How do you build strong online communities?
The recent history of social media has made me interested in the factors that make online communities successful/healthy, or toxic etc.. This is one of the appeals of Tildes for me. I'm also emotionally invested in seeing a healthy future for the Irish language, which has seen some interesting developments in the internet age but remains in a precarious position as a community language in the country. You can see how these two interests dovetail together. At the moment this is a thought experiment, but later, who knows...
Tips I've got so far:
I've heard that some barriers to entry can increase group loyalty by making members feels slightly "invested" by earning a place in the community
I've also noted that some of the most persistant subcultures operate online but also have a strong in-person element (eg: furries)
There's also the common observation that good moderation is crucial to user experience and therefore group cohesion
Then I got some pointers from the Tildes docs:
- Trust by default, punish abusers
- Focus on user experience, not growth metrics
- Favour deep engagement over shallow/clickbait
- Empower members to make choices
- The golden rule (apply charitable interpretations, don't tolerate bad actors)
So, people of Tildes: what factors do you see as crucial to building and maintaining a strong cohesive online community?
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.
I think not including any kind of low-effort feedback would be a mark against a platform at this point. Displaying karma totals or post counts is obviously unnecessary, but if you make a contribution and receive no response whatsoever there's less incentive to keep contributing. Which for a fledgling community is pretty likely.
I pretty frequently use votes as a filter for what I actually read in online communities for which I am familiar and as a way to begin to judge online communities for which I am unfamiliar. I can't speak for all of humanity, but I'm a garden variety human, perhaps less commonly I know for certain I'm susceptible to echo chamber effects, and yet I still do it...
Even in larger, established communities it's important I think. My personal YouTube experience has definitely gone down since dislikes are no longer visible.
I mean if you tell a joke at a funeral you cannot read the room. My point being; growth happens naturally and organically already. Fostering a solid community takes time and not everyone will like the content. But not everything can be to everyone's liking. And that is okay.
I don't know how you made the leap to not being able to read a room when I'm talking about not being able to tell whether the room even has anyone in it.
In this regard, the very nature of Tildes works in our favor. Tildes doesn't exist to garner "engagement": it has no KPIs to meet/exceed investor expectations.
Part of the reason why Karma was given out on Slashdot was to curate a segment of the userbase who could be sometimes partially trusted with moderation points. Then within that group another hidden metric was used to reward meta-moderation points. These points don't get displayed publicly and they're widespread enough for the small power that there was no point bragging. And in fact low effort garbage would even detract one's points from this system.
Not so with Reddit. They intentionally made all these things visible, so users would mass pile on votes in either directions; they gave out shiny baubles for people to chase afte and give each other and create its own celebrities.
There's no algorithm here: posts live or die on their own merits. The most famous Tildes members' comments look exactly like those of a new member. Any semblance of fame only exist in long time members' minds at best.
It's boring for folks who chase that high. And I like it this way
*edit: Deimo's username is distinguished though, but I think he only uses that account to talk about Tildes anyway. (Aside: Ive wondered what his usual commenting account is...)
Even if there is no total karma, I do think that a bit of that is here on Tildes. Votes on comments and posts do have influence what people see if they have things sorted like that. Then there is also the “exemplary” label.
And I certainly have seen comment behavior from people where I couldn't help but feel that they are chasing after votes and/or fishing for an exemplary label.
But, overall, it is indeed a far cry from the whole karma rat race over at reddit.
Perhaps folks (ahem, myself) need a period of time to detox from chasing that high, y'know? And then some of us are more susceptible to that kind of a rush than others, and good site design only goes so far to remediate a personality level thing.
Question for you: do you envision a time in the future where Tildes might grow so much we'd need a suite of mod tools and a team of mods?
To be clear, I did not have you in mind specifically ;) I can't deny being immune to the effect of a comment doing well with votes either.
As far as Tildes needing more tools and more mods. Maybe? I don't think Tildes is growing at a rate where it is something that requires much consideration soon. Effectively, Tildes already has mods, the people who can edit tags and move posts.
It is a difficult question to answer because I am not involved in running Tildes. So I am not sure what sort of work goes on behind the scenes right now. I sometimes do spot a user being banned or a post being deleted, but that is about it. I get the feeling Deimos has a handle on things right now and with the current invite system things probably remain the same for a while. So the most likely scenario where I see a need for more tooling and more mods is one where registration becomes easier.
Does this also apply to less public things that gamify desirable behaviour, like achievements/badges or (this one is definitely controversial) streaks?
I mean, it goes to show what is important in the end right? If a platform really incentivizes engagement, focusing on user retention and gamifies interactions and has reward structures then it's safe to bet there's a financial incentive at play behind it all instead of purely fostering constructive discussion.
I could write a lot about this. But I also would be repeating a lot of good stuff that is out there. For example, has been a lot of research on this subject as well as people on other platforms theorizing about all of this. If you dig deep enough in the archives of /r/theoryofreddit (I am talking well over a decade old posts) you will find a lot of very insightful information. Unfortunately, a lot of that was never put in practice or simply couldn't work on reddit due to how the website itself worked.
Still, some random points come immediately to my mind.
On moderation
Fluff principle
"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it." Source: Article by Paul Graham,
What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:
So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E and F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.
Ironically, both on HN and Reddit this was never really done much about. HN still suffers from this as far as fluff comments go. Here on Tildes it is less of an issue as people sort content by various different ways.
Getting community feedback
All this to say that when a community is asked for feedback, it would be foolish to blindly implement all feedback. It takes a lot of effort to gather meaningful feedback and turn it into actionable items. Things that need to be considered are "who is the feedback coming from", "will this negatively impact other people", etc, etc.
The 1% rule
There is a thing called the 1% rule, or 90/9/1 principle, the obvious choice here is to nurture the 1% and 9% groups the most, but purely focusing without a focus on what you expect can have odd side effects. Karma farmers on reddit did belong to the 1% but a lot of their stuff would be complete crap.
The fluff principle definitely aligns with my own observations. On reddit, I've seen a lot of users decry "memes being banned from (or restricted in) the main sub" for a fandom, but I argued with them that unless there are some restrictions such content takes over a subreddit. I've gotten some heat over it haha. But this takes away focus from better content and discussions. Memes and jokes are fun, but they shouldn't overwhelm a wider community. They are cheap content.
Slight side-tangent, but memes are such an interesting topic. I like them for the easy stimulation and fun they provide, but they are also often very anti-intellectual. Even in simple things, such as whether a character was right or wrong, they are used to strawman the otherside while glorifying your own opinion. This can be ok if it's tongue-in-cheek, but most often it's not. I think such practices are both a result and a cause of anti-intellectualism.
I have spent a lot of time in the past talking about the Fluff Principle, and how subreddits needed to do something about it or be flooded with low effort content. It took a lot of years, but after 15 or so on reddit, I realized that Reddit is for low effort content and that moderators making efforts to disallow low effort content were fundamentally misunderstanding what the reddit system is for. I spent a few more years on reddit after that realization hit - that I had been trying to make communities into something that they
'vewere not - and then I left.I think that Tildes approaches content differently, and addresses and pretty much nullifies the Fluff principle. This shows that while it's not "easy" to do so, it's certainly technically possible to do so. Sites like reddit that reward memes do so because their business model is served by showing you memes - sites like Tildes that reward content do so because their business is served by showing you content.
I don't agree with that assessment of what reddit is for. These days I fully agree that it is a platform fully aiming for fluff content.
That was not always the case, and for a long time it was possible for communities to exist with high quality content. What changed is simply the scale of things, when reddit started to grow they never truly invested in the tooling needed for the higher quality subreddits to keep up with moderation demands.
You have to remember that reddit was founded in 2005, it has a very long history, and we tend to remember only the past few years or so.
When I started work on toolbox in 2012 reddit was already 7 years old. At the time it really was nothing more than a few scripts with some nice to haves for moderation. It only grew into the essential tool it became a few years later because of how massively reddit grew and most mod tool development ceased.
I agree and also disagree with what you have said. I started using reddit almost 19 years ago - my account is 18.5 years old, and I lurked for the first 5 or 6 months of use, so it's been almost 19 on the money for me. I recall what old reddit was like; I used it in every iteration.
I had a paragraph here that talked about learning about the fluff principle around 2010, but it actually just references the article you put in your original comment above, so I can make this brief:
Reddit knew about the Fluff Principle since around 2010, almost 15 years ago. Since they were ineffective at making adjustments to their algorithms to account for the Fluff Principle, they became a site of Fluff. As more and more people came to reddit, the Fluff became overwhelming, and we moderators spent a lot of time working at keeping the fluff at bay.
I think that as time progresses, it become more and more clear, that the system of reddit rewards Fluff. That is how it is now, but that's also how it has always been. This does not mean that a moderator wrestling high quality content away from Fluff wasn't possible. There were (and still are) loads of great communities on reddit that feature fantastic content, with great mod teams. But they are there in spite of the system, not because of the system. Every subreddit that wants to reward posts that are not just fluff posts has to struggle against the system to achieve that. And I think that's been the case basically forever.
That's what I mean by what I said above, and I think that it is notable that only through tools like the one you made are moderators able to wrestle with the crapgasm that is reddit. And over time, more and more people just want the firehouse of memes, so it become increasingly difficult for moderators of subreddits of any size to have non-fluff pieces naturally rise in their subreddits.
Yeah that's entirely fair. I suppose I am more or less arguing about how bad the odds have been stacked against communities.
To give an example, a lot of visual fluff used to be external to reddit. It was there and already pretty dominant, but still external links. I still agree that communities for more serious content flourished despite reddit. But at that time you could reasonably argue it was more or less inertia of reddit simply not undergoing much change at all to begin with.
Once reddit started self hosting images in 2016 and videos about a year later is the time where I am more or less fully on board with reddit fully disregarding serious content over fluff content for growth metrics. Further reinforced by the choices made for the redesign a little bit later where images and videos are made first class citizens and loaded in line.
As far as comment fluff goes (cheap jokes, etc), no argument there actually. Well one argument, bringing in Deimos and allowing him to integrate automod. Without automoderator being a native tool it would have been game over for many communities years earlier.
But also there my understanding is thar Deimos had a lot of trouble being allowed to properly work on automod.
I won't add much other than that I think we are in full agreement and just thinking about degrees and timelines of reddit's enshittification.
Deimos was one of the bright lights, and automoderator was (probably... is? I don't know if it's still working) a great tool. There were also lots of other reddit admins over the years who were good people trying to make the site better. There are still some today! But the leadership isn't enabling them to do things that need to be done.
Communities flourished in spite of them for a long time. By design: they wanted to be sure harvesting users wouldnt kill them first
We saw that happened with all kinds of start ups: group buys, ride shares, streaming platforms.... It's not our fault we thought they were something else because they sold them to us as these things.
I'm over their site, but I still lament all those little communities that flourished in between the cracks of their hidden intent.
Eh, as I pointed out here reddit has been around since 2005, it is nearly 20 years old. In that period it drastically changed several times in as far as ownership goes and direction of the company behind it. Frankly, now that I am typing it out again, I am amazed we got to enjoy reddit for as long as we did.
For the last few years I do fully agree, it was in spite of what the direction it had taken that communities persist.
Fair, more than fair. If they had kept Reddit to what they originally thought to do it would be a very different story (and not as popular or successful on a wide scale probably). Sorry, the latter years bitterness coloured my happier memories of the place.
That's unfortunately how human brains tend to work. We tend to focus on and more easily remember the negatives. Probably some survival mechanism (you want to avoid negative things) but doesn't help us in the modern world.
I'm reminded of the infamous drama in the atheism subreddit when post thumbnails were disabled to discourage meme posting, which led to the historic comment "Socrates died for this shit and we're taking it too lightly."
I miss the euphoric atheist drama. Tangentially, I feel like I got into being a compulsive popcorn-muncher at the worst possible time. Had I tried to get into online drama-watching any later, my first major drama would've been Gamergate. Reading threads about that is like snacking on stale piss popcorn. Could've closed the tab and logged out. Instead, I got hooked on previous drama and didn't realize that online culture was entering a boring forever war. Had I joined the dramasphere earlier, that would've been that many more years of acutally entertaining drama.
"desserts are for after supper".
I enjoy memes, jokes, self referencing comments etc a lot, but I also recognize that they need to be restricted to a weekly thread of silly news, or nested under substantially more nutritious comments. They should never be presented with equal weight alongside the main course, just like how one should not serve dessert in the same quantify and at the same time as the main. (Opinion does not apply to ~talk, which I hope remains a more free wheeling dessert cart to the main train)
Small things like placing the comment box at the end, helps. Not giving dumb rewards for jokes helps. Not having a site wide cumulative high score for users also help.
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"
That's pretty apt. I probably had to ban or suspend people more times because they couldn't stop being an asshole. The first rule on communities I mod is often “Keep it civil”, not even “be nice” just keeping it civil. Which for a lot of people is still very difficult.
My comment isn't exhaustive at all, but I think one of the key things is definitely being choosy about who you allow and keep in the community. I haven't seen a single online community that hasn't decreased massively in quality past some threshold. There's a balance to be had between having enough interactions and preventing this. This is why I disagree with the idea that bigger = better. Tildes, to me, seems to be at a very good point in this regard.
Another, related, key element is the user profile. I've seen forums or subreddits that were faulty from the start due to the crowd it attracted. This is also heavily tied to the profile of the administration/moderation team and their vision, especially for spaces where there is heavy moderation.
Speaking of moderation and administration, there have to be mechanisms of checks for their behavior. This can be internal, or external due to user pressure. I think, like almost everything human, a healthy dose of suspicion regarding those with power is a good practice. This is not to say, of course, one shouldn't approach them with good faith, or forget they are human. Again, there's a balance to be had. While people often remember bad interactions due to moderation, good moderation is mostly invisible, and many moderators are just people enthusiastic about creating a community.
Lastly, I don't have a roadmap for this, but there should be both structure and culture that prevent extreme echo chamber effects. I don't think in a space any idea should be welcome, as some are very stupid and not worthy of discussion, and some are simply bad faith, but dogmatism and strict adherence to the popular opinion are enemies to healthy conversations.
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 freindships: 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.