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.

  • Honeyed Coffee
    4•1 year 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
      3•1 year 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
        3•1 year 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.

          • manitcor
            4•1 year 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•1 year 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
              5•1 year 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•1 year 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
      2•1 year 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.

        • @displaced_city_mouse@midwest.socialEnglish
          4•1 year 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
          2•1 year 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.

      • Honeyed Coffee
        1•1 year 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
          2•1 year 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.

      • @alternativeninja
        1•1 year ago

        I agree but I think the days of phpbb forums are unfortunately over. I don’t think people will switch back to them.

        • manitcor
          1•1 year 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”