Me and my terrible comments

removed by mod

In order to maintain standards there has to be a barrier to entry. That might be a moderator or cost or complexity. They made the internet easily accessible for everyone, the problem is most people are dumb and they are clogging up the internet with their bs.

Take three people. One is A one is B and one is Z a troll/flamer or whatever wildcard.

A and B have opposing views and are having civilized conversation about a topic. Then the Z tries to come in between with some shitty statement or troll comment or whatnot. A and B can still ignore the stupidity and stay with the topic.

Now multiply then by 100. You will see variations of each group and their micro-/macro inclinations towards others. One or many of the Z’s or A/B inclined to Z can get in between A and B and due to inclinations, there will be more breeding ground for the shittyness. A and B can’t ignore the multitude of sitty comments spamming around the convo. Their only option is to steer away. What is left? Bunch of monkeys in a shit throwing contest. Be it hate, memes, trolling, flaming…

Now I like memes if they really are funny and have a point and if they even evolve as they used to. But I still prefer knowledge content. And no. I do not produce high quality comments. They’re all flawed somehow. An imprint of me.

But basically it’s about variations in masses.

It’s not just online communities. See figure 1.

Figure 1: America.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Lemmy, honestly. We make jokes and share the occasional funny picture in the comments, but it’s never really been the focus of the content.

I’m the main poster, though not a mod, for SuperbOwl and we’ve grown well without watering down the content. I try to stick to mostly educational, yet fun things, but I summarized a research paper this week on how levels of street traffic affects the hunting success rate of nocturnal owls. It was a pretty big hit, better than some pic only posts.

Maybe if the captivating content is keeping up with the volume of users, it’s less of an issue of conversation deteriorating. I’m still at a point I have a big audience but can keep up talking with everyone. If it got to a point where I couldn’t, I imagine it may be like any other group gathering where someone will inevitably try to fill any awkward silence with whatever and that could detail the previous flow of sticking to the real topic of the community.

I don’t know if that’s helpful to anyone whose community may have already passed that point, but we haven’t had to take any mod action or try to force anyone to do anything. I just feel we’re pretty good example of how popularity doesn’t need to mean sinking to the lowest common denominator.

There are two kinds of trolls: Harassers and flamers. Harassers will pick an individual target and grief them until they stop reacting. They only defense is to stay off their radar. Flamers are drawn to a community they can divide, and the bigger the community, the easier it is to divide into warring factions. And that’s why bigger communities attract more trolls.

Once something is popular enough it attracts bad actors, trolls, and grifters.

There’s a shit event horizon.

There’s always a certain amount of shit-quality posting, but when the conmunity is relatively small, the shitty posters are on their own against a group that doesn’t like them, so they can’t make a really strong or long-lasting inpression.

But as the community grows, the number of shitty posters also grows, and it reaches a point at which there are enough of them encouraging each other that the opposition no longer matters. And then fairly quickly, the quality posters will say “Fuck this - this forum sucks,” and go somewhere else.

And the shitty posters are all rhati left.

I faced this problem a lot on reddit when my subreddits took off. The closest I got to identifying a cause was with the volume of posts. At a certain point, the daily volume is so high that posts have to compete for attention to get on the front page. The quicker a post can be read, the faster it will be upvoted and the more the algorithm will weight it because it got early interaction. This gives posters an incentive to make memes, images, and jokes instead of an effort post that takes ten minutes to read. New users attracted to the snowballing population see a page full of these posts being upvoted, so their default incentive is to post what already works. Old users are turned off by the stale regurgitation of the worst posts and leave, so you only have new subscribers posting references to things they weren’t there for.

Hexbear has remained pretty consistent even back in the 2016-2020 r/chapotraphouse days because it’s consciously meta-modernist. We’re coming out of irony-poisoned postmodernist forums like reddit and hate how that shaped interactions. The in-jokes have their role but aren’t the feature, with effort posts being something the community rewards. Usually comment threads will have good discussions because they’re niche topics that the users are passionate about, and removing downvoting helps to discourage anything but discussion even when you disagree with someone.

Paradox of tolerance being ignored

It is harder to manage and moderate larger/growing user bases. The founders also may have left and their vision or intention for the community can no longer be communicated/enforced. You are left with many people with unclear purpose. When this happens to humans, chaos ensues.

I found its the opposite. A person makes a community and just floods it with memes or such trying to get traction whereas more mature communities start getting better posts.