[HN Gopher] Attacked from Within (2009)
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Attacked from Within (2009)
Author : jacquesm
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-10-10 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (atdt.freeshell.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (atdt.freeshell.org)
| andrew_ wrote:
| This is a fascinating read, and should be printed and kept in the
| Library of Congress as a mile marker. The arguments the article
| makes and suppositions for how large communities eventually
| devolve describe perfectly what I'm seeing today; more peers
| turning away from social media and back towards smaller forums,
| abandoning followers/followings in favor of small, intimate and
| personable group chats on services like Signal, Telegram.
| mcc1ane wrote:
| (2009)?
| motohagiography wrote:
| The counter-intuitive point to me was that registration keeps out
| good posters while not limiting bad ones. But wow, yes, it's
| consistent with the SSC "asshole filter," concept where poorly
| enforced rules mainly reward rule breakers and directly
| disadvantage people who follow them. The emphasis on conversation
| over points seems smart, if still gameable the way search engine
| optimization games them with links.
|
| There is another incentive I think we've seen come to the fore
| since this was written in 2009, which is that crapflooding forces
| moderation, which creates governance, and this centralizes
| oversight and reduces the number of people you need to pressure
| to control the forum. No new divergent or decentralized forums
| can exist very long because it costs states and political parties
| themselves almost nothing to subvert it and install, or
| compromise, moderators and governors who can be leveraged to use
| the forum for their messages.
|
| I can't help but suspect the flood of porn, spam, racism, and
| hostility you get if you leave any method on a forum open is at
| least partially driven by political operatives who poison your
| archives, and then when you fix it, they can say, "hey, so you're
| the one responsible here, we need this favour from you, and if
| you don't give it to us, we are going to make sure your name is
| synonymous with all this content we may or may not have posted.
| Such bad luck."
| Dan42 wrote:
| This was an incredibly enriching read. It's too sad that such an
| article results in much fewer comments on HN than less insightful
| but more provocative ones.
|
| My main question is, since this was published in 2009, has anyone
| tried to apply these recommendations? And if so, what has been
| the result? A priori it sounds like a very plausible model, but
| it needs to be tested.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's funny that the first part of your comment is in a way
| proof that the article is correct!
|
| As for the second, Metafilter did, iirc with some success.
| [deleted]
| h2odragon wrote:
| slashdot and kuro5hin's leadership decisions _directly_ led to
| the downfall of their communities, as did dig.
|
| Rusty's fundraiser was a kick in the nuts to some of the last
| people trying to keep k5 alive and functioning. He hadn't wanted
| a "community" so much as caught one by accident when Slashdot
| went full cult. I've always thought that the SXSW trip showed
| them what being a "media darling" was going to be about, and they
| bailed out of that as quickly and safely as they could.
| pfraze wrote:
| My goodness, this was a good read. Whether I agreed with all the
| points or not, I found it well worth the time to read and think
| about
| roenxi wrote:
| This goes to an illusion found in social groups. Even very large
| communities are actually tiny - only a fraction of the members
| matter. For example, Hacker News is read by who knows how many
| thousands of people. But a huge amount of damage could be done to
| the quality of the community with a couple of tens of users being
| removed. The effect turns up a lot in companies too - very small
| nerve centres, large and powerful surrounding apparatus in which
| everyone struggles to take useful action.
|
| There isn't really a principled or ideological way to approach
| managing that small core. The only models that seem to work well
| are to form a community around a powerful dictator who gets to
| eject people from the core group (a moderator in the online
| setting, owner in the corporate setting, leader in a social
| setting, etc). Then pick one option out of:
|
| 1. Maintain a rigid and traditionalist culture that tries to keep
| the core pure of external ideas (I argue academia is a good
| example of this).
|
| 2. The hydra of democracy that lurches between catastrophe and
| farce, somehow usually getting good results as people rapidly
| reorganise around what works for them.
|
| 3. Collapse when the core group becomes corrupted or moves on.
| Kinrany wrote:
| I was trying to imagine a perfect system: several dictators
| that control access to their own chunks of scarce resources,
| plus several dynamically formed groups that operate by
| consensus, funded by one of the dictators.
|
| I think it ends up hard to distinguish from #2.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've heard it said that "The best form of government is an
| absolute monarchy. The worst form of government is an
| absolute monarchy."
|
| It depends -entirely- on the monarch.
|
| I'm not sure I buy the premise of the article, but I also
| don't have a viable alternative, which, in many communities,
| means that my opinion is worthless.
|
| I just got finished watching -yet another- documentary on
| WWII, and was struck by how so many of the reasons for the
| start of the war, were because a very few individuals had
| poorly peer-reviewed, anecdotally-tested philosophies, that
| they nonetheless were successful in making mainstream, by
| sheer force of personality (and arms).
|
| _" The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the
| world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports
| the strong probability that yours is a fake."
|
| "There's always an easy solution to every human problem;
| Neat, plausible and wrong."
|
| -H. L. Mencken_
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's #2 with freedom for people to express themselves on the
| channels that will accept them and organize themselves over
| channels, even creating new ones if needed. That basically
| creates a marketplace of ideas, that I guess it's what you
| wanted from the beginning.
|
| Beware of cancellation culture and power concentration.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I just looked at a HN comments dataset, for May 2018.
|
| Empirically the number of commenters, c, needed to "start x%"
| of conversation is sqrt(c) %. So 144 commenters gets you 12% of
| "conversations started".
|
| Where I define that as there being 144 commenters whose
| comments are the parents of >=12% of all comments.
|
| At 2500 commenters, 50% of all conversations are accounted for,
| etc.
|
| Note, this is just an empirical formula for 0 to 3k commenters
| on this dataset, ie., its just very close to sqrt(c) for this
| range. The general formula will be different, but approximated
| by sqrt(c) within a small range.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Interesting statistic, but does it mean that much? A board
| where the same 144 assholes agree or argue with each other
| all the time isn't likely to be that much fun for anyone
| else. 2500, not much more so.
|
| The community is the thousands of people that make up the
| long tail and usually say very little, individually. The
| sufferers of verbal diarrhea who stand tall in your
| statistics are just something you get in any community, not
| necessarily reflecting a larger opinion or leading it, just
| decorating.
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