I thought I'd share this since it suggests a way to put the current situation on Tildes in a positive light. What would "Cosy mode" be like for Tildes? Or perhaps we're already in it, but don't...
I thought I'd share this since it suggests a way to put the current situation on Tildes in a positive light. What would "Cosy mode" be like for Tildes? Or perhaps we're already in it, but don't know it? Not knowing it seems more like "Heartbreak mode."
From @ifixcoinops' very long thread about Internet communities:
Moar thoughts on online community management: every online community goes through a cycle of inception, establishment, maturity and decline, and this is natural and fine.
There are a finite number of people in the world. Of those finite number of people, a finite number are interested in your site's topic. Of those finite number of people, some will die, some will get distracted and go look at something else, whatever, nobody stays on one website 5eva.
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The "decline" phase can be the tragic Heartbreak Phase, with a bunch of people arguing about The Future Of The Site and about why people left (an irresolvable question that can suck in a community until it collapses on itself like a black hole) and frantically trying to renew and change itself until even the old guard are scared off, or it can be the Cosiness Phase.
In Cosy Mode, everyone who wasn't right for the site has moved on, and the folks left are the ones who love it.
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During Cosy Mode, you scale back advertising until you're no longer trying to grow the site, but just keep it in general maintenance. You fix long-standing UI annoyances and make small quality-of-life improvements. Avoid making big interface changes.
After a few years, say for a big anniversary, you might send out an email to the old guard saying hey here's what's changed, but be careful as a lot of the old guard might have moved on because they no longer fit the culture of the site.
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Cosy Mode is the longest phase, and it's pretty lovely. There are no more existential crises and the community has pretty much met its equilibrium.
Heartbreak Mode can also drag on for years, becoming more and more tragic every day as members run around with their hair on fire trying to answer why people left (for 99% of former members, they left because it's a website - but one or two will come back to say This Is Why I Left and they'll be taken as representative samples).
The big difference between Cosy Mode and Heartbreak Mode is that the people in Cosy Mode like being in Cosy Mode, and the people in Heartbreak Mode hate being in Heartbreak Mode but do it anyway.
People go into Heartbreak Mode because they think that a website has to grow forever, and this is madness. If a website carried on growing forever, then eventually everyone on the planet would be on that website all the time.
I thought I'd share this since it suggests a way to put the current situation on Tildes in a positive light. What would "Cosy mode" be like for Tildes? Or perhaps we're already in it, but don't know it? Not knowing it seems more like "Heartbreak mode."
From @ifixcoinops' very long thread about Internet communities:
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