
To understand how group dynamics work online, look no further than Numtot - josephpmay
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/style/numtot-urbanism-memes.html
======
chasingthewind
I joined a popular video games forum back in about 2000 which, at the time,
had some industry folks. Everybody was generally very polite and reasonable
but as time went on and more people joined the forum it became more and more
tense and the industry people got berated for their games or their commentary
and slowly left. The quality of discourse degraded to the point where there
was an outright rebellion against a certain set of trolls who weren't being
"dealt with" which led to a mass banning and an exodus that included me.

Most of the refugees wound up at another forum which repeated almost the exact
same pathologies over the course of the next few years. I eventually left that
community as well.

The conclusion I came to was that I was not gaining anything valuable from my
interactions on these forums. I also suspect that pure online interaction that
is not backed by in person interaction is ripe for serious problems. Knowing
someone in person and interacting with them on some routine basis is a huge
bulwark against mistreatment. It's much harder to mistreat someone you have to
face in person again soon.

My online interactions are now very limited. I may share an opinion or an
answer and I'll read and appreciate the same from others, but I refuse to get
into an argument with people that I don't know. I don't think it's edifying to
me and I suspect it may not be edifying for most people.

------
tgb
I don't doubt that the bad dynamics would happen regardless, but Facebook is
just such a terrible way to have this group. First, it's private so you can't
view any of it without joining the group which is a little icky though I guess
they do that for moderation reasons. Second, there's just way too much
content. I joined and it was producing multiple times the amount of content as
the entire rest of my Facebook feed (which I otherwise keep to just actual
friends and happily block people who post too much). And too much of the
content is filler "look a train" type stuff. Having that crowd out actual
friends' pictures etc wasn't worth it to me. I'd much rather have had it a
subreddit I could occasionally go through and sort by best in the last month.
So I left that group after a week for reasons largely independent of the
problems talked about here.

------
sbinthree
This is the right question to be asking. So many good things are only good at
the right scale. If Google or Amazon were not two of the most valuable
companies on earth and instead say, even a tenth as large, people would have
an endearing trust in the way their whimsical, easy to use products make their
life better. Now we view them as omnipotent gods to rebel, almost on
principal. Micro socialism (sharing resources in a family for example) is
basically the default if not the only model: the concept of "keeping score" is
seen as pathological in relationships at the family unit scale, but standard
and even necessary the larger the group of people sharing (specialisation and
trade). Democracy is a great example too: there are less than one
representatives per million people in the US. Early on it was a fraction of
this, and therefore much easier to meet their needs. Medicine is can range
from a useless waste of money to deadly and in the middle be extremely useful,
even within the same order of magnitude. Society and social systems are not
immune to these effects.

~~~
ams6110
It's like we have a cultural or maybe even evolutionary aversion to large,
powerful, monopolistic authorities. Maybe because so often they lead to human
suffering.

~~~
sbinthree
Certainly power seems to be a corrupting force in almost all cases, I would
just argue that to a certain extent, what we perceive as good (a disregard for
the status quo) when small is endearing and even admirable, but once those
rebels take over the world we want them to magically fall in line. It's
obviously a cultural immune system of some kind.

------
intended
The story of life - which our kids and their kids will repeat for etenerity
“it was good when it was small.”

It’s good when it’s new and unpredictable and you’re in the mindset of “oh
let’s see what else is there” (aka, an open mind)

------
florabuzzword
Which “Brutalism” is BIMBYISM referencing? I don’t use Facebook so maybe
someone here can answer this. Is it:

\- The architectural style?

\- The social housing traditions that birthed the architectural style?

\- The contemporary literalist misappropriation of the term to reference
dystopian urban infrastructure which punishes the needy? (like spikes under
bridges)

I’m hoping it’s the first and will be pleasantly surprised if it’s the second.
But not getting my hopes up.

~~~
mkbgw
It's referring to the architectural style.

Re: spikes under bridges, AFAIk that's referred to as hostile architecture.
I've never seen the term Brutalism applied to that.

~~~
florabuzzword
That’s refreshing. Unfortunately, I have. At least in the past few decades,
brutalism has been conflated with being unkind, authoritarian, or Stalinist.
But maybe this wave has passed and I’m out of the loop. I also didn’t think
brutalist architecture was appreciated in circles like this, so I clearly am
out of the loop to some extent.

------
badcede
“All it takes is one person being like, ‘Oh not all police are bad,’ and it
can get very bad,” she said.

~~~
perl4ever
It might sound intolerant if she's criticizing the statement itself, but I can
see where she's coming from if she's saying it acts as a dog whistle
attracting awful stuff regardless of the intentions of the original poster.

I've noticed elsewhere, on a non-political site, where a particular post, say,
relates to the military and people drop in with the sort of toxic comments you
never heard before the last couple of years.

------
alistproducer2
It's funny this article came up today. I was just thinking about how much the
2016 election and the crypto bubble of 2017 changed the dynamics of HN, mostly
for the worst. The article mentions scale as being the problem. I think it's
more than that as HN was already a large community. I think it comes down to a
community reaching a critical mass of people that don't respect the existing
rules. At that point, other users, even those that largely respect the
existing order, are forced to a.) break the rules to try and combat the newbs
or b.) flee. Either way the destruction of what was is complete.

------
ilaksh
My difficulty is that every splinter group has a firm set of beliefs that
never seem to me to be quite aligned with reality or adaptable enough to be
effective. I see all of these viewpoints being based on fundamental structures
and technologies that should actually be changed.

------
gaius
_“We will not ban you outright for being a capitalist, but don’t expect us to
defend you either.”_

The sheer lack of self-awareness embodied in this statement. Facebook is not
the WELL.

But the issue of the size of a group is well-studied
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

 _A recent study has suggested that Dunbar 's number is applicable to online
social networks[13]_

(As an aside I am getting a "you're posting too fast" warning, my last post
was 46 minutes ago on another thread, hmm)

