This is a really interesting framing. It feels intuitively correct to me, though for the places I've seen go through change -- subreddits, mostly -- it's hard to divorce what the author is talking about from the challenges of community scale: a community of 10,000 behaves differently from a community of 100, even if the individuals in both cases are broadly similar.
I guess you could summarize it as the process of a group becoming more popular and also less specific, and arguably no longer focused on its original "mission". I can see the Somethingawful forums in that. Originally a website making FPS jokes and mocking amateur websites, the original forum demographics were extremely gamer-heavy and, well, mean. Gamers are still common but not as much the norm, and there's not nearly as much tolerance for offensive behavior or language.
Reddit is not a discussion forum, it's a marketing platform. It's actively hostile towards any meaningful discussion through upvotes, downvotes, and aggressive moderation. These principles cannot apply to reddit since "possums" will be repelled by reddit's structures and never form groups there.
Yeah I kind of agree. I've modded a couple popular subreddits, and while you can have reasonable discussion and disagreements when the subreddit is only slightly popular, as it scales up that rapidly becomes more difficult. Anyone disagreeing with the consensus doesn't get one person engaging them in argument, they get twenty, which feels overwhelming. And of course, the downvotes.
I think the aggressive moderation is necessary, but it doesn't really solve the problem, it just keeps the peace.
That said, plenty of subreddits are still useful. It's just really hard to get any real sense of community.
> Anyone disagreeing with the consensus doesn't get one person engaging them in argument, they get twenty, which feels overwhelming. And of course, the downvotes.
Yeah, unfortunately I 'abandoned'* Reddit because of that. Either your comment is downvoted to oblivion, or you get a lot of people being aggressive towards you
* I still use it, but almost only for browsing memes, and a few useful subreddits
These principles do apply, there is a constant churn of small subreddits being created where you can see some deep, slow discussion of stuff despite Reddit being actively hostile to it. Eventually they grow to the point where they get a few posts showing up on the default front page and then there’s a big influx of new readers who are much more casual about the subject, and much more likely to shitpost. Within the year there will be at least one new subreddit trying to recreate what it was like before that happened.
Yes, correct. I think the bottom line is that on some level we celebrate growth and popularity, but it seems to strangle more nuanced, meaningful discussion and community-building.
I run a Mastodon instance and very quickly got to the point where new accounts are only available if you ask me for one, and if I decide to let you have one. Which is not a thing I do lightly for strangers.
The last thing I want is growth. Then I'd have to treat it like my full-time job and deal with managing an ever-more-unmanageable number of users, finding ways to deal with ever-huger bandwidth, storage, and CPU requirements, and somehow making enough money off of it to pay for all that, plus my own rent. Fuck growth. It's a little gathering for a few friends and that's about all it needs to be.
It's a thing I've often seen on Discord, actually. Otters
will often create a “neighbour” server, which is essentially
a one big #general channel. Over time, that neighbour server
becomes its own thing, while most of the Possums stay on the
main one to actually discuss the Thing.
It depends on the site, and especially the modes of user interaction and moderation. Some types will tend towards a purity spiral, while others will become dissolved by casuals. A balance is needed.
> One idea is to have a periodic ‘chat splitting,’ where every 3-6 months (or when membership hits a certain number) there is a new forum/chatroom made, and people have to choose which group to join.
IMO communities that undergo splitting of this kind will inevitably result in the death of the community.
For me personally, in the current situation, this wonderful review of the best gay dating sites https://gayhookupguide.com/ helps to clarify the situation very well. Surely each of you has friends who prefer to look for like-minded people and love online. It is this useful resource that will help you very quickly if you want to find an unconventional relationship.
I disagree with the dichotomy presented. People who like a specific, niche culture aren't necessarily closed to other cultures, and people who like mainstream culture don't necessarily like most cultures and don't necessarily get along with everybody. As such, this is the progression I've watched happen:
- Niche possums and niche otters create a small community focused on a specific culture
- Otters from mainstream culture enter the community, and are welcomed by the niche otters, but this opening is disliked by the niche possums.
- The niche possums either try to moderate the community more heavily, or leave the community.
- The community grows in size, being overwhelmingly filled with otters. Mainstream otters dominate as they are more numerous.
- The community's content and culture gets shifted from niche to mainstream culture.
- Mainstream possums join the community as they identify with the community's new, mainstream culture. This completes the community's shift from niche to mainstream culture.
- Most of what remains of the community's original, niche culture is suppressed by mainstream possums, as it goes against the community's current culture.
- Niche possums create a new community, and the cycle repeats.
Yes, I was surprised to see this end with Otters forming a new community. I typically feel like Otters overflow a community, and as you indicate the Possums create a new one. The old one implodes (or sometimes does not) because with losing the Possums, the driving force behind what made the community unique and great is now gone.
I tend to agree.
But there is another aspect: Sadly the democratization of internet access has lowered the bar across the board in regards to both form and content of discussions in communities.
I've been a heavy forum user and occasional mod/admin in subject focused communities in the pre-Facebook era (~'98-2005) and I've seen many communities die down from an influx of barely literate (technical or otherwise), low effort, entitled and sometimes rude users. And I don't think this can entirely be explained by the "mainstream otters" concept, and neither have I seen many instances of new niche communities appearing to replace the former. At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I observe that the education level of the average internet user has been dropping.
The way I usually see this solved is by relentless moderation to keep communication on topic, i.e., only things of direct interest to possums. Otters self-select out because they can't talk about group-adjacent stuff. It helps also to point otters to groups where they can talk about this interest and other things.
Examples: I am an an Esperanto language learners group on Facebook. Any posts about anything not directly relating to that topic are closed, and the posters pointed to other, more general groups.
Many phpBB-style topical forums I'm in have a "general discussion" subforum. Any posts not directly related to the forum's topic are moved there, and so follow the otters.
I don't know if this an otter thing, but many groups of people that know each other online for a long time get interested in off-topic discussions. Just like most people talk to colleagues also about other things than just work.
In small amounts, this seems to be a good thing. Too much and the group loses it original topic and becomes just a social hangout.
Isolating the topic kills communities in the long run. People who know each other deeply, even because of a topic, will start to go topic-adjacent, and then off-topic. You either end up having to broaden the scope of the overall community or risk losing folks after a certain period of time.
That's why it's important to have an off-topic containment section on the same forum. Give the regulars a place to have their social chats while not spamming up the on-topic threads.
The core problem here is the shared resource - the group. It is a shared channel of information. When you have people with different backgrounds any message on this channel will be "signal" to some and "noise" to others. That causes a conflict over what belongs to the group and what doesn't.
The most common split is how knowledgeable you are on the topic. Experts are your "possums" and beginners are your "otters". If you don't stop the inflow of the beginners, then you get mostly noise for the experts (Eternal September). If you do stop the inflow - you become beginner unfriendly.
The article's suggested solution to regularly split the group tries to lessen the tension on the shared resource by creating more resources. But it's hard - you will lose members as you try to constantly create new groups.
I'd like to suggest a different solution - let users dynamically connect to people who post "signal" and disconnect from people who post "noise". Imagine a group system where when you upvote a post, you connect stronger to other people who upvoted this post (this includes the author of the post). And if you downvote some content you weaken your connection to people who upvoted it. And then how strongly you are connected to others determines how the content is ranked for you. The stronger you are connected to "possums", the more "possumy" content you get. And if you prefer "ottery" content - upvote it and you will see more content from "otters".
This removes the tension because everyone has control over the content they see and they no longer need to fight over the rules of what belongs and what doesn't. This replaces a collective decision with an individual decision.
And guess what, I am building just such system as a hobby project at https://linklonk.com so you can try it out.
I wonder if this is recreating groups without labeling them as such. To a newcomer, such a big group looks like it is composed of many smaller groups. The newcomer then first has to reduce the signal of uninteresting group before finding relevant content (or not and wasting quite a bit of time).
Recreating groups is a hard reset on connections between users. That is, if you migrate from the old group to a new one, you effectively disconnect from all members of the old group and connect to the new.
With LinkLonk you gradually update your connections as you upvoted/downvote content. In a regular group your connection to all other members is a boolean 0 (you are not a member of the group) or 1 (you are a member of the group). On LinkLonk your connection is a float - 0.01 or 0.5 or 3.7 - depending on how useful you found their previous contributions.
As for taking the time to onboard, I agree, this is a problem for LinkLonk - the initial set of recommendations is purely popularity based and there is no topic focus to it. But try upvoting a single item and you will get connected to the other users that upvoted that item. Refresh the recommendations and you will see more content from those users, which should increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Or try submitting a new link and you will get connected to the RSS feed that posted that link.
This is similar to what e.g. the TikTok "for you" algorithm does, right? Interacting with content will make it more likely for you to see similar content in the future.
Yes, the basic idea is similar. The big difference is that the TikTok's algorithm is a black box, while LinkLonk is intentionally transparent.
By transparent I mean that you know what the algorithm will do when you upvote an item. For example, it tells you when press upvote: "You will see more content from 4 users and 3 feeds that recommended this item". And then, when you see a recommendation, it tells you which items connect you to the users that brought you this recommendation (it is shown above every recommendation if you expand "from X users and Y feeds").
My hope is that the users will have more control over the information they get and, as a result, will be more thoughtful about what they upvote/downvote.
If the possums are so keen on moderation and community standards, why not take advantage of this and employ some self-moderation and censorship? Make the community invite-only or if a user reaches a certain threshold of downvotes they are banned for a while. This would discourage Otters who are generally just looking for somewhere to spend time.
This model is incomplete at best. In my view "possums" here are not simply people obsessed with staying on topic, they are people who are deeply invested in the topic. Other terms for possums would include makers, scholars, artists, and founders. So called "otters" are those who have a passing interest in the topic, enough to be entertained by it but who do not participate at a deep level. They are otherwise known as consumers or dilettantes. There is a third group missing, they generally move in after the "otters" have reached a critical mass. To stick with the theme let's call them "orcas". They have no interest in socializing or in the topic, their goal is to monetize the topic and extract wealth from the otters by exploiting the work of the possums.
A solution to slow this that doesn't involve chat splitting is introducing friction to onboarding in an otherwise open community. A Discord server in-which I'm active routinely executes arbitrary kicks on new members (not bans) as a matter of course. A determined new person would reach out to pretty much any active member, request an invite, and be allowed back in. Users are expected to carry server invites on them at all times. Users that seem excessively active are occasionally given temporary bans, and told to "touch grass". Nobody's upset by this, because kick permissions are given to all active members, and revoked from members who use them to pursue vendettas. Moderation privileges rotate pseudorandomly among the active members.
This kind of hazing selects for people of good humor, who are willing to work to participate in the community and aren't emotionally volatile, but who are mature enough not to be too upset if they lost access. It's a good culture without too much homogeneity, but it's understood that you miss a few good people to produce the environment.
This isn't the solution to creating an online community, but it's an example of engineering a culture and onboarding process that selects for certain temperaments so that the community doesn't become diluted as is grows, and members who don't fit self-select themselves out of the population.
The Discord itself has no explicit purpose, but it was a companion to a now defunct constellation of facebook pages that were designed to give leftists and rightists neutral ground to discuss their criticisms of society and the media landscape the typical brigading or flamewars. After two or three facebook purges, the admins gave up on maintaining that community, but the Discord's still around and mostly runs itself, because the environment is inherently toxic to knee-jerk ideologues.
In my experience there's a third type of group, a subcategory of possums who solved the otter problem to their own detriment: Porcupines. Porcupines use techniques such as "toxicity" to create communities that are more stable on average than possum-led groups. The otters and possums are likely to stay away from the start for fear of being associated with the toxicity of the porcupines. The outsiders may create their own less toxic groups, and continue the possum-otter cycle, but the porcupines remain in the same place they always have, not changing much, always slightly screwing over the reputation of the group as a whole by their very existence. The porcupines quickly develop thick skin and become immune to the toxicity themselves, at the expense of their reputation and potential growth.
Porcupine toxicity can take many forms:
* general abrasiveness and rudeness (e.g. toxic multiplayer games)
* extreme ideological purity (e.g. tumblr) or impurity (e.g. 4chan), usually around popular culture war fault lines
The advantage of toxicity is that there is no "constitution" or even much moderation needed at all. The main disadvantages, aside from the toxicity itself and the lack of strong growth (which is a feature not a bug), is the difficulty of finding platforms to host the communities, as toxic communities are not very advertiser-friendly, and the reputational hit one takes by being associated with a porcupine-led community
37 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 98.4 ms ] threadI guess you could summarize it as the process of a group becoming more popular and also less specific, and arguably no longer focused on its original "mission". I can see the Somethingawful forums in that. Originally a website making FPS jokes and mocking amateur websites, the original forum demographics were extremely gamer-heavy and, well, mean. Gamers are still common but not as much the norm, and there's not nearly as much tolerance for offensive behavior or language.
I think the aggressive moderation is necessary, but it doesn't really solve the problem, it just keeps the peace.
That said, plenty of subreddits are still useful. It's just really hard to get any real sense of community.
Yeah, unfortunately I 'abandoned'* Reddit because of that. Either your comment is downvoted to oblivion, or you get a lot of people being aggressive towards you
* I still use it, but almost only for browsing memes, and a few useful subreddits
I run a Mastodon instance and very quickly got to the point where new accounts are only available if you ask me for one, and if I decide to let you have one. Which is not a thing I do lightly for strangers.
The last thing I want is growth. Then I'd have to treat it like my full-time job and deal with managing an ever-more-unmanageable number of users, finding ways to deal with ever-huger bandwidth, storage, and CPU requirements, and somehow making enough money off of it to pay for all that, plus my own rent. Fuck growth. It's a little gathering for a few friends and that's about all it needs to be.
IMO communities that undergo splitting of this kind will inevitably result in the death of the community.
- Niche possums and niche otters create a small community focused on a specific culture
- Otters from mainstream culture enter the community, and are welcomed by the niche otters, but this opening is disliked by the niche possums.
- The niche possums either try to moderate the community more heavily, or leave the community.
- The community grows in size, being overwhelmingly filled with otters. Mainstream otters dominate as they are more numerous.
- The community's content and culture gets shifted from niche to mainstream culture.
- Mainstream possums join the community as they identify with the community's new, mainstream culture. This completes the community's shift from niche to mainstream culture.
- Most of what remains of the community's original, niche culture is suppressed by mainstream possums, as it goes against the community's current culture.
- Niche possums create a new community, and the cycle repeats.
I've been a heavy forum user and occasional mod/admin in subject focused communities in the pre-Facebook era (~'98-2005) and I've seen many communities die down from an influx of barely literate (technical or otherwise), low effort, entitled and sometimes rude users. And I don't think this can entirely be explained by the "mainstream otters" concept, and neither have I seen many instances of new niche communities appearing to replace the former. At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I observe that the education level of the average internet user has been dropping.
Examples: I am an an Esperanto language learners group on Facebook. Any posts about anything not directly relating to that topic are closed, and the posters pointed to other, more general groups.
Many phpBB-style topical forums I'm in have a "general discussion" subforum. Any posts not directly related to the forum's topic are moved there, and so follow the otters.
In small amounts, this seems to be a good thing. Too much and the group loses it original topic and becomes just a social hangout.
Is it that possums only want to talk on-topic?
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
The most common split is how knowledgeable you are on the topic. Experts are your "possums" and beginners are your "otters". If you don't stop the inflow of the beginners, then you get mostly noise for the experts (Eternal September). If you do stop the inflow - you become beginner unfriendly.
The article's suggested solution to regularly split the group tries to lessen the tension on the shared resource by creating more resources. But it's hard - you will lose members as you try to constantly create new groups.
I'd like to suggest a different solution - let users dynamically connect to people who post "signal" and disconnect from people who post "noise". Imagine a group system where when you upvote a post, you connect stronger to other people who upvoted this post (this includes the author of the post). And if you downvote some content you weaken your connection to people who upvoted it. And then how strongly you are connected to others determines how the content is ranked for you. The stronger you are connected to "possums", the more "possumy" content you get. And if you prefer "ottery" content - upvote it and you will see more content from "otters".
This removes the tension because everyone has control over the content they see and they no longer need to fight over the rules of what belongs and what doesn't. This replaces a collective decision with an individual decision.
And guess what, I am building just such system as a hobby project at https://linklonk.com so you can try it out.
With LinkLonk you gradually update your connections as you upvoted/downvote content. In a regular group your connection to all other members is a boolean 0 (you are not a member of the group) or 1 (you are a member of the group). On LinkLonk your connection is a float - 0.01 or 0.5 or 3.7 - depending on how useful you found their previous contributions.
As for taking the time to onboard, I agree, this is a problem for LinkLonk - the initial set of recommendations is purely popularity based and there is no topic focus to it. But try upvoting a single item and you will get connected to the other users that upvoted that item. Refresh the recommendations and you will see more content from those users, which should increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Or try submitting a new link and you will get connected to the RSS feed that posted that link.
Cool site!
By transparent I mean that you know what the algorithm will do when you upvote an item. For example, it tells you when press upvote: "You will see more content from 4 users and 3 feeds that recommended this item". And then, when you see a recommendation, it tells you which items connect you to the users that brought you this recommendation (it is shown above every recommendation if you expand "from X users and Y feeds").
My hope is that the users will have more control over the information they get and, as a result, will be more thoughtful about what they upvote/downvote.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
This kind of hazing selects for people of good humor, who are willing to work to participate in the community and aren't emotionally volatile, but who are mature enough not to be too upset if they lost access. It's a good culture without too much homogeneity, but it's understood that you miss a few good people to produce the environment.
This isn't the solution to creating an online community, but it's an example of engineering a culture and onboarding process that selects for certain temperaments so that the community doesn't become diluted as is grows, and members who don't fit self-select themselves out of the population.
Porcupine toxicity can take many forms:
* general abrasiveness and rudeness (e.g. toxic multiplayer games)
* extreme ideological purity (e.g. tumblr) or impurity (e.g. 4chan), usually around popular culture war fault lines
* promoting illegal activities (e.g. hard-drug-using communities)
The advantage of toxicity is that there is no "constitution" or even much moderation needed at all. The main disadvantages, aside from the toxicity itself and the lack of strong growth (which is a feature not a bug), is the difficulty of finding platforms to host the communities, as toxic communities are not very advertiser-friendly, and the reputational hit one takes by being associated with a porcupine-led community