- The first day of September 1993 was the beginning of an eternal September, a calendar month whose days stretched to infinity. Prior to this infamous day, there would be an influx of noobs onto Usenet each September. These were the arriving college freshman. They were not legion. They were few enough that they could be corralled and assimilated by Usenet veterans.
September 1993, however, was different. It was the day the gates of hell were thrown open and never-ending torrent of demonspawn descended on Usenet – like locus, they devoured the community.
These locus were AOL users. In September of 1993, the company granted Usenet access to their entire user base, which triggered an unending deluge of noobs into the Usenet community. Thus began the September that never ended.
The author compares small communities to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, which has been 'solved,' with the best strategy being 'tit-for-tat.' Iterated versions of coordination games rely on reputation being known by all players. As communities scale, the number of players rises, and the incentive to coordinate falls because it's more difficult to enforce reputational costs to bad behavior. Except online communities do have reputation and rewards/costs associated with behavior, usually in the form of points or "karma" or some other distinguishing feature. But, even in small communities, reputation systems do not prevent trolling, flaming, or crapflooding (i.e. 'defection'), and community voting is a notoriously bad system for establishing the true quality of interaction/contribution. Moderators who can ban defectors are still necessary, because reputation systems aren't enough. Further, the prisoner's dilemma model fails to describe his prior example: the awful YouTube post. This is not a 'defection' in the way that trolling or flaming is. It is either an actual idiot or a foreign language speaker writing broken English. It's not a malicious post, even if it is useless noise. Scale will bring in anti-community trolls, but it will also bring in idiots, teenagers, and people otherwise unable to contribute at a high level (foreign language speaker, people posting from their phone, etc). Their earnest but shitty contributions aren't a defection and the iterated prisoner's dilemma reputational model does not take into account their effect on the signal-to-noise ratio and community decay.
Isn't one of the unique aspects of the hubski experience that users choose how large their community will be? I can follow and share with familiar names that challenge my thinking and offer me new perspectives. My hubski experience is largely governed by my choices.
This also happens to me whenever I post from my phone. Do you use an iPhone, perchance?
It happens to me occasionally. Usually, this is because as a page is loading after I submit I hit submit again because I'm a very inpatient person. The result =duplicate posts.
Did you intentionally hit submit twice this time, or is it just a coincidence? I'm on my phone right now. Here goes nothing...
Did you intentionally hit submit twice this time, or is it just a coincidence? I'm on my phone right now. Here goes nothing...
It happens to me occasionally. Usually, this is because as a page is loading after I submit I hit submit again because I'm a very inpatient person. The result =duplicate posts.
I guess I am a naive person who believes that giving and doing good to people I will probably never meet again spreads this spirit of kindness further and so on... Yet again, maybe I am saying those nice things here because I know that I will interact with the users here more often than for example on reddit (according to the article), nice food for thought I wonder what will happen with hubski, are there any
Graphs of user growth here in hubski for the last 3 years? mk
I don't think we've made any graphs of user growth here. One of the things we want to be able to do is give users the ability to make Hubski feel like a small community even when we do grow to the point where this article says we'd start to have problems. One of the prevalent pieces of advice for improving your reddit experience is to find small subreddit communities for things that you like and just subscribe to them. Hubski has even been described as a "like a really nice subreddit". You have to ask around to get that kind of advice, though. When you first start out you're just thrown into the mess of defaults and an alternative experience isn't shown as an option. Hopefully we'll be able to accommodate different user experiences, from those who want to feel like they're a part of a huge community, to those who just want a quiet space to discuss their few niche subjects.
I tend to look at hubski as a bit of a /r/maturediscussion. I'm not even sure if that sub exists, especially considering that it's reddit and the sub would be quickly vandalized by trolls. I think hubski will always be small, unless significant changes occur. I don't want those changes to occur. We've had significant influxes with thousands of new people visiting the site, but only a few stay per thousand. That shows hubski can't appeal to the masses in its current form--a good thing. Anything that appeals to the masses is simply increasing its odds of failure; once you appeal to everyone, you appeal to nobody on a personal level.
Could we compare hubski to a collection of small village communities in a larger nation of users that occasionally may interact. These interactions are,by and large, peaceful and thoughtful due to the well written constitution and it's bill of rights as created by the founding fathers of the United States of Hubski.
That seems too much like how reddit sees itself. Traditionally in online communities each community is it's own kingdom with a benevolent dictator. This is what reddit went with for a model for subreddits: each a kingdom unto itself with a top mod having final say over everything. This is why when you complain about some subreddit to the admins they'll say you should join another community or create one of your own. Not that I really have a better analogy to offer.