Daily Tildes discussion - A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

This is definitely something to bear in mind during the tildes development. So far it's been going pretty well, with everyone behaving "correctly", with one (or is it two?) exceptions. But the more invites that get sent out, the more chance there is for the site to get overrun by those negative behaviors.

Edit: Having now finished the article, I have to say I really enjoy the last part, specifically the idea of a kind of segregation of users with different capabilities. Sounds a lot like the trust system that's been talked about a bit.

If that's only a small piece of what you've read in preparation for creating this community, then I'm impressed. Bravo.

A lot goes into making a healthy community. I think the one driving force here is that we're all looking for quality content and discussion. For now, I have high hopes for this community.

This is incredibly dense. Tonnes and tonnes of different things in it and I can see many different reasons you would want this community to read it Deimos. Some things that stood out a lot to me (that aren't addressed numerically) were -

Groups defending themselves incorrectly. This occurs in company teams too, people can end up leaning towards negative behaviours that prevent progress from occurring or being done. The task that a group is setup to do will be sabotaged by group behaviours that attempt to not do the job of the group. This is why you techie types have often heard the phrase "actionable" within management of teams. Marshalling a team towards performing what is actionable as part of the goal of the group is important because taking no actions is not acceptable. Do things that move forwards, don't just do things that sandbag and suggest that no things should change on account of the many issues surrounding the changes. Recognising what is actionable and moving forwards with it is important. If the net-benefit of doing something one way or another is questionable then testing to provide data that removes its questionability should be performed.

Not everything is programmable. Groups exhibit certain behaviours and sometimes you can not fight this through programming. Whatever you do will be fought against by the users, or even the core. It is extremely important for community moderators and community designers to understand this notion. Systems must sometimes firmly accept that certain behaviour can't be stopped and so you must build around the acceptance of this behaviour occurring. It will always occur. A comparative (but not exact) example of this occurring that springs to my mind is users who tell people "search first" when anyone comes into a community asking a question. They act under the mindset that they can fight against users who ask questions without searching when in fact it is an impossibility. People will always ask without searching and fighting it is useless. Working with the knowledge that this will occur and making the community and better place with the understanding that it will occur (these duplicates can't be left unanswered because they appear in google unanswered harming future users) is better than fighting it uselessly or worse - wasting resources trying to magically stop users from doing it, you won't stop them. Ever.

No service is permanently scalable. This comes from a quote I feel I need to add to explain it:

The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

What this brings out to me is something that I have noticed in attempting to grow a discord community I operate that receives several hundred thousand chat messages per month. A chat channel has a ceiling for communication. There is a maximum number of people that can participate in conversation at any single point in time before the chat is moving too quickly for further participation to occur. This causes two issues in a chat community. The first is that your new users do not participate as easily as they did before the chat became so large and active. You have a harder time getting new users to participate because they are put off from participating due to the high activity level. It is easier to just watch. The second issue is that your existing users don't participate when things move too quickly either, they lurk and watch conversation instead. You want to get everyone to participate spread out across your entire community simultaneously but instead you find the whole community concentrated in a small space focused on one thing.

This occurs on ALL communication platforms in one way or another. It occurs on forums, but at a different speed. It occurs in email groups, at a different speed. It occurs in voice chat groups, at a different threshold. It occurs on reddit in threads, on /r/all, at a smaller scale in subreddits, it occurs everywhere. Super threads with 5000 responses in just hours have 4500 comments that are nearly pointless. They aren't being seen by anybody and they aren't being heard. Smaller subreddit communities and threads gain effects similar to it, I don't have the data but I want to say it's in the 200-400 comment range, further comment activity drops off at some point or another and new people to the thread may just read the existing comments. I'm speculating a bit based on general feeling from experience.

I'm not saying any of the above is a bad or good thing. I am saying that it is a fact that occurs and is worth keeping in mind for the marshalling of user behaviour and building of a quality design. It will occur on all communication platforms in one way or another. I do not know of a platform where it does not occur one way or another.

Whew So now that those are out of the way - Talking about the things that are actually covered numerically:

1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues. There are two attractive patterns. One says, we'll handle technology over `here, we'll do social issues there. We'll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we'll have one track here and one track there. This doesn't work. It's never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction." I can do no better than to point you to those documents.

This ties into the "You can't solve everything with programming" point. - You must accept that social behaviours will occur and build programming to work WITH the behaviours, not AGAINST the behaviours. People will exhibit behaviours you are foolish to try and fight. You can't fight them. Please god. Learn from history. Learn from the same thing hundreds of community creators have been forced to learn from time and time again.

2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."

Allow your core to differentiate themselves visibly from the rest of the community. They are going to see themselves differently from the rest of the community anyway. They are going to define themselves if you do not define them as a service. They will act as a pressure group on the service together and you need to work with them to keep them happy while simultaneously working to prevent the group from being the earlier point "A group is its own worst enemy", working against themselves and bringing a halt to any change and improvement ever happening, or worse, harming the service. The core and the service working together while under the influence and marshalling of the service (and being liked by the core knowing full well they are being marshalled) is the ideal. This requires a great deal of trust and (in my opinion) good communication between the service and the core.

I also think it's important to add that (in the context of an only community) the core is not the mods. The core is your most active and socially aware userbase who have interlocking relationships with other core members. They might include some mods, but they are far far larger than just a modteam of the service. In community management this group (the core) is usually covered by the golden rule - that 10% of the users participate while 90% lurk.

3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.

Covered already in my response to 2 - understand that "the core" is a pressure group on the service and not listening to the core will cause relationship breakdown between the service and the core. Communication between core and service is important to stop this. But the core understanding this concept is also highly beneficial. The core don't want to see their service fall apart either. But the core doesn't always recognise when they're performing the earlier "the group is its own worst enemy". Juggling all of these concept is hard. Being open to their existence internally and juggling them all (from both sides, the service and the core) is key to preventing them in the long term.

I think it's important to understand that, unfortunately, ensuring that the core is educated on all of these concepts for the benefit of preventing "the group is its own worst enemy" from occurring is futile as the group (users and core) scale in size. Communicating with the whole to educate them on it(tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions - as growth scale occurs over time) just is not possible.

A juggling act will occur. Mistakes will occur. Back and forth will occur. Working to prevent it is an ongoing permanent issue that only gets harder and harder the larger and larger things become.

Numerical things to design for

1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.

The point here somewhat was that the group (users and core) will police themselves via reputation if identity is recognisable. People generally try to conform to the rules of a group, the community culture, the behaviours and etiquette that the group has set for itself. They do this if you can define the group well, make users feel part of the group, and make them aware that they are RECOGNISABLE within the group.

Doing this is hard. I see this at high-speed in chat communities. A new user joins a chat community on day one, may break half the rules (written and unwritten) of the chat/group on day one, but within a few days of participation if they feel like they are of the group then you will see them settle into the group behaviour. Over time you may in fact see them change their ENTIRE personality. I operate(with many other people) a discord community where lgbt people have surprisingly come out in droves despite us not being an lgbt community. Far above the average of other communities I have the experience of operating. This is occurring (I believe) because of the friendliness of the group that we have. It is so friendly and so nice that more people are discovering themselves introspectively than in other communities I have the experience of moderating and marshalling. Another instance of this happening is that initially toxic individuals have, over time, changed significantly in personality by the longterm being around and influence of the nice-culture of this particular chat community. I have had many users come to me personally through private messaging to say that this particular community has been a positive influence on them, that it has fundamentally made their lives better, that they have changed from a toxic individual that sought out negativity or conflict into a person that actively promotes positivity.

They learned from the group.

I'm NOT saying that negatively behaved communities are bad either. Don't interpret the above in that way, it should include zero judgement of community behaviour at all. There are spaces where people thoroughly enjoy highly toxic behaviour, 4chan for example, and exactly the same concept of people learning and mimicking the group happens on 4chan too. People join and become a part of the group they participate in frequently, they then start to take on significant portions of that group's mindset.

The examples above are not judgements of right or wrong. They are simply things that occur in group behaviour. Understand that they occur and will happen (already have happened in some ways) here on Tildes is valuable. Deimos wants us as the early-adopter community to understand this concept because it is a fundamental thing he wants to build up. He needs to build a group that is a specific type of group for the service he wants to grow and he needs to make that group a group that outsiders and new people WANT to be part of. Retaining new users is absolutely and positively essential to the growth of any service.

What's important here also is that a toxic person on one service may not be a toxic person on another service. Behaviour differs depending upon the group that a user is participating in.

The group established here will establish the future behaviour of the whole community. New users will form into the existing group and take on the community culture established here. These new users will take on the behaviour of the group, whether they are toxic elsewhere or not. (in some cases requiring banning because they absolutely refuse to join the group at all, for the protection of the group that is wanted)

3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.

Now, the segmentation can be total -- you're in or you're out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial -- anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while.

It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.

Over on reddit the intended method of solving this problem is the downvote. It worked well. It still works well, in a way. It allows a "group" to police the behaviour of the group by punishing one another. It's somewhat negative, it creates a lot of conflict, and it causes other issues, but it does empower the group to defend themselves. Personally some (but not all) of the issues I have with this system are that it eliminates 1 to 1 discussion, people on reddit aren't talking to the person that they are responding to, they are talking to the group, the people that will vote. There are adversarial issues with it in trying to seek "winning" a thread through getting the group(voters) to downvote the other person. For obvious reasons this isn't necessarily what you want. Good honest conversations in 1 to 1 occur because 2 people are talking to each other alone, the only person to gain respect from is the other person in a 1 to 1, whereas when the user is trying to gain respect from the group instead of the person they are responding to they will be less open to the person they are responding to aim more to gain "win" with the group voting instead. This in my opinion causes a huge amount of conflict on reddit, especially within the political subreddits, but it happens literally all over reddit in every single thread.

I'm not posing solutions here. I don't necessarily have them. Coming up with them would take a huge amount of time to digest the issue in the background of my head over time. I hope and assume Deimos has done so for years and years as it has been his responsibility having worked at reddit, I can't say I've considered solutions because I never thought I'd be in a place where we would discuss them or shape the possibility of a site that solves them. I am excited to see whether success happens and am here for the ride and potential to learn by watching it. I've moderated communities for 15 years, from scratch, from joining a team in already well established ones, as a full time paid member of staff, and more, I've seen all types, from forums to chats to voice to subreddits to email groups. Hence my interest and participation. It's a passion.

4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

Don't even get me started on this one. Do I have a solution? Fuck no. I don't have a solution. I don't even know where to start with a solution. It is such a visible and clearly problematic issue on all platforms. Yes you can do things to solve identifiability and make core users clear and visible and empower them and blah blah blah - but the ceiling that occurs with maximum level of activity preventing participation or harming participation across your community? That is a problem I do not have a solution for. The problem differs per platform (chat/forum/twitter/fb/reddit/etc), with different thresholds, but it persists as a problem. Rarely have I seen anything work as anything other than a bandaid. It's a HARD issue. (if you have any suggestions for solving the chat ceiling I am super super interested because it's one we've actively tried to solve for several months now in one of our communities with very little effect).

Missing things

I don't want to drag this out too much further. I suspect I'm really testing the size of a post that can be made here. But one thing I do want to touch on (but by no means comprehensive of other things) with groups and the "core" is one not mentioned in this article. The core in online communities and to a lesser extent the tech-sector is often full of, hmm, let's say "quirks", to put it nicely. I in no way want to be offensive. But the people that gravitate to the core of communities often happen to have significant social differences to the rest of society. It takes certain personality types to become highly active people that happen to stand out in an online community enough to be considered the "core". I've seen this also inside tech companies, it takes certain personality types for children/teenagers to gravitate towards spending ridiculous amounts of time tinkering with computers in their rooms instead of being social, learning computers, programming, or online communities. I'm speaking anecdotally of course and don't know if evidence exists, but it has been my experience in tech companies that there are more people with things like aspergers, depression, social disorders, bipolar, and not just mental problems but just odd quirks of behaviour too. This is not a judgement of those people, just a thing that is often useful being aware of, I've worked with many very very good people with them. Learning to work with and around quirks, oddities and issues inherent to the industry and I believe inherent to the "core" of communities is good. Not everyone will have these and it's not an extensive list, I'm generalising, lots of people are without such traits, it's neither a good nor a bad thing, merely a thing helpful to be cognizant of.

Big read, big ask to try and discuss it Deimos. Maybe it's not possible to actively "discuss" something that's so dense, but still highly useful to try and make people digest and take it on-board regardless of whether discussion about it is easy or not.

Some I got a lot out of, some I've seen in other writing, some is obvious but putting words to it is still useful. Thanks.

Open to discussing or debating any part of this, should anyone get through it all. Apologies for errors or any oddly worded parts, I'm not re-reading to edit when this has taken as long as it has. It'll do.

Can we mention other users here? Another user posted this today: https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans/up-next
It's a TED talk about how humans only separate from animals because we can work together due to a common belief. He mentions the obvious, religion, but he also mentions other beliefs that we prescribe to such as the rule of law.

I mention this to now relate it to this article. This community needs rules to control it and rights to maintain peoples activity.

I know this isn't the best description, but I think it would help to have "10 commandments" and a "Bill of Rights". I mean this metaphorically, but if we have rules and rights that a large group of people can follow and have faith in then it can grow to be a very large and positive group.

Edit: changed to Bill of Rights instead of Constitution.

That link didn't work for me. Wayback machine being brilliant as normal though. Archived

I came over half an hour ago and am really liking what I'm seeing so far.

That was interesting.

Some of the parts I particularly found important:

you don't get to program users, the members in good standing will find one another and be recognized to one another.

So...figure out a system for this and implement it, or someone will and it may not be how you like it

If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen

Names (handles) are a start, but there may be more options for this. (Pictures/avatars traditionally. I was also thinking how in the military folks have their own unique pattern of awards/commendations they wear- perhaps this could work for ~ too: communities have their own mini-flag/band of assorted decoration, and someone with distinction in each community wears a mini version of that band next to their name)

the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value

This got me thinking in particular about the debates ~ has seen already around tags (on people/comments) and votes, especially the weighting of votes and reputation. Votes and reputation will differ between the smaller sub communities and groups, especially weighting depending on contribution. For example, someone who regularly posts high quality content might be valued more in a community more than' say, someone who gives great and insightful comments. Each subgroup will value different things, in addition to the OVERALL ~ values. (But defining those global values perhaps should only be the defining factors in determining rep of the TLGs)

The author notes that Tibet issue on Usenet, and that (in addition to the three points above) lead me to think a successful system here might be to ensure the most reputable members of the tiniest groups have the control over the tiniest groups, and the reputable members that span multiple groups gain reputation over the larger parent groups as well. (In a similar form to how Deimos was talking in another thread about how the smaller communities’ posts would bubble up to their parent groups once the posts had enough engagement)

I'm glad that Tildes is getting a bit more attention. Even if it's currently a closed community, it's good to establish a presence. I'm excited for the site to grow to see how the branching communities will be implemented.

I am curious if you are familiar with Tuckman's stages of group development. Since this is a new community I feel like it is applicable, and I believe it is still well within the forming stage.

Hi all - I just joined the site. I'm old enough to remember Reddit before it blew up. It was a treasure trove of thoughtful people with all sorts of weird hobbies and sophisticated views about the world. Hopefully this will fit that bill!

I just joined after seeing the post on TrueReddit and I gotta say, Deimos, you handled some of our more trolly, cynical members masterfully. Having high hopes for this site

Out of curiosity, can you even copyright a name like 'Tildes'? From a quick Google search, I don't see the common definition of Tildes expanding to mean this site in addition to the character unless this place hits like Reddit levels of traffic. Not sure if I'm understanding it correctly.

Interesting read. It's definitely dated - 4chan uses no handles (tripcodes don't really count) for reputation management, instead a user's reputation is measured by whether they act within the norms of the group in individual posts. I'd say the website has been one of the most influential on internet culture, despite being mostly anonymous. But 4chan is a dynamic thing, and anonymity is but one variable that made it work - some of those variables have been tweaked in recent history and it's hard to say what it's future will hold as a consequence.

I think lots of groups and organizations are like that - something might actually be a good or useful idea, and it might appear that it can't work because everyone has failed at it, until someone finds a combination of variables that makes it work. This is sort of like the "history repeats itself" myth, in a way. It's important to try to learn from the mistakes of people in the past, and I'd say it's probably important not to assume the failure was due to one specific variable, when it might well have been several other things that are invisible to us without a time machine. I think this is a good optimism/creativity filter to adopt.

Voat is a really great example of that kind of distorted hindsight thinking that people sometimes adopt - e.g. "voat failed because it valued free speech so highly" rather than it being due to the inability to scale, and the dumping of behemoth reddit's rejects onto voat's hobby servers (and/or some other variables that aren't immediately obvious).

Very interesting reading, thanks. I find many of the things referenced in the article also apply to classroom dynamics.

And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is

This, for example, is something that certainly works well, especially in high level subjects. Some guidelines are always needed though, moreso for beginners.

"Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!"

Regarding MF closing registration at times, do you plan to implement something like this as well?

This was a great read and I agree with pretty much everything in that article.

I won’t repeat what others have discussed in this thread either, but instead point out the two things that, from my own experience with running (online) communities, I think are (also) paramount to keep in mind:

• Never assume a communications tool is “social” or not. If a group start using it as such, it suddenly is.
• Whatever rules (either in code or law) you implement, people will eventually game it.

Be prepared for both :)

anyone else coming to this thread later:

tl;dr is basically this:

And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen.

Replace Communitree with Reddit or Hacker News or any other forum.

I myself is a developer, and I came to think of this often.

Like MMORPG, if someone is cheating, then the player would be locked into a server dedicated to cheating.

The same way, we can setup a dedicated "echo chamber" for certain type of people. A troll would view most of the trolling comments. This would require some extensive NLP labeling work in order to work.

That a a crazy good read, even as someone who went into it not knowing much at all about designing online communities or software. Those "four thing to prepare for" seem like...spot on.

FYI - The Clay Shirky link is broken returning 404.

So I'm still trying to understand this platform a little. Did this get re-pinned to the top because its relevant again or was this bubbled to the top by a user necroing the thread.