371–378 of 378 posts
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…
Right, that's the vibe. And it's fantastic.
The bigger they get, the less personal they get. A regression to the mean.
For example, if your town has fewer than 7,000 people, you'll often see strangers waving to each other, conversations happening at the general store, etc.
Once you cross over 7,000, that disappears. Waves turn to nods, and then nothing.
Warpcast is the online equivalent -- it has (I think) only 20,000 DAUs, so feels much more friendly and intimate
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
I have been on the internet for a while, and I always loved online communities because I did not have access early in my life to resources that I was interested in, and those communities gave me a sense of belonging and intuitive resources that fulfilled my life.
While this was great, for the last 6 years I have stuck to nurturing small communities with no more than 20 people because even gated communities (especially big ones in Reddit and Slack) are not fun anymore.
Several behaviors that I noticed in those small communities were:
- status game with participants receiving attention and dictating the "discourse" more based on social status than content
- Safeticism: tons of artificial rules that contradict even local and national laws
- Tons of non-contributing people are shitting on the water and pushing great contributors away.A lot of great contributors are leaving, creating the dead sea effect on the community.
I've been observing a pattern that I've been trying to articulate here and I can best describe as a framework where stuff 'comes to you' whereas the Internet for a long time was an enabler of 'you go to stuff'. The pendulum swung back, thanks to ad tech, and centralization, that have or are trying to orchestrate a culture shift. Okay, here are some concrete examples. 1. Television/cable (absent a TiVo type device), t…
Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s. He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could travel to cities to meet audiences where they were. Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it…
One is what you and Benjamin are highlighting: the distinction between message traveling to audience and audience traveling to message.
Generally a forum or theatre are both examples where an audience assembles to receive or view a message. Similarly for museums or in situ* attractions. It's possible to appreciate the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon in person only by visiting those places. Flagship performance venues such as La Scala, the Bayreuth Festival, Lincoln Center, or New York's Broadway also attract audiences from around the world.
A contrast is tours in which some object or performer(s) travel a circuit over which two or more audiences are assembled and performances take place. There's some localised travel, but in large part it is the message which travels to the audience. Classic film-based cinema scales this up further, with physical film spools touring through projection rooms, traditionally beginning in larger and wealthier markets before hitting secondary and rural ones (there was a time when films might open in New York and Los Angeles weeks, or months, before even large Midwest cities such as Chicago). Digital distribution has made simultaneous openings much more common.
Broadcast, cable, and Internet transmissions take this concept even further where a performance is delivered directly to the home, business, desk, or hands of the audience via radio, television, desktop computer, or mobile phone. And of course books and printed materials afforded a similar service centuries earlier (though the true fall in prices and rise in volume began only in the 19th century, and in many ways was a 20th century phenomenon).
Generalising:
- Networks distribute messages.
- Spaces (or venues) assemble audiences.
There are hybrid forms as well:
- Media Channels combine distribution with an assembled audience.
- Tours visit a series of audience across a travel path.
- Archives gather records to spaces which readers can visit and access large quantities of information at little marginal cost (effort, time, distance, energy).
https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/3aa6e840ac7a0139294f00...>
There's another symmetry I've noticed between records and signals generally:
- Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time subject to noise to a receiver potentially creating a new record.
- Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space subject to decay to a reader potentially creating a new signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…
“catpost half drunk and high” Is the theme of our online pub