What you discuss regarding the enabling mechanisms of college towns is fair commentary, though it should be noted that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, excluding the rapid boom/bust variants, don't give rise to the cultural aspects of a college town. Tourist attractions may, if, say, arts and culture are significant elements of this (say, a Sedona or Ashland, OR, or Bayreuth), though it can be difficult to disentangle tourism from other elements for larger destinations (Disneyland and Hollywood in the Los Angeles region, San Francisco as distinct from its economic and tech-sector activity). Heavily merchantilistic cities can draw wealth, but are less effective with culture (again, trying to isolate for those without a major academic centre, so NYC, London, and Paris would be confounded examples). But a Hong Kong or Shenzen or Dubai or Singapore whilst having an extraordinary merchantile / trading role, does not have a commensurate cultural or academic one.
And at the other end of the scale, you can have college towns which are too successful. I'd put Stanford and environs here: Stanford, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Altos, say. These are so wealthy that the cultural amplification of the educational institution is dampened by the lack of affordability of the region (housing, etc.). Several of the US East Coast college towns have similar issues.
There's still something particular about the college town dynamic, and I think the points I've raised are fairly key to it.
Regarding Reddit:
The larger encompassing community was useful for a time, but with brigading and even just having a smaller sub appear on the front page or cross-posted to a larger one, the local in-group culture could very easily get overwhelmed. (This is hardly specific to Reddit, and there were examples of trolling and other cross-newsgroup attacks on Usenet.)
Reddit does little to foster conversation. I still miss Google+'s dynamic of having a Notifications pane which showed all threads in which there was ongoing discussion (whether it directly involved you or not), and both presented those threads and enabled replying directly from the Notifications pane. This meant that:
- Conversations could continue for a prolonged period of time. Days, weeks, even months or years in instances. And do so productively. (Yes, the thread host would have to delete spam and trolls, but a well-tended thread was a delight to behold.)
- Other participants would be made aware of the ongoing discussion, and could choose to rejoin if they wished. Or to opt out (mute the thread). Again, with a principled and intelligent host, this could result in long-ongoing discussions.
On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only to the author of the comment replied to. There's no sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller region, say, the three or five preceding comments' authors). This means that conversation tends to die rapidly on Reddit.
For HN there's a similar issue, though with the "Threads" link it's possible to see if there's been general response to a specific comment of yours. There's no notification mechanism, and unless a third party is higher up on the thread, they're not going to see the activity within their own Threads view.
The G+ mechanism can be abused, of course, and is again affected by scale. On G+, a "thread" consisted of an initial post and up to 500 replies, a limit I saw reached occasionally. This limited total participation, though it seemed to be sufficient for most discussions. I'd make a practice of splitting off sub-discussions or linking a continuation thread to preserve integrity of the origin discussion. With 500 comment slots, 20 people would have an opportunity to comment 25 times each, which is reasonably comprehensive.
One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and underpowered, in terms of features, notably search) is the built-in wiki. That could serve far more than it does as an informational repository. There are some subreddits which make good use of the wiki, far too many which ignore it completely. Not being able to search the wiki means it's a bit of a roach motel (text checks in, it never checks out), but ... the concept is useful.
though pg also set [HN] up in terms of direction and focus.
[...] Both execution and constitution matter, IMO.
that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, [...] Tourist attractions [...]
- The (putative, anyway) core mission of colleges is one of education and research. There's a hell of a lot of other stuff going on at colleges, to the point where that core mission often feels like an afterthought, but it is a unique factor relative to the other examples we can name.
- While colleges sure love to suck up money, it is not their core focus in the way that it is for a corporation.
- Colleges have a markedly younger demographic than just about any other money faucet we could name
There are more of course.
And at the other end of the scale, you can have
college towns which are too successful. [...]
These are so wealthy that the cultural
amplification of the educational institution is
dampened by the lack of affordability of the region
On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only
to the author of the comment replied to. There's no
sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller
region, say, the three or five preceding comments'
authors). This means that conversation tends to die
rapidly on Reddit.
Ultimately I don't find this to be a dealbreaker but it is for sure a shortcoming.
One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and
underpowered, in terms of features, notably search)
I don't know what the solution is there. A wiki is such a different paradigm w.r.t. a threaded discussion forum. And their functionality overlaps. I don't know how you weld them together.
To really make it work in a synergistic way there'd need to be some thoughtful integration. First we'd need to define the purpose of each.
This is an admittedly arbitrary distinction but IMO it would be useful to have the wiki be a place for higher-quality information that has been accepted as canonical or at least reliable by the mods and the community.
This would need to be coupled with a way to "bless" or "promote" information from discussion threads to the wiki. And a helpful and magical way to automatically surface relevant wiki information in threads, for example if you are asking a question whose answer already lives in the wiki.
The wiki search should, as you say, be better. But the underlying problem there is split-brain syndrome: the bit of information you want could lie in the threads and/or the wiki. At a bare minimum there needs to be a unified search.
The notion of having both an ongoing transactional dialogue and an accumulating finished work, somewhat analogous to a financial journal (transactions) and statements (finished works) is something that I've long wanted to bring to online discussion. Again, Wikipedia (and similar projects) most closely resembles this, though even back in Usenet days there were newsgroups and the periodically disseminated FAQs of accumulated knowledge and behavioural norms.
Determining what each should do is key. There's a long history of discussions being bundled up as books (lectures, meeting notes, bull sessions, etc.), of serialised publication, of collected letters or other epistolary exchanges.
There's the case of Stack Exchange which as I see it somewhat has the opposite problem: it tries to treat the transactional discussion as the finished work, with a great deal of feather-ruffling. I'd think that SE would benefit from a different approach in which the live / current Q&A discussions are allowed to happen, but examples of especially good answers being canonicalised and surfaced in search, perhaps refactored into articles.
Another problem with knowledge corpora is that they both get out of date and/or are subject to malicious (or simply uninformed or misguided) edits with time. These are problems which long predate online versions and variants (one joy of mine was discovering a 19th-century encyclopaedic edit war: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...>).
Ultimately, this requires real work, with procedures and time devoted to review, screening, and updating articles. It's not what every group will want to take on, but some most definitely would see benefits.
General agreement otherwise.
Two, there's no direct profit motive with HN. Can't underestimate that. It is optimized for user happiness rather than anything else.
These factors work great for an online community but they don't have easy analogues in the physical realm.
I agree that college/university towns in America are generally pretty nice places. Not utopias but generally cooler than others, as a vast generalization.I always see them as kind of a... happy byproduct of a flawed system.
Ideally everybody would have access to higher education. But we don't. And in fact the average lifetime earning advantage of a bachelor's degree was about $1 million cumulative USD last I checked. So colleges can charge a lot of money, and it is still a good deal, and people will pay that money, and the government subsidizes a lot of this via grants and loans.
So you have a gigantic money faucet pouring money into the town, and a lot of people (students, faculty, and graduates who never move away) who have certain demographic traits: because we have an unequal society, those who are able to attend higher education tend be more intelligent and/or more driven and/or are more educated and/or enjoy more privilege.
And that certainly creates a certain kind of place, although I think the key factors are hard to duplicate elsewhere w.r.t. founding intentional communities. Although, maybe that is the ultimate lesson: found your intentional community in the shadow of a giant money faucet and/or a privileged niche community.
Yeah. Small is key. I founded a (now defunct) online niche community that had a very committed fanbase. I viewed smallness as our moat, actually. Big players could never be as small as us; could never have the "small town" or "local bar" feel. This is still an extremely viable business plan for a lot of things IMO if you are willing to stay small and target a max of like... several fulltime employees. There is a lot you can do with a business if e.g. $250,000-$500,000 is your target revenue and are content with that rather than trying to conquer the world, but that requires you to bootstrap and avoid investors more or less.I think Reddit's approach was awesome, actually. A bunch of small, mostly-independent communities (subreddits) under a single roof.
It would work if they could downsize and have a razor focus on the core functionality people actually care about. But no, they have to enrich investors, and pay SV rent and SV salaries, and therefore can't turn a profit even on hundreds of millions of revenue.
I hope a leaner operation takes their approach and runs with it. I have seen a few mentioned in this discussion.