Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enough, gets ruined?

Re:Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enou... by brailsafe on Friday May 13, 2022 @02:41AM (#31364153)

It depends how you define community. If the game's growth discourages the people you actually play with from playing, then sure, it kills your community. If your neighborhood becomes too expensive to live in, your community will be crushed. Pretty much anything involving scaling a factory of any kind will necessarily favour broad applicability, but whether that means your community within that stops being fun depends largely on what those changes are and over how long of a timespan they occur. In WoW, people like to cling to the classic version of the game that they played when they were a kid and have since changed. Those changes were obviously good in a lot of ways, but also negative in others. Those people could argue that changes since then killed their community, but really what happened is that tradition is inherently stagnating in some ways.

The hilarious corporate mantra of buying out a startup and keeping it a "startup with much better funding that runs independently but within the company" is a joke tho seriously

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Re:Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enou... by neonsunset on Friday May 13, 2022 @04:48AM (#31364904)

I think it is more insidious than that. Take for example Subnautica - an awesome indie game unlike many others, not without its issues but well loved and made with care. After the initial project success, the team started (and eventually released) another project - Subnautica: Below Zero.

However, in the middle of development it started to have issues namely around the decisions to add personality to the player character, character's gender and additional plot lines based on this, characters received voice overs, then it was redone, then plot was changed, people left, etc. The original game had no "main character" per se while Below Zero did and my general impression on reading all the drama was that the game was no longer influenced by people harboring love for the craft and those who genuinely wanted to play it but rather "others" whose interest was using this medium as yet another proxy to push their agenda.

Back in the days me and my friends used the term "normies" but I don't think this term would precisely describe what's happening. There are many people one would describe more or less "normal" who are kind, respectful, and don't degrade the quality of communities they are part of. So here comes the question - who are those people who destroy communities and what we can do to stop them at scale?

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Re:Ask HN: Is it true that any community that grows big enou... by brailsafe on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:36PM (#31373232)

Oh, that's a matter of scope creep and bad actors. I have people in my real life community who suck the life out pf any interaction with them. Always going on about victomhood or gender or whatever, when really everything is getting along in a healthy way without them. The only way to stop this is to avoid giving them an audience, and to vote literally and figuratively with whatever you have. Don't buy the game and voice your reason. Or try the game and see if you still like it. A lot of the time it is easy to be annoyed that intruders are taking over, but some of that comes down to pre-existing bias. Most of the people who hate gays for example haven't really met any.

But ya, vote with what you can vote with. Start your own company that you control etc..

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