This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model. An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth.

Great writing on the current Reddit saga. The author put down in words a lot of things in my mind I couldn’t find the right words.

  • pre@fedia.io
    18·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Honeyed Coffee
      6·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • pre@fedia.io
        4·
        2 years ago

        @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

        • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
          3·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • RandomBit@sh.itjust.works
            5·
            2 years ago

            Personally, I found that karma led to self-censorship of any idea that remotely deviated from the group consensus.

            • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
              4·
              2 years ago

              Ofc! whats the point of posting anything when you have people actively work to suppress your thoughts and statements?

              Really user-based meta-moderation had been pretty much a disaster, not sure we need internet points at all, things worked great without them.

            • Honeyed Coffee
              2·
              2 years ago

              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

              • RandomBit@sh.itjust.works
                4·
                2 years ago

                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.

                • Honeyed Coffee
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  Fair enough. I always assumed downvotes were used to weed out/shadow-ban troll accounts more than suppress unpopular opinions but I’ve never seen that measure reduce the number of trolls in the long run

        • Honeyed Coffee
          3·
          2 years ago

          I hadn’t considered the idea of small communities at all. It would be quite interesting to see how far this develops. Thanks for taking the time to respond

      • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • cwagner@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          2 years ago

          Millions, probably. But most subs I’m in are small, and most subscribers don’t even post. Fragmenting those further just kills discussion.

          • displaced_city_mouse@midwest.socialEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            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.

          • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
            2·
            2 years ago

            i think its just another UX issues, reddit also had the concept of topics but it was rather weak and not leveraged. With a federation setup topical sorts should get more prevalence. Even getting some small communities togher might be a challenge, even some small comms dont post because reddit culture rather than the sub being small. “back in the day” you could easily find active communities of 10 users on a phpbb forum. Part of the trick? IMO, no internet points.

          • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
            1·
            2 years ago

            id disagree, this dynamic exists on discord with thousands of communities and hundred’s of redundant servers. What you are seeing as “people” is mostly “folks Stockholmed by reddit”

        • Honeyed Coffee
          1·
          2 years ago

          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

          • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
            4·
            2 years ago

            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.

      • PierreKanazawa@fedia.io
        1·
        2 years ago

        The way I see it, it’s like a small world model with layers and emerging hierarchies, instead of being flat.

    • alehel@beehaw.org
      3·
      2 years ago

      I agree. The problem is that many people who come to Lemmy don’t know how it works, and they gravitate to the biggest instances automatically. Heck, it’s what I did when I joined Beehaw. It wasn’t until a few days later that I understood the pro’s of this method. Fortunately, the Beehaw community rules really aligned with me, so I was lucky in that way.

    • MightyMjolnir@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      I can see pros and cons. More people all at once gives greater odds of some unique perspective to take hold that would otherwise only be seen in a single smaller sub community. But there’s also a more vested interest in the health of “your” community if it’s smaller.

      Baseball is a fun example because I’m really sad the biggest group so far has only like 80 subscribers. I NEEEEEED my fix of baseball chatter so I really want that one to grow, lol.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 years ago

        IDK, it seems that once a community gets big enough, it devolves into an echo chamber so the unique perspectives get drowned out. Sometimes the unique perspectives wins and slowly propagates through the community, and sometimes the unique perspective gets buried, but uniqueness is rarely highlighted.

        For example, I used to be active in /r/personalfinance (kind of a cesspool imo), and there have been times when my perspective won out and I saw it get parroted (often incorrectly), and I was later corrected by yet another perspective and that one got buried and to this day people are parotting my incomplete perspective instead of the more correct perspective. I tried correcting it, but ended up giving up.

        So a community needs to be big enough to have diversity, but not so big that the hive mind takes over. I think that magic number is somewhere around 10-100k people.