Community rambles
I really like forums, but there is a good point against them: They have a LOT of community inertia: Standards and expectations passed down from long bygone days. Often cemented by posters who'd left to the march of time, shaped by moderation guidelines, and hopefully eroded by progressing social expectations.
This can make them incredibly daunting to the new comer, unaware of tradition and injokes, unsure of what steps may result in the soft *click* of a social land mine.
Re: Community rambles
@IrisKalmia Forums that grow popular quickly develop a social condition similar to the "5 Monkeys and a Ladder" experiment, except almost everything is a different type of ladder with different levels of punishment associated.
Point systems help alleviate this by making it easier to find the ladders ahead of time, though they also more rapidly condition users to mirror the dominant culture.
Generally speaking, the larger the space, the more toxic that culture becomes. :x
Re: Community rambles
@IrisKalmia Good moderation stems the tide of toxicity. In smaller communities, it can eliminate it near entirely, and have procedures to keep it at bay when it inevitably returns.
The larger scale, though, is way more complicated. The healthiest solution is to let communities branch off naturally as their members find points of division with one another. Mastodon is probably the healthiest model I've seen for keeping large scale communities healthy and connected.
Re: Community rambles
@mawr Yeah, forums can handle that somewhat with subforums and kinda just becoming a loose collection of barely connected communities, but they're often far less 'chatty' than this social structure.
Re: Community rambles
@IrisKalmia As a community scales up, inevitably some users will find divisions around the very definition of toxicity. When two sides of a community define the other as toxic, that's a division, and you can't moderate around that. At that point, the only way to keep things together is to take a less hands-on approach to moderation. That's where we're at with Twitter and Facebook.
Re: Community rambles
@IrisKalmia (I've spent a lot of time over past 3 years thinking about this problem specifically, and I've developed a lot of thoughts and strong opinions about it. ^^;)
Re: Community rambles
@mawr It's something to have opinions on! It's been on my mind for ages heavily inspired by how IRC communities fragment and form
Re: Community rambles
@mawr Not much I can say to argue with that: Good moderation helps offset that, but how moderation is handled is one of those defining questions of every social group.
Good forums like any online community hopefully have internalized that it's not "Just words on a screen" into their standards by this point and are moderating accordingly.
It's sad how many places haven't.