What we're doing here:
- Change people's lives: Belonging. Fulfillment. Connection. Value.
- Stand for something: Communities. Altruism. Virtue. Citizenship.
- Destroy: Spam. Wasted community. Tragedy of commons. Mean people winning.
- Create: Conversation. Gifts & giving. Useful, valueable stuff. Victory of the commons: shared benefits.
The anger: online communities suck by nature. Their inherent suckiness shows up in gradual loss of focus, spam, bullying, and a diminishing value over time/growth. The efforts of moderators, CMs, janitors, and rule-bots preserve communities against value-entropy. They persevere organically by fragmenting themselves into sub-communities. But for the people involved, it takes work, and the result is lost value.
The people in my communities aren't terrible people. My social feeds shouldn't be bad. Getting added to a big group text or email conversation shouldn't be obnoxious. If we were all in a room together it'd be fine. So it's bullshit that the same group, online, suffers from the negative effects (focus, spam, etc) of these strange artifacts (the incentives, pressures, rules) forced upon it by the shape of the system.
"[Social media] isn't a conduit to our friends. It's performance art."
The change: online communities should work according to the rules of regular communities of people in a room. The social value. The collaborative experience. The rules of the game. The expected value of belonging to a group. The social texture and norms of the group.
The problem of online communities sucking will continue to exist regardless of whether these changes are sufficient to solve it or not, because the ways we engage aren't designed. They're reskinned copies of copies of a few tools built by university IT guys forty years ago: IRC. Email. Usenet. How limiting.
Vision: miniature digital utopias where me and my fellows give to each other. Help, entertainment, advice, comfort. A virtuous tribe for every context at every degree of privacy. An economic angel sitting on everyone's shoulder. Valuable contributions incentivized by negative contributions being automatically minimized. (Who decides what's what? The community.)
What are you making? Better communities.
Why are you making it? Because I've spent a shitton of time in online communities. They've legitimately been my primary recreation at points in my life. As a first-generation citizen of the internet I can see the road we're walking down, and it looks like being locked in a minor circle of hell - the one where hell is other people - and not at all the technoutopia we were promised, all because we're too lazy to solve fundamental problems and we limit ourselves to optimization problems on engagement and design and content. Because digital communities are tremendously valuable, and they've got a tremendous problem with value loss and nobody even seems to think there's a problem once they fire up a slack channel, even while they groan about the spam and distraction they face if they want to stay involved. I want the internet, or some corners of it, anyway, to be a reflection of our better selves.