Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces
by derefr on Thursday February 13, 2020 @11:58AM
(#22319249)
> Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints.
I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make.
There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums.
But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that.
I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's.
There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.
I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make.
There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums.
But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that.
I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's.
There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.