[HN Gopher] What Makes a Community? (2020)
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What Makes a Community? (2020)
Author : panic
Score : 19 points
Date : 2021-02-26 13:19 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buttondown.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.email)
| v_london wrote:
| This is very interesting and insightful. I 100% agree with the
| notion that small communities require an organiser to keep things
| going.
|
| I personally believe social media can be a positive force in
| building better human connections online. Because I think none of
| the existing platforms are optimising for this (better
| connections and discussions), I've been working on it myself. I
| believe group chats with a small circle of friends are the rare
| form of social media that actually works well today, so we're
| trying to build something where you could be connected to group
| chats with people you may not know in advance. In this way, the
| social media app would act as the "organiser" of these micro-
| communities, which would hopefully grow into real friendships.
|
| Thoughts? We're looking to launch a landing page next month, and
| the app itself (which will run on the web browser) in a couple
| months.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Ideas like this come and go every month. If someone open
| sourced something like that, so I could host it myself, I'd be
| down. But these ventures always either fail completely, or are
| bought up by some big company, which guts the core product and
| leaves it to whither into obscurity.
|
| I would love something like this, I just wouldn't trust it to
| last more than a few years. I'm sorry to be negative about your
| venture, and I truly do hope it works out, because the world
| needs a small scale technology platform for sending chats and
| files easily.
| lc3sim wrote:
| I thought you were going to take your pitch in a different
| direction.
|
| I have found myself a part of a community organizations which
| practically live in the stone age. There are a lot of people
| and groups who are GREAT at organizing, but there aren't any
| technologies (besides phoning, text, and email) that one can
| use to enhance their ability to organize.
|
| My best advice would be to unplug from the engineering
| community - see what real people are living through. Use
| technology to enhance arms length organization. I feel like you
| are doing what MeetUp is doing - creating a platform for human
| connections. I apologize in advance, I'm certain that I don't
| have the full picture.
|
| People are tired of platforms. Give them a tool and let them
| use it how they see fit. Consider the blog post author. Think
| of a tool that allows them to better organize and communicate
| with their community of hobbiest painters. Tool to engage with
| other humans, not platform to spread your seed.
| rmason wrote:
| As someone who has run a user group for over twenty years this
| rings quite true.
|
| I take as personal inspiration the Gandhi quote:
|
| Be the change that you want to see.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The #1 thing I've learned from the covid-19 pandemic, is that
| online channels are not, and never will be, an adequate
| substitute for IRL. At best, they are a temporary half-measure,
| to keep the relationships on life-support until they next meeting
| IRL.
| v_london wrote:
| Do you feel this way about all kinds of online interactions? Or
| are Zoom calls or group chats better than, lets say, your
| Twitter feed or Reddit threads?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Zoom calls and group chats are definitely less bad than
| Twitter or Facebook or Reddit, but they are nowhere close to
| as good as IRL.
|
| Note that I have worked mostly remote jobs for a couple years
| now, so I'm not opposed to partially remote, but frequent
| visits to the client IRL are necessary, and if you're part of
| a team it's even more important to meet together.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Only a few more months!
| hendersine wrote:
| I think of a community as sort of the inverse of a mob. A mob
| shares a space for a short time, unifies around a single shared
| idea or emotion, and destroys the awareness of the individual.
| A community shares a space for a prolonged time, unifies around
| a hodgepodge collection of ideas, and maintains the level of
| individual thought and awareness.
|
| The quality and persistence of the space is critical. Online
| communities certainly do exist, but the space is ephemeral and
| lower fidelity than shared physical space because the range of
| possible forms of communication is constrained.
| GoRudy wrote:
| Some of the best online communities I have been a part of tend to
| have a strong founding member / figure head. At advrider.com we
| have that in Chris MacAskill.
|
| Started with the intention to share info and ask questions
| because he had no where else to find the info he needed.
|
| He developed a culture around sharing of knowledge, experiences
| and empowered a team of moderators.
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