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Communities are not fungible

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Communities are not fungible

#41

Post by energy123 »

FranklinJabar wrote: post #37
energy123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation to allow more private development. I want both. They are complementary. There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they share some skepticism around private land ownership.

> There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.

This is a fictitious trade-off. Deregulation (of parking minimums, height limits) helps ensure public housing is affordable for the taxpayer and environmentally friendly. If it also helps private developers as a side effect, and that is no loss for public housing.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#42

Post by glroyal »

Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.

Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.

Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.

If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#43

Post by baud147258 »

ajuc wrote: post #3

This is why open source for communication platforms is so important. Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.

Discord's just a platform. When Discord will disappear, I don't think it would happen overnight and the communities would have time to decide where to relocate, hopefully for an open-source self-hosted solutions, but more likely for the next hot thing in instant communication. And it's not as if communities don't move from platform to platform already: like wasn't there a big wave of people moving from Digg to Reddit a while back?

Re: Communities are not fungible

#44

Post by 38jj999 »

nicbou wrote: post #26

Fantastic writing. The stone walls and fabric metaphor was brilliant. It's the sort of storytelling that made Steve Jobs' ideas so compelling (to me). I see the same value in community, especially as an immigrant helping other immigrants. Someone arriving in a new country is much more likely to be happy and successful if they quickly find a community there. Communities hold so much knowledge that is freely shared but…

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Re: Communities are not fungible

#45

Post by ckardaris »

goodpoint wrote: post #31
ckardaris wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the article proposes that a community should not accept new members. On the contrary, it critiques the breaking of communities. Migrants or refugees have to find a new community because their old one was broken for whatever reason, be it war, financial troubles or something else. So in that case, that first breakage of community should have been prevented and the community preserved.

If anything it's well known that migrants tend to build communities as well as high-skills "expats".

This is a completely different topic though. And not relevant to point being discussed. Analyzing the effectiveness of community building by different groups is a separate issue.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#46

Post by nottorp »

jpereira wrote: post #35

When thinking about online communities I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution. I fully agree with the author that you can't just pick up and move a community wholesale but irl we do see patterns of migration, disaporas, etc that bring along with them relationships and trust networks. That's been basically impossible to do online. The networks where most of…

> I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution.

Do you know what that sounds like? The "feature" that lets some credit card subscriptions follow you across credit cards although you'd like to get rid of them thank you very much.

I don't want a global identity for all communities I'm part of. Joe from the bait and tackle group (i don't fish, is that a plausible fishing group name?) has no business knowing what games I play unless I personally tell him.

Moreover, that nice store that gave the bait and tackle group a 10% discount has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS chasing me in MMO #245768.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#47

Post by testdelacc1 »

Esn024 wrote: post #36
testdelacc1 wrote: post #4

I agree with Joan here, communities aren’t fungible. Building something where something already exists does carry a cost. But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new…

I think, unlike what the author writes, communities CAN be moved if they are sufficiently small and loyal to the leaders who do the move, and the leaders don't screw it up. Moreover, the move is sometimes an improvement. I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I can't think of a…

Digg to Reddit was a positive migration. I can think of many small Reddit communities that couldn’t have flourished under Digg or the old phpBB style boards.

Things can get better over time. When they don’t acknowledge this I can’t help but see the authors article as a dislike for any change of any kind.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#48

Post by s_dev »

ajuc wrote: post #3

This is why open source for communication platforms is so important. Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.

Online communities are far more transient and far less effective than ones rooted in geography. I'm not saying that they don't provide value or aren't worthwhile.

Online communities can rebuild quickly are more resilient in a sense e.g. Digg to Reddit migration.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#49

Post by monideas »

Communities aren't fungible (in the sense that the actual particular culture and values of a particular group of people living in a particular area do have an extreme impact on that area) but also communities are not defined by particular areas that people live.

People who are from the same community tend to settle in particular areas and I think that is what the author is getting confused by.

Also many people in the developed world don't really have any community that they're a part of at all.

If you're interested in learning more about this you can look up the phrase "covenantal vs majestic community".

Re: Communities are not fungible

#50

Post by nicbou »

38jj999 wrote: post #44
nicbou wrote: post #26

Fantastic writing. The stone walls and fabric metaphor was brilliant. It's the sort of storytelling that made Steve Jobs' ideas so compelling (to me). I see the same value in community, especially as an immigrant helping other immigrants. Someone arriving in a new country is much more likely to be happy and successful if they quickly find a community there. Communities hold so much knowledge that is freely shared but…

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Communities fragment as they migrate, online and especially offline.

ToyTown Germany died, and overnight both the community and its decades-old body of knowledge vanished. An identical forum was created a few weeks latwr, and it's still pretty much dead, many years later.

All those communities who tried to move away from reddit due to the API debacle? None really survived the transition. Moving away from a platform means losing all the passive traffic from that platform, and losing many more users to the friction of creating a new account. All the information stays on the older platform too. All that friction adds up.

I mean it wouldn't hurt to give something a bit of thought and consideration before calling it hot bullshit. Since you created an account just to post this, you might want to familiarize yourself with the HN commenting guidelines. They keep things civil and pleasant.

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