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.
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.
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.
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?
@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
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
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.
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.
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.