of things that I recommend reading if you’re interested in communities.
- I used to run a community focused on intelligent conversation, and I made the naive mistake of NOT enforcing rules and censorship. I figured that intelligent people would be able to sort it out amongst themselves. I was wrong. [source]
- Grow your communities slowly and organically. [source]
- Read about the evaporative-cooling effect by Xianhang Zhang – “If anyone can join your community, then the people most likely to join are those who are below the average quality of your community because they have the most to gain. Once they’re in, unless contained, they end up harming the health of the community over the long term.”
- Read Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution by David Chapman. Very succinct, clear articulation of how cool is born, nourished, and then how things go wrong from there.
- Read Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism by Eliezer Yudkowsky. “Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.” Eliezer talks at length not just about the bad actor problem, but about how good actors struggle to coordinate a response to bad actors – and how that usually plays out.
- Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums
- Boz – The Path Matters “By starting small and expanding outward we built a community. […] if we had tried to jump straight to the end state, we would have never gotten it right.”
- Yishan Wong on the problem with reddit “We were accused of harboring horrible racist and sexist content AND accused of being controlled by SJWs, because most people believe that if you enforce some rules on them, you must be supporting the other side.”
- SMBC – “Each group is some percent crazy assholes”
- “Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right-wing.”
- Paul Graham: What I’ve learned from Hacker News “Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don’t all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.”
- The Toxoplasma of Rage “Every community on Tumblr somehow gets enmeshed with the people most devoted to making that community miserable […] if memes spread by outrage they adapt to become as outrage-inducing as possible.”
Unsorted links:
Misc
Beware cycles of nastiness:
10 points by visakanv 682 days ago | parent [-] | on: The Best Entrepreneur I Know
It’s interesting to look at your comment, and look at the nasty comment that it provoked. This is the starting point of a cycle of nastiness.You could’ve asked the person to elaborate or be specific, or even contradicted or questioned them- without saying “you lack <important skill>” and “try to <be useful> rather than <being unimportant>”.
Why so mean? Was the meanness intentional, or…? Genuinely curious.
See: PG’s hierarchy of disagreement
” What’s happening is a kind of evaporative-cooling effect- specifically, the very natural rise of cheap wit and sensationalism. These things trigger upvotes more easily. Pithy answers and responses get rewarded quicker by larger crowds, and this discourages the carefully-evaluated-and-reasoned answer.”
Marketplaces
“There seems to be some natural law of Internet shopping that ensures that every “Specialized marketplace for X,” will, once it becomes popular, inevitably devolve into a flood of thousands of sellers all reselling identical cheap junk from AliExpress for $0.99 + free shipping–to the point where it’s impossible to find anything genuine or non-counterfeit.” – Source: HN discussion on Etsy