People are increasingly hanging out in small, private communities. Global timelines and newsfeeds won’t come back.
The shift looks something like this:
As covered by this excellent edition of Garbage Day, Twitter shows all the characteristics of a rotting online community. How to recognise a rotting community, quoting the full list:
Power users aggressively dominate discussion on the site.
Public harassment and inter-community elitism has created a culture of indirect communication, where users no longer directly say what they’re actually trying to say.
There is no longer any internal cultural memory.
Users have become so obsessed with the minutiae of the community that the site now functions as a meta discussion of itself instead of whatever its intended purpose was.
Poor or lax moderation has created a sense that nothing on the site is genuine - fake users, fake trending topics, fake threads, fake engagement.
Users, reacting to the inauthentic behavior, public harassment, and elitism that occurs due to bad moderation, create their own self-policed communities within the larger community, which typically only exacerbates these problems and creates warring factions within the site.
Meanwhile, only the olds use Facebook (including me), but everyone younger has mostly vanished, being increasingly uncomfortable with
ad microtargeting and its rapacious data appetite
living your online life in the open with the perpetual risk of context collapse and your whole identity blowing up from one misguided status update that another group takes offence to.
So this is the end of the era of global timelines. Who would take on the responsibility of content moderation to build another one.
Where is everybody going instead?
Well there are the peer-to-peer and small group spaces of texting and WhatsApp.
But the problem of peer-to-peer is that you don’t get those joyous, serendipitous moments of running into like-minded friends-of-friends.
In-between:
There are private Discords, private Slack channels, and a flurry of spatial interfaces in development. They’re immune to data harvesting, invisible from search engines, and there’s no context collapse – good fences make good neighbours.
As the global timelines get abandoned, this is where people are homesteading.
And doing all the usual things of chatting, sharing links, giving support, falling out, making jokes, and all the rest.
…Or so I’m told.
I’m no zillennial hanging out in a handful of private Discords. Instead I have a blog, which is like being a big noise in ham radio, or an unironic aficionado of VHS.
My own, limited experience of this, from back in 2015:
If the global timeline feels like a city, a private Slack group feels like a neighbourhood.
I do not include in this “virtual neighbourhood” space media like newsletters and podcasts, both growing fast rn.
Perhaps what we’re seeing is the disentangling of social media back into social and media: newsletters and podcasts are best understood as being part of the media spectrum, even if many of them are smaller and have community spaces attached. And Discord space, Slack spaces, etc, these virtual neighbourhoods are pure social.
I’d love to understand these virtual neighbourhoods better.
My hunch is their optimum size will hover around the Dunbar number of ~150, fewer if you’re just looking at active members (you need a mix of active and less active in any community).
But has anyone published any research on this?
What is the distribution of populations of private Discord groups and other similar spaces? How many groups do people belong to? How does this time take away from other activities? Is there a typology of groups and how they start? How well do people know each other? Is there a typical lifecycle? Are there temporary groups and persistent groups? Is there a difference in the culture created vs the global timelines? Etc.
And let’s assume that this grows into the dominant mode of socialising online in the 2020s:
What does this mean for the nature of celebrity?
What about the businesses that rely on data capture, and in particular what about advertising?
Will these make echo chambers problems worse or better?
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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People are increasingly hanging out in small, private communities. Global timelines and newsfeeds won’t come back.
The shift looks something like this:
As covered by this excellent edition of Garbage Day, Twitter shows all the characteristics of a rotting online community. How to recognise a rotting community, quoting the full list:
Meanwhile, only the olds use Facebook (including me), but everyone younger has mostly vanished, being increasingly uncomfortable with
So this is the end of the era of global timelines. Who would take on the responsibility of content moderation to build another one.
Where is everybody going instead?
Well there are the peer-to-peer and small group spaces of texting and WhatsApp.
But the problem of peer-to-peer is that you don’t get those joyous, serendipitous moments of running into like-minded friends-of-friends.
In-between:
There are private Discords, private Slack channels, and a flurry of spatial interfaces in development. They’re immune to data harvesting, invisible from search engines, and there’s no context collapse – good fences make good neighbours.
As the global timelines get abandoned, this is where people are homesteading.
And doing all the usual things of chatting, sharing links, giving support, falling out, making jokes, and all the rest.
…Or so I’m told.
I’m no zillennial hanging out in a handful of private Discords. Instead I have a blog, which is like being a big noise in ham radio, or an unironic aficionado of VHS.
My own, limited experience of this, from back in 2015:
If the global timeline feels like a city, a private Slack group feels like a neighbourhood.
I do not include in this “virtual neighbourhood” space media like newsletters and podcasts, both growing fast rn.
Perhaps what we’re seeing is the disentangling of social media back into social and media: newsletters and podcasts are best understood as being part of the media spectrum, even if many of them are smaller and have community spaces attached. And Discord space, Slack spaces, etc, these virtual neighbourhoods are pure social.
I’d love to understand these virtual neighbourhoods better.
My hunch is their optimum size will hover around the Dunbar number of ~150, fewer if you’re just looking at active members (you need a mix of active and less active in any community).
But has anyone published any research on this?
What is the distribution of populations of private Discord groups and other similar spaces? How many groups do people belong to? How does this time take away from other activities? Is there a typology of groups and how they start? How well do people know each other? Is there a typical lifecycle? Are there temporary groups and persistent groups? Is there a difference in the culture created vs the global timelines? Etc.
And let’s assume that this grows into the dominant mode of socialising online in the 2020s: