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.
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
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.