Not showing any form of status or anything tangible for people to distinguish oneself from others e.g. Karma. It's a useless thing but ppl give meaning to it and thus it has a runaway effect of it having to matter. On forums this was fairly often the amount of posts (higher = better?) etc. The value is in the content that you provide and people will remember you if you had anything meaningful to say.

In the extreme situations like TikTok or Instagram likes are everything and it works demotivating when your posts don't seem to hit a certain expected value and this directly can influence your mental well being.

In the context of transparency I can see why the 'upvotes' on tildes give reason to see why a post is trending or on the frontpage but it would be neat for that to be an opt-out thing.

Based mostly on my experience with the Tildes community, I suspect having some intentional meta* goals for community interaction pretty early on attracts/repels/filters and sets a tone. I'm part of the Great Reddit Diaspora. Tildes was sold to me as an intentionally non-toxic replacement for reddit.

Walking into the site with expectations on me around how I interact with the community greatly increased my investment in and connection to the community.

Non-toxicity doesn't have to be the intended meta goal, rather just an easy example. I'm reminded of a statistic about Howard Stern's morning show in its early(er) days. Listeners who liked Stern's antics listened on average 2 hours a day. Listeners who hated Stern's antics listened on average 4 hours a day. (Those numbers are made up but reflect my memory of gist of the stat... haters listened 2+ times as long as non-haters). In an online community like that the meta goal could be "A place to let it rip unfiltered. We want your gut reaction."

*I'm possibly mis-using 'meta' -- the comments I read about tildes and the interactions I viewed on the site before I sought out an invite all supported an intentional 'tone' of not just non-toxicity but ?intentional civility? Community tone doesn't strike me as a typical goal of a community, but rather a goal for the members of the community as they commune, so I've dubbed it a meta goal.

I think it mostly comes down to clear rules for moderation with tiers.

My first forum was pretty straight forward. If you cross a line, you get a warning. You could see your warning level, and it would "cool down" overtime. If you went over a certain level, it was an automatic suspension, and then eventually perma ban.

Mods had some ability to circumvent this for extremes.

I feel the only tricky part is transparency. There's both good and bad reasons to be transparent, and it's a sticking point for a lot of people, especially now that so many hot button issues are politics. Someone has "the right views" but is also an asshole, and then it's "well they got in trouble becuase mods don't agree with their views" and it's more just...

Well honestly 90% of modding seems to boil down to that scene from The Big Lebowski. "you're not wrong, you're just an asshole"

Just read all the Tildes docs linked below every Tildes page.

Some things are not in the docs though.

Community seems to emerge in spite of anything you do. If you look for deimos past comments you will see that the Idea was never for Tildes be a community with strong emotional bonds. We where supposed to be content driven like Usenet used to be, or like a Hacker News that is not just for STEM people. We are not really supposed to be here everyday to meet our buddies, we should be coming here once a week or even less.

A community came about nevertheless.

Ironically, it seems to me that the very fact that deimos is not really engaged in the community is one of the conditions for Tildes success. That allows admin enforcement to be impartial and consistent, although still largely informed by the idea of a website that is focused on content rather than emotion or personal connection.

So I think the formula might be: (1) try your best to make non-pretentious Hacker News, (2) fail at that, (3) now you have a great community.

Although I do think we have a fairly cozy community here, it only goes so far. There isn't much scope for close ties so long as most of us are hiding behind aliases, we don't post personal details to maintain opsec, and we don't meet in person.

Some questions to consider: do you remember their real name? Do you have their email address and phone number? Do you ever meet in person? Have you been to their house? Did you invite them to yours?

I think of it as similar to work friendships: some of them survive long after you leave the team, and others end when you switch jobs, however friendly people might have been as a time.

It's okay though. Not all ties need to be close.

I could talk about what makes healthy communities for ages! My search for a better community has brought me through quite a few spaces, including Tildes, and eventually to helping form a community to continue to experiment in the space and test some communal hypotheses on ways things can be made better.

While your question is about 'strong' communities, I'm going to interpret that through a lens which prioritizes the following: cohesion, good/nice behavior, diversity, being a relatively safe space. You may not hold all the same ideals when you think strong, but I'll do my best to point out throughout this post what interventions and designs are primarily effecting so you can choose what makes sense for you.

On a high level I think there's a few thoughts which hold pretty universally:

First and foremost a community needs to center the idea that there's a human behind a computer behind every post. This is primarily targeted at keeping a space nice but it's also quite important for cohesion and a sense of community. I believe the most effective policy in this space is to encourage folks to treat others in good faith until proven overwhelmingly otherwise. When people treat others with bad faith or assume trolling or other negative behavior you need to step in and publicly remind them to ask questions and confirm suspicion. Moderators and power users should strive to open comments early by predicting the kinda of questions which will likely arise when questionable content is posted in a community. By far this is one of the trickiest needles to thread because it requires fairly high touch moderation or an engaged community and it can break down easily if you're not keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. It may require proactively sequestering certain conversations in specific communities or threads and for major issues may require regular stickied or high visibility posts from administration or moderation reminding users to be on good behavior or reminding the users of the values of the community.

Secondly I personally believe that a good community always has treasured people. These treasured people are often extraordinarily nice and this helps to reinforce nice behavior within the community and ultimately leads to stronger cohesion because folks are more engaged. Your community needs to center the needs of nice folks over rude ones and you need to pay close attention to this. Losing nice people is much easier than losing people who aren't nice and losing nice people is much more damaging to a community than losing anyone else. This is touched on quite a bit in an excellent blog post which touches on a concept called 'evaporative cooling'. The first point about treating others with good faith goes a long way in helping ensure you keep your nice folks, but it's not the whole story.

Which brings me to the third point, I strongly believe that hyper specific rules are damaging/bad for a community and that less specific, more interpretable rules are better. The reason for this comes down to an explicit recognition that communities are there to support the community, and not the individual. Most in person communities do not have rules- think about your friend group or an activity club you belong to. These almost never have explicit rules, but if you're a dick to someone in these groups it certainly won't go unpunished. I think that healthy communities have lots of discussions about behavior when folks have conflict and I think that's part of what makes them work. People feel engaged with a community when they feel heard and respected and it's extremely alienating and dehumanizing when someone's being a dick but following all the rules and you get ignored because of it. This is perhaps the most important driver behind long term community engagement- without it folks will interact more cyclically and leave after they get too fed up bad actors.

Fourth, I think that diversity is extremely important in a community and the only way to ensure adequate diversity is to explicitly be a safe space. This can be tricky to deal with because being a safe space means being flexible on some level around rules. A transgender or black person, for example, may not be in a space to do the emotional burden required to take a potentially offensive content in good faith and you need to be able to adjust moderation tactics to give them space to vent about the harms and injustice they have experienced while gently reminding them and the community of the ideal behavior. You'll also need to manage the emotions of fragile folks in majority groups who may take offense at what these minority folks are saying. This is definitely one of the stronger personal beliefs I have about websites and one that is extremely infrequently centered on the internet which caters predominately to white men in tech. This is one of the largest mismatches of community ideals I personally experience on this website and it's why I've significantly disengaged from it as compared to the early days. I believe that this mismatch is primarily behind the decline in diversity I've seen here and the biggest issue I have with the community ideals here.

Fifth, I believe that communities cannot grow beyond a certain size and feel strong or cohesive. I do not know what this size is and I suspect the size is actually on some level actually a function of how many intermediaries exist- the number of moderators and highly engaged individuals which engage in community discussions and help to keep a community healthy. This is talked about a bit in a blog post which highlights the difference between a village and a train station.

Sixth, moderation needs to be more high touch and involve more conversations and less moderator actions. Folks need to directly see next to and after questionable behavior, moderators and admins stepping in and asking clarifying questions or reminding folks of the appropriate behavior. Sometimes it can be helpful for problematic material to be left up because the visibility of pushback can help to signal community values. A highly responded to comment where everyone is pushing back against what the person shared can be important to a space feeling safe to minorities. Sometimes the material might be too inflammatory and need to be removed. Often this requires discussion amongst moderators and admins on how others would step in and sometimes it's informed directly by how many reports the community makes or reports coming from specific well known individuals such as the nice/treasured ones mentioned above. Sometimes this also means having meta discussions with individuals when they step out of line or just reminding them of how they are expected to behave.

Seventh, moderation should not only be done by moderators. The above point talks about situations in which the community steps up to protect how safe and welcoming a space seems by pushing back against a problematic opinion. This can be done entirely without the intervention of moderators and admins and in fact this models how in person communities work. Multiple people might chime in if someone says something fucked up in person and none of them need to be the organizer for it to be effective. Similarly if someone says something possibly problematic, their friends or close companions in the community might pull them aside and talk to them in depth about how that might come off to others. This kind of behavior should happen regularly as well as be celebrated when it does happen and increases engagement and cohesion as well as helps to keep a space diverse because it becomes clear to minorities that their safety is prioritized. You need to keep in mind that it's still a community and a safe space does not excuse repeated negative behavior by heavily marginalized folks- the community always needs to come first but there needs to be some flexibility and understanding for human emotions and a lens on equity (which necessitates examining need in depth).

Eighth, you should have a space for admins and moderators to discuss problematic behavior and to double check with peers whenever they are unsure how to act. This space should exist away from the eyes of non moderators to allow for discussion to happen privately and should be a safe space for moderators to share opinions on appropriate action because opinions on this will not always be aligned. I find that it helps for this space to be open to all moderators regardless of the community and its purpose is to help gut check borderline behavior and to brainstorm with peers on what the appropriate action is. This space often will drive folks to take less action and start more discussions. Often you'll find other moderators have exactly the words you're struggling to find or the perfect response to specific behavior and can help to reduce the cognitive burden of deciding the right reaction to problematic behavior. It also increases cohesion and engagement of your moderators by allowing them to chime in on community and specifically moderator ideals and set precedent for how specific behavior should be treated more globally on the website.

I could probably keep going on about online community health, but instead of positing every hypothesis I have, I'll point you at the philosophical musings available on the documents section of the community I helped to form and run.

In my (very old) experiences running a dial-up BBS back in the late-80's/early-90's, you have to decide beforehand what kind of vibe you want, and what sort of interactions you want. It helps to write out at least a brief explanation of such, but really, the only solution is active moderation with a human brain, which can get exhausting, as it is fundamentally thankless work. A few bad actors can upset the entire applecart exceedingly easily. Maliciousness isn't even required, just abrasiveness.

One automated feature I've seen on HN that really does help is a simple timer that lengthens in time before a reply-post is allowed the deeper in the chain you get. Didn't apply in my day, as people were limited by the number of minutes they could dial in per day anyway, but it seems to genuinely help cool off the intensity of the flame wars. DanG in general does a pretty good job, considering the personality makeup of the folks that post there. (No shade, just acknowledgement of how tech folks can be. Myself included.)

If your community is based on a shared interest, then the broader the topic of interest, the deeper the engagement between users is likely to be. Deeper engagement leads to users seeing and treating each other like human beings.

This is an observation I've had over ~3 decades of online involvement. If you form a community around a particular interest -- a hobby, a fandom, a support group -- then every interaction you have with other community members will be under the lens of that particular interest. It's very hard to break out of that and get to know other people as people, even if you realize you should try. I've joined Discord servers based on particular interests, and they may have a #general or #off-topic channel, but most of the conversation is going to still revolve around that one thing.

Back in the day, I liked to visit a website that was not about any one thing in particular. It had various sections filled with humor pieces, various kinds of games and brain teasers, film reviews, and the like. It also had a message forum and chat room, and when a new person would enter the fray, we'd have no idea what particular part of the website brought them in. All we really knew was that it was likely they had a similar sense of humor and possibly liked to play games that exercised their brain in similar ways. We had to start from scratch with introductions every time, which naturally led to talking about any and all aspects of our lives. I formed friendships there that are still going strong 25 years later, and I've met all of them in person at one time or another.

I've rarely had a chance to test this theory with a similar style of community. Most communities I can find are based around one specific interest, sometimes extremely specific, and I feel as though I can never break through that barrier to truly humanize the person behind the other keyboard. Tildes is possibly the closest I've gotten since. Most engagement here is about one specific topic or another, but the topics are all across the board and I see different aspects of some of the same users, which is quite nice.

I think a community about the Irish language and life in Ireland has a strong chance of being a broad enough topic to encourage that deeper engagement. You'll know practically nothing about a new user! Fair chance of guessing their nationality, I suppose, but do they live in the city or country? Are they a movie buff or do they cook fancy meals or do they like to hike? Or maybe all three! People can have so many different things that are interesting about them which leads to many different interesting conversations. I feel as though you shouldn't split the community into too many hyper-specific topics, because going too granular would encourage people to only participate in certain sections. You might want to have a section on Dublin, but not on restaurants in Dublin, because the latter could easily go in the former. Does this make any sense?

• a shared set of positive interests in common to discuss
• the freedom for users to express themselves in their parlance