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.
[...]
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.
...
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.
...
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 think we've been in Cosy mode for the last couple years, after the last Reddit influx. Active development stopped a long time ago, and that's been mostly fine for the community. But it seems...
What would "Cosy mode" be like for Tildes?
I think we've been in Cosy mode for the last couple years, after the last Reddit influx. Active development stopped a long time ago, and that's been mostly fine for the community. But it seems that confirmation of that may have put a lot of people into Heartbreak mode, even though nothing's really changed; I have to hope it'll cool off relatively quickly.
(prolonged meta-discussions aren't healthy for any forum, and tend to burn people out. hopefully we don't lose too many people from these ones.)
I've only been around since 2023, but this is how it's been reading to me. Some users worried the site is dead or dying, just because there's no more active development of it or desire for...
But it seems that confirmation of that may have put a lot of people into Heartbreak mode
I've only been around since 2023, but this is how it's been reading to me. Some users worried the site is dead or dying, just because there's no more active development of it or desire for continued growth.
I've been a part of a lot of forums that later migrated to very small forums (less than 15 users) over the course of their life and there's definitely a lot of comfort in that very small, cosy community, I'm certainly not going to bemoan it here.
I am disappointed to see some people leaving and can't help but feel I may have contributed to that, but ultimately, that is going to happen regardless (people leaving, I mean), so it's something I have to make peace with.
At any rate, I'm not the smartest, the most frequent or the best poster here, but I intend to stick around.
Something I’ve been learning in the past year is that thinking about things too much can be a problem - there is a time to think and reflect, and there is a time to act and do. It seems that many...
But it seems that confirmation of that may have put a lot of people into Heartbreak mode, even though nothing's really changed; I have to hope it'll cool off relatively quickly.
Something I’ve been learning in the past year is that thinking about things too much can be a problem - there is a time to think and reflect, and there is a time to act and do.
It seems that many people were just using Tildes and not thinking about it too much, and Deimos’ announcement has caused a lot of people to start thinking more about the site itself and its future. It’s almost become a memetic hazard at this point, as people thinking about it leads to more posts on the topic, then more people read the posts and think about it and reply and think about it more… but those posts and discussions are not necessarily healthy for the site (people in general don’t come to social media to talk about the platform itself, if there’s too much self-reflective discussion people will stop engaging/leave, the community getting smaller reinforces the “bad” interaction patterns as more people transition from cosy mode to heartbreak mode. And so forth).
Unfortunately the cat is rather out of the bag at this point so we will just have to see if it becomes a real issue or not. Hopefully not! I was very happy in cosy mode (although I didn’t know it at the time) and hope to return ASAP.
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:
[...]
...
...
I think we've been in Cosy mode for the last couple years, after the last Reddit influx. Active development stopped a long time ago, and that's been mostly fine for the community. But it seems that confirmation of that may have put a lot of people into Heartbreak mode, even though nothing's really changed; I have to hope it'll cool off relatively quickly.
(prolonged meta-discussions aren't healthy for any forum, and tend to burn people out. hopefully we don't lose too many people from these ones.)
I've only been around since 2023, but this is how it's been reading to me. Some users worried the site is dead or dying, just because there's no more active development of it or desire for continued growth.
I've been a part of a lot of forums that later migrated to very small forums (less than 15 users) over the course of their life and there's definitely a lot of comfort in that very small, cosy community, I'm certainly not going to bemoan it here.
I am disappointed to see some people leaving and can't help but feel I may have contributed to that, but ultimately, that is going to happen regardless (people leaving, I mean), so it's something I have to make peace with.
At any rate, I'm not the smartest, the most frequent or the best poster here, but I intend to stick around.
Something I’ve been learning in the past year is that thinking about things too much can be a problem - there is a time to think and reflect, and there is a time to act and do.
It seems that many people were just using Tildes and not thinking about it too much, and Deimos’ announcement has caused a lot of people to start thinking more about the site itself and its future. It’s almost become a memetic hazard at this point, as people thinking about it leads to more posts on the topic, then more people read the posts and think about it and reply and think about it more… but those posts and discussions are not necessarily healthy for the site (people in general don’t come to social media to talk about the platform itself, if there’s too much self-reflective discussion people will stop engaging/leave, the community getting smaller reinforces the “bad” interaction patterns as more people transition from cosy mode to heartbreak mode. And so forth).
Unfortunately the cat is rather out of the bag at this point so we will just have to see if it becomes a real issue or not. Hopefully not! I was very happy in cosy mode (although I didn’t know it at the time) and hope to return ASAP.