[HN Gopher] Communities are not fungible
___________________________________________________________________
Communities are not fungible
Author : tardibear
Score : 199 points
Date : 2026-02-11 07:42 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.joanwestenberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.joanwestenberg.com)
| ttoinou wrote:
| It'd be helpful to cite which kind of economists / intellectuals
| make such claims. There are different incompatible schools.
| ajuc wrote:
| This is why open source for communication platforms is so
| important.
|
| Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will
| lose their communities.
| squeefers wrote:
| for discord emigres, teamspeak still exists, and for social
| media all you need is an old school forum that hosts videos and
| voila
| ckardaris wrote:
| The author of the article claims that a mere migration to a
| new platform does not solve the problem. It just fragments
| the community. I agree with that. For one or another reason
| not all people will migrate.
| baud147258 wrote:
| Discord's just a platform. When Discord will disappear, I don't
| think it would happen overnight and the communities would have
| time to decide where to relocate, hopefully for an open-source
| self-hosted solutions, but more likely for the next hot thing
| in instant communication. And it's not as if communities don't
| move from platform to platform already: like wasn't there a big
| wave of people moving from Digg to Reddit a while back?
| s_dev wrote:
| Online communities are far more transient and far less
| effective than ones rooted in geography. I'm not saying that
| they don't provide value or aren't worthwhile.
|
| Online communities can rebuild quickly are more resilient in a
| sense e.g. Digg to Reddit migration.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I agree with Joan here, communities aren't fungible. Building
| something where something already exists does carry a cost.
|
| But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the
| quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic,
| political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost
| to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn't
| build new high density housing because the new residents will
| never be able to replicate the community of the previous low
| density single family home neighbourhood.
|
| You can tell this is a NIMBY piece because it doesn't touch on
| how to build new communities, just that existing ones exist and
| new ones can't be built and even if they can they'll be poor
| imitations of the old ones. So instead of trying to build new
| things, let's preserve what we have already. It would have been
| more interesting and honest if it had explored the role of say,
| third spaces and how consciously creating the right conditions
| can lead to community formation.
|
| After all, even the communities that exist today were empty land
| once upon a time, until we built the infrastructure and community
| within. If all we ever did was preserve we wouldn't even have the
| communities today that we value so much.
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| > But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in
| the quiver of NIMBYs.
|
| How much are NIMBYs actually a problem these days? It seems to
| me that YIMBYs insisting on building anything, anything,
| anything at all, damn the cost, be it a privately developed
| five over one or a publicly funded ferris wheel downtown, are a
| much bigger issue now. We should be intentional about the
| communities we are developing (say, FUCKING PUBLIC HOUSING),
| and ideally not spoonfeeding capital more of our lifeblood as
| most YIMYs insist on
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I live in a city that consistently builds about 3-4% of the
| number of homes we need to build each year. We don't build
| rail, we don't electricity transmission infrastructure, all
| of which increases our cost of living.
|
| NIMBYs are doing great, I'd say.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| That would imply that 96-97% of population growth in your
| city immediately becomes homeless. Obviously, that is not
| the case.
| ziml77 wrote:
| No it doesn't. The number would be the percentage of
| _additional_ housing needed. Existing housing doesn 't
| suddenly disappear each year.
| econ wrote:
| I've seen people live with their parents till 40 while
| waiting for a tiny room that will cost 2 or 3 times what
| their parents pay for their large villa with large
| garden.
|
| Its quite simple to me. We the grown ups (together) are
| to facilitate housing for the kids. If we can't do that
| anymore we should ask ourselves why we don't want to do
| that anymore?
|
| Quite interesting is how the (now proverbial) 40 year old
| isn't really attacking the problem.
|
| I won't be around but I'm curious how their kids in turn
| will share the tiny room till 40.
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| > NIMBYs are doing great, I'd say.
|
| NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you
| tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for
| systemic dysfunction.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| What do you consider to be anglo incompetence in dwelling
| construction that _isn 't_ NIMBYism?
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be
| hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to
| death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a
| result.
|
| I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY
| harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-
| human.
|
| We need public fucking housing.
| roenxi wrote:
| You seem fairly keen on building public housing. Wouldn't
| that qualify you as a YIMBY? The YIMBYs are the lobby
| that tends to be pro-new-buildings.
|
| If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs
| would really oppose the idea.
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| > Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY?
|
| YIMBY is the pro-private-development lobby, as best I can
| tell. PHIMBY is the term I've seen.
|
| > If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs
| would really oppose the idea.
|
| I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.
| roenxi wrote:
| > I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.
|
| Well I'm not sure what you're proposing but if it can be
| characterised as "mass public housing" it sounds like a
| terrible idea on the face of it, and most people would
| probably oppose it on that ground. But the YIMBYs would
| have to agree that you're allowed to try it if you want,
| otherwise they'd be NIMBYs, on the basis that they are
| telling other people they can't build on their land.
| energy123 wrote:
| There is no trade-off or contradiction between public
| housing and YIMBY deregulation to allow more private
| development. I want both. They are complementary.
|
| There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they
| share some skepticism around private land ownership.
| FranklinJabar wrote:
| > There is no trade-off or contradiction between public
| housing and YIMBY deregulation
|
| Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.
| energy123 wrote:
| This is a fictitious trade-off. Deregulation (of parking
| minimums, height limits) helps ensure public housing is
| affordable for the taxpayer and environmentally friendly.
| If it also helps private developers as a side effect, and
| that is no loss for public housing.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| We get it, you're a commie. No need to constantly repeat
| that you want public versions of everything that already
| exists.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Most of NIMBY legislature and processes that block
| private construction also block public construction. So
| most YIMBY arguments to improve the situation apply to
| both public and private constructions. (Not to mention
| that public construction has a plenty of problems
| specific to it.)
| energy123 wrote:
| You can tell the difference by observing that, intra-city
| (not inter-city, inter-state, or inter-country, which
| introduces confounds), the suburban locations with the
| highest land values build the least. Enclaves like where
| Marc Andreessen lives, where his family unit has been
| involved in successful NIMBY activism. That is an outcome
| that can only be explained by asymmetric government
| interference due to more effective lobbying from
| politically active NIMBYs.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This sort of construction failure is present everywhere
| where the public is allowed to make extensive inputs into
| what gets built. It is not just a US-specific reaction to
| urban engineering by Robert Moses.
|
| We've let the pendulum swing too hard and instead of a
| dictatorship of technocrats, we have a dictatorship of
| vetocrats. A relatively small group of people, sometimes
| one single individual, can make new construction more
| complicated than lunar exploration, and there are indeed
| neighbourhoods whose permitting process took longer than
| the entire Apollo project.
|
| I live in a house built on a former brownfield, 32 semi-
| detached houses in total. The whole project was delayed
| by four years by one dedicated octogenarian who didn't
| like the idea of new people in "his" neighbourhood and
| pulled out all stops he could (or even couldn't).
| kjshsh123 wrote:
| Market housing will be expensive until you allow developers
| to build as much housing as the market demands.
|
| Non-market housing will have extremely long wait times if
| there is not as much of it as the market demands.
|
| And the NIMBYs and left-NIMBYs are still winning.
|
| Relevant substack article (Towers Don't Cause the Housing
| Crisis):
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/shonczinner/p/towers-dont-
| caus...
| aragilar wrote:
| It's not only the transition from low -> high that removes
| communities, there are multiple examples of public housing
| communities (of medium to high density) replaced by similar (or
| effectively low) density (as new expensive apartments) within
| Sydney.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| If you are in America, that 'empty land' was not 'empty land'.
| It was Native land. Displacement of Native Americans was
| genocidal and destroyed communities and cultures.
|
| Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about
| communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online
| communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the
| expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear
| down the old, behaviour patterns change. Take, for instance,
| the reddit re-design, which changed the page's culture. Or
| usage patterns of RSS post Google-Reader-shutdown.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| You will be pleased to know that I'm not from America, nor
| have I ever lived there.
|
| My point stands: there are a million excuses not to build
| more. And when we make that choice not to build, the costs
| are invisible but they definitely exist. But hypothetical
| benefits are not as easy to point to as the costs of
| building.
| Esn024 wrote:
| I think, unlike what the author writes, communities CAN be
| moved if they are sufficiently small and loyal to the leaders
| who do the move, and the leaders don't screw it up. Moreover,
| the move is sometimes an improvement.
|
| I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans
| moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB
| following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I
| can't think of anybody that got lost, and it was actually an
| improvement because the new discussion infrastructure was
| better than it had been before. The community didn't scatter to
| the winds, far from it; it consolidated and grew.
|
| Of course, such a situation is probably rarer with the
| enshittification these days, but it would be worth it to figure
| out when it works, too.
|
| And history is replete with stories of groups who became most
| successful AFTER a migration, or at least were not so
| negatively affected by one.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Digg to Reddit was a positive migration. I can think of many
| small Reddit communities that couldn't have flourished under
| Digg or the old phpBB style boards.
|
| Things can get better over time. When they don't acknowledge
| this I can't help but see the authors article as a dislike
| for any change of any kind.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sure all the people who somehow find themselves unable to find
| community, are neurotic as fuck, and who are lonely have some
| sort of theory for how community is formed. This is definitely a
| case of "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". This entire
| field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit without anything of
| any value in it. It's just pseudo-science dressed up in the
| language of science with some pithy lines of how "there's more to
| it than numbers" and garbage like that. It's just made up
| bullshit from people who really shouldn't have received a college
| degree.
|
| Out with this garbage. Defund the bullies.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| > This entire field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit
| without anything of any value in it.
|
| I'm here for the project blogs, and news but yeah I'm tired of
| the best-practice evangelists.
| metalrain wrote:
| Communities also evolve and devolve with time even without large
| external event. Maybe you don't feel the same belonging in the
| friend group after ten years or community grows to become
| something it wasn't in the beginning.
|
| Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but
| they can dissolve at any time.
| energy123 wrote:
| Impermanence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence
| kristoff_it wrote:
| This the strongest argument against building a community on top
| of proprietary services, especially if's a startup / VC money is
| involved. It's guaranteed to enshittify / sell out to a big
| company, and your community will crumble.
|
| That being said, I am guilty of helping building Zig communities
| on Discord, but in my defense none (literally none) of the FOSS
| alternatives was good enough at the time. And I'm also not really
| happy with plenty of the newer ones.
|
| I'm now working on my own take of what an open source Discord
| alternative should look like and I plan to move away from Discord
| by the end of the year. You can find it on codeberg, it's called
| awebo, I'm intentionally not posting a link since these are super
| early days.
| nsvd2 wrote:
| I'm guessing you looked at matrix and decided it wasn't
| suitable?
| nicbou wrote:
| On the other hand, these platforms are free and much easier to
| work with, especially for non-technical administrators.
|
| As of today, there just doesn't seem to be any good simple
| forum software. They all seem to need quite a bit of upkeep.
| Meneth wrote:
| Gratis in terms of dollars, but not free. You pay by letting
| them take your community hostage.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Gratis in terms of dollars, but not free.
|
| That is what "free" means.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| "Free" in English has more than one meaning. this has led
| to an attempt to be more clear by using 'libre' or
| 'gratis' loanwords to differentiate (see libreoffice,
| liberachat), but this isn't universally accepted.
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| Campfire by 37Signals [0] might be interesting to you. This can
| also serve as a foundation to add your own features on top of.
|
| [0] https://once.com/campfire
| nicbou wrote:
| Fantastic writing. The stone walls and fabric metaphor was
| brilliant. It's the sort of storytelling that made Steve Jobs'
| ideas so compelling (to me).
|
| I see the same value in community, especially as an immigrant
| helping other immigrants. Someone arriving in a new country is
| much more likely to be happy and successful if they quickly find
| a community there. Communities hold so much knowledge that is
| freely shared but rarely written down. Think immigrants helping
| each other navigate the unwritten immigration office policies and
| surfacing knowledge that is invisible to locals, let alone LLMs.
|
| I've been thinking about building an intentional community for
| years, mostly to surface that knowledge. Currently it's all
| happening in private groups on a dying Meta property. Previously
| it happened on a forum that unceremoniously went dark.
|
| But I am afraid that all of this will be in vain, and that the
| age of small forums is long gone.
| jpereira wrote:
| When thinking about online communities I think the lack of
| "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration
| and evolution. I fully agree with the author that you can't just
| pick up and move a community wholesale but irl we do see patterns
| of migration, disaporas, etc that bring along with them
| relationships and trust networks. That's been basically
| impossible to do online. The networks where most of us hang out
| are even straightforwardly antagonistic towards people leaving
| and maintaining their identities and relationships in anyway.
|
| I don't quite know how to articulate it but I really feel the
| social fabric of the internet has been limited hugely by this,
| and it's hard to seperate what is fundamental about community
| migration with what's an outcome of this limited circumstance.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically
| hampered community migration and evolution.
|
| Do you know what that sounds like? The "feature" that lets some
| credit card subscriptions follow you across credit cards
| although you'd like to get rid of them thank you very much.
|
| I don't want a global identity for all communities I'm part of.
| Joe from the bait and tackle group (i don't fish, is that a
| plausible fishing group name?) has no business knowing what
| games I play _unless I personally tell him_.
|
| Moreover, that nice store that gave the bait and tackle group a
| 10% discount has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS chasing me in MMO
| #245768.
| Carrok wrote:
| I can't disagree with this more. Even on discord I have four
| accounts for different contexts. One, my real name. Another, my
| gaming name. Another, my music/stage name. Another still, a
| different gaming name. Why? Because I don't want people in any
| of those contexts knowing anything about who I am in the other
| contexts. This is a feature, not a bug.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Agreed. I find it ironic that online communities thrived on
| the detachment between the virtual persona that posts are
| associated to and the real persona that is writing the posts,
| but for one reason or another some people insist in
| connecting both.
|
| It's a "need to know" basis, and I don't need to know your
| face, I don't need to know your gender, your age, where you
| are from, what job you have, I don't need to know your
| political affiliation, your religion, your other hobbies,
| what movies you watched, games you played, books you read,
| whom you follow, what communities you have joined. I don't
| need to know anything more than what the words in the post
| say.
|
| When you "need" to know what is real you end up with social
| media like "BeReal" which is just an enormous privacy
| nightmare (requiring you to take photos at random times) just
| to make sure that people aren't editing photos or showing
| only the good aspects of their lives to the internet. Since
| when has "posting on the internet" become synonymous with a
| panopticon?
| em-bee wrote:
| same here, i keep my game and tech groups on different
| accounts. that's one thing that keeps me from joining
| facebook. it doesn't allow pseudonymous identities.
| Tistron wrote:
| Having global identities that move with you between networks
| doesn't mean that your identities need to be singular nor
| openly tied to your government identity.
| esafak wrote:
| I don't think so. If you want to bring your identity re-use
| your alias, or oauth ID, otherwise enjoy the benefits of
| privacy.
| jpereira wrote:
| I guess I got my language wrong here. Maybe what I'm talking
| about is about portability more than global vs local.
| Identities should exist at a layer higher than any given social
| context, and should be "materialized" into that context with
| local information. It's not about using the same identity
| everywhere, it's about being able to take the identity where
| _you_ want to. Similarly it 's not about the same information
| being available everywhere, but information being relative to
| durable identities, not ephemeral ones.
| glroyal wrote:
| Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.
|
| Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people,
| institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over
| time.
|
| Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the
| geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born
| in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old
| neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy
| improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like
| the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes
| over them.
|
| Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many
| communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues,
| church congregations and political movements, all of which are
| subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.
|
| If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community
| itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any
| technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable
| of preserving it indefinitely.
| kijin wrote:
| An unchanging community is a dead community, period.
|
| Attempts to "preserve" a community, both online and offline,
| tend to end up preserving unhealthy power dynamics within the
| community as well, which would have been slowly replaced with
| something else if you had just let the community evolve (or
| disappear) naturally.
|
| Often, members of the community who benefit from the status quo
| are the ones who cry the loudest for such preservation.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| NIMBYs
| ux266478 wrote:
| I don't think NIMBYs have much of a community to begin
| with.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Nowhere in the article does it say that communities can't
| change. Communities are living, breathing organisms.
| supern0va wrote:
| >Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.
|
| The same is true of individual humans. And yet, that is not a
| great argument for killing them.
| ux266478 wrote:
| He not implying impermanence is an effective primary argument
| for killing a community, as in "This community is
| impermanent, therefore we must destroy it" in a vacuum.
| Additionally, humans and communities occupy different ranks
| in a moral hierarchy. I'm not sure your point is coherent.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Like many technical people, my personality naturally gravitates
| towards introverted behavior. I am very comfortable being alone
| for long periods of time, and in spending my day writing code
| or fixing bugs with just me and my computer.
|
| But I also enjoy interacting with other people. It just takes
| the right 'community' to draw me out of my shell. There have
| been periods of my life when I was outgoing, because I was in
| the right environment (college, certain jobs, sports, etc.).
| Other periods allowed me to retreat into my own isolated world.
|
| There just isn't a magic formula that produces the right kind
| of community that we want on demand.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| A lot of introverts are best served by parallel proximal work
| and the only stratification should be around noise levels of
| the activity.
|
| But frankly it's best for everyone, the isolated computer age
| has made in person get togethers have friction when they
| historically have had zero friction and were just things we
| did along the way.
|
| This is part of why I love going to NYC, as long as you
| understand and respect the local rules it's an incredibly
| positive, effortless social area, so much pleasant casual
| interaction.
| monideas wrote:
| Communities aren't fungible (in the sense that the actual
| particular culture and values of a particular group of people
| living in a particular area do have an extreme impact on that
| area) but also communities are not defined by particular areas
| that people live.
|
| People who are from the same community tend to settle in
| particular areas and I think that is what the author is getting
| confused by.
|
| Also many people in the developed world don't really have any
| community that they're a part of at all.
|
| If you're interested in learning more about this you can look up
| the phrase "covenantal vs majestic community".
| yugant10 wrote:
| Absolutely agree with the points put forward by the author. The
| online "communities" in their natural existence seem more
| fragmented as people in it cannot find a strong commonground for
| them to stick for a long time. (Generally talking about the
| numerous forums and communities that have gone dead in the past
| decade)
| talkingtab wrote:
| When we think about communities we need an effective model of
| what they are and how they operate.
|
| What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And
| Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community _afforded_ by
| Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and
| therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash
| mobs.
|
| That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of
| communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of
| social system would afford long term substantial change?".
|
| Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the
| community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf
| hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think"
| to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
|
| Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your
| language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try
| to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents
| prevents?
|
| Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on
| communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's
| "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to
| at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the
| community mechanism.
|
| Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I
| personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A
| gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that
| can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities +
| rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant
| behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could
| conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior +
| money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
|
| The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus
| part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of
| Science".
|
| This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the
| most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability
| to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising
| in it?
|
| [edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing
| this wonderful work.]
| esafak wrote:
| Twitter is organized around tags, which are all right, I
| suppose. It's greatest weakness that it is rooted in short
| messages -- sound bites -- which are not conducive to reasoned
| debate. Though they removed that technical limitation, the
| culture was solidified at that point.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy
| their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just
| put advertising in it?
|
| I'm taking this analogy for myself :)
|
| > what kind of social system would afford long term substantial
| change?
|
| In my experience over the last year, these things are true...
|
| First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital.
| You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed,
| but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you
| can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth
| communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not
| obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is
| something that many people understand intuitively but it took
| me a while to quantify it.
|
| Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the
| best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some
| political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm
| in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an
| emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't
| happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same
| people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being
| able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option
| that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only
| understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb
| take another time."
|
| Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make
| friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?"
| and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am
| still learning this skill.
|
| Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal
| communication comes down to trust and respect, especially
| respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person
| meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed
| bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-
| on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything
| about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna
| be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send
| someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they
| didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read
| it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in
| person because it shows that you are both respecting each
| other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking
| their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't
| name a person who likes that.
| talkingtab wrote:
| The point about trust and respect is a good insight.
| Especially in the context of our current internet. A friend
| once said to me "trust is the one thing you can't get on then
| internet". So how would one bring that trust to the internet?
|
| And the insight about meetings brought back memories of some
| horrendous meetings. At software companies. OMG. But very
| funny very long after the fact. Good points all. Trust,
| respect, reputation.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your
| language prevents you from thinking some things
|
| Last time I looked, Sapir-Whorf is almost universally
| discredited among linguists and cognitive scientists.
|
| The wikipedia summary:
|
| "The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations
| throughout its history. The strong hypothesis of linguistic
| relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that
| language determines thought and that linguistic categories
| limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by
| some earlier linguists pre-World War II since then it has
| fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists.
| Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence
| supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity that a
| language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions,
| without strictly limiting or obstructing them. "
| talkingtab wrote:
| It does not matter if a hypothesis is discredited if it helps
| you build an effective model that works. If you use a
| discredited hypothesis to make bread and make a great tasting
| and edible bread, then the hypothesis has value. Even if it
| is "wrong". Because it works.
|
| Here are some question for you: can you think of any things
| you cannot think of in your language? Hints. Beethoven, Van
| Gogh, 7. Can a democracy evolve from FaceBook? What kind of
| political system can evolve from FaceBook? Is there a
| language for Democracies? The important thing is not the
| answer, but the thinking.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| No, it doesn't work. Humans (at least) are very powerful
| metaphor users, and it is typically possible to discuss
| things for which there is no direct language in terms of
| metaphors (and analogies). We do this all the time, and it
| pretty much removes all bounds on what we can talk (and
| think) about with language.
|
| Lots of poetry makes no sense if you consider it to be a
| series of words to be literally interpreted according to a
| grammar rules and a dictionary. But it can often hint at
| meanings and ideas that can't be expressed directly.
|
| Of course, there are some things that always remain that
| are harder to get rid of. That's not "lack of language
| preventing you from thinking things", but rather
| "assumptions so deeply built into language that it is hard,
| though perhaps not impossible, to escape them".
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Look, I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was great when I
| learned about it, too. I love the movie Arrival (and the
| Ted Chiang story it's based on). But if you aren't a social
| scientist, it can be very appealing (and self-defeating) to
| latch onto a specific concept you heard about and try to
| create some grand theory of the world. This is fine, but
| it's sophistry, not deep thinking.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| After reading this I wonder if ifMud has survived 29 years
| because we use a modified perlMud that has an IRC-like channel
| communication system.
|
| We're not beholden to any commercial service and the mud is self-
| hosted by the community (generally the IFTF - IF Technology
| Foundation).
|
| No one could disrupt our community the way Discord or Reddit
| might.
| piffey wrote:
| First time hearing about ifMud despite being someone who spent
| a lot of time on MUDs and MUSHs in the past, hacking on various
| ones. Seems like a neat community and would love to hear more
| about it.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Head on over to http://ifmud.port4000.com/.
|
| Create a user, login, find the Adventurer's Lounge and hang
| out. We don't actually build or play in the mud anymore. We
| use the channel system to talk about "stuff and things" and
| really not a ton about IF anymore. A lot of politics these
| days.
|
| The most recent discussions were on:
|
| #sci/med/health/health #alt/conspiracy
| #misc/politics/gayrights #alt/animals/chickens #misc/cars
| #misc/AI #tech/.../programming
| em-bee wrote:
| many muds have/had those. there is intermud too. i guess ifmud
| just had the critical mass to keep people interested in
| communicating even though they stopped playing.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Chatting in the "Lounge" was always the starting point. The
| mud-building was what a few people did for kicks. ifMUD never
| had any systemic game play. The IF community has always had a
| strong core of people that interact daily. Some are on
| intfiction.org, some are elsewhere.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Is the blinking on that page driving anyone else nuts?
| econ wrote:
| Two things this reminds me of.
|
| I was once part of a "traveling" community that would sign up for
| every new platform. A good few tech bloggers among us. We would
| meet again and again but the community still failed long term
| despite everyone artificially trying to make it work. I got one
| good friend out of it, whom I never talk to.
|
| I one time tried to root in a new city, I talk with everyone, buy
| cups of coffee for reluctant strangers, had a ton of fun and a
| ton of laughs but nothing permanent grew. I made two good friends
| whom I never talk to.
|
| In my home town I must have 1000 people I almost never talk to.
| Adds up to a lot of talk. Familiar faces everywhere.
| kjshsh123 wrote:
| Classic slam dunk on economists, except I think it's a bit of a
| miss. They're a classic scapegoat and punching bag but there's
| tons of economics research on community.
|
| Saying economics doesn't model community is a bit like saying
| physics doesn't model color because some models ignore wavelength
| variation. It depends which models you're looking at and what
| their purpose is. There is substantial economic research on:
| Social capital (e.g., Putnam, though he's political science
| adjacent; economists like Glaeser formalize it) Network effects
| and network structure Repeated games and reputation Religious
| participation and club goods (Iannaccone's work is central here)
| Identity economics (Akerlof & Kranton) Trust and informal
| institutions Household bargaining models Matching theory, where
| who you match with specifically matters
|
| I think the fact that communities are not fungible is frankly
| obvious. Fact is communities do die, and sometimes there are long
| run benefits to consider.
|
| The challenge is actually nurturing and valuing community which
| this post doesn't actually grapple with.
|
| E.g. the problem with Robert Moses wasn't just development. It
| was the style of development which was inherently anti-community.
| Nurturing a community requires common space where people bump
| into each other harmlessly. Highways dividing neighbourhoods, for
| people in their private cars to get to neighbourhoods with no
| commercial life and large setbacks between homes.
|
| It's not that Robert Moses didn't realize community isn't
| fungible. It's either that he didn't realize how bad it would be
| for community or that he just didn't value community in the first
| place.
| moon2 wrote:
| That's what capitalism does - it isolates individuals and
| destroys communities. No wonder why so many people are
| befriending AIs and there's a "loneliness epidemic" going around.
|
| When it comes to physical communities (e.g. neighborhoods), I
| think about some neighborhoods in Sao Paulo that are being
| destroyed by buildings and construction sites everywhere [1]. So
| many neighborhoods full of stories and friendships and people who
| took care of each other, now becoming part of this massive
| verticalization, speculation and isolation. Neighbors have to
| leave due to construction companies' harassment. The ones that
| decide to stay have to live without their friends around, in
| neighborhoods that grow more dangerous, with worse traffic, with
| less small businesses and without knowing who are their new
| neighbors (which aren't even long term living). Their houses look
| exactly like Carl Fredricksen's house from Pixar's Up.
|
| When it comes to digital communities, I can only be reminded of
| how Orkut and MSN defined lots of adolescences in Latin America.
| Orkut literally had the concept of communities, where people
| gathered around similar interests (just as the early web's
| forums). I made a lot of friends in Orkut and MSN Messenger, some
| of them are still my friends after more than a decade. Facebook
| tried to recreate the idea of communities (with their groups),
| but Facebook is pretty much dead for younger people. And
| Instagram is just so isolating. It has a whole lot of
| standardized and algorithmically curated content that alienates
| you from other human beings.
|
| I believe the reason why Orkut (owned by Google) was killed was
| that they wanted more users, maybe to compete with Facebook. But
| Orkut was too localized, it basically talked to Brazil and some
| other countries in Latin America, and India, where it was
| created. After killing Orkut, Google invested a lot on Google+
| (do you remember that fiasco??).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCIQoN0fUE0
| ArcHound wrote:
| As there are no references to "Seeing like a state" by James C.
| Scott, let me recommend it. A great read that explains how hard
| is to create a city from scratch, how illegible community value
| is and how big organizations cannot see forest for the trees when
| using KPIs.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Best quote: "When Alice doesn't need "a neighbour" but needs that
| neighbour, the one who watched her kids that time, the one who
| knows she's allergic to peanuts. The relationship is specific,
| and specificity is the enemy of fungibility."
|
| The memory of what the community was or had eventually vanishes.
| Jane Jacobs (referenced in the article) was the reason that I
| learned that the sidewalks in NYC's West Village weren't always
| so narrow. They were made narrow to accommodate more cars, which
| in some ways don't help geographic community strength.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The companies don't care about communities, or humans really.
| They want to make money.
|
| If some social media website has no community, and has only
| negative effects for its users, but makes money, that is a
| positive outcome for its owners.
|
| It's a net negative for society perhaps, but the owners don't
| have to care about that part.
| an-allen wrote:
| And neither are people. And beware of anything that treats them
| like they are.
| tech_ken wrote:
| This is basically what I think of as the "fundamental problem of
| conservation ecology", ie. that 'conserving' an ecosystem
| inherently changes it. The pre-human state definitionally could
| never be recreated (or maintained) by human hands, it will always
| reflect the contributions of its human stewards. So if
| conservation is fundamentally impossible, what's the real goal of
| conservation ecology? Is it doomed to simply create "theme
| parks"? Or can we be said to meaningfully preserve something
| (even if it's a changed or debased form of the original).
| Conservation ecology is what happens when these stupid
| philosophical musings bump into actual engineers willing to try
| to do it.
|
| Human communities (even digital ones) ultimately have the
| character of an ecological system IMO (albeit in a more
| allegorical sense). What the author calls fungibility I might
| call conservation; weird Twitter accounts "migrating" to Bluesky
| is sort of like pandas surviving primarily in zoos. Some element
| of the original system is kept, but ultimately the "conservation"
| is more like "recreation" or "homage". Does that mean that it's
| futile to try? Or is there some sense in which we can have
| meaningful translation of the relationship web from one medium to
| the next? Maybe we don't even care about maintaining the system;
| if it's just the biodiversity we prize then maybe pandas in zoos
| forever is enough.
|
| I don't think this is adding anything new to what the author is
| saying per se, but I find the parallels interesting to muse
| about.
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