
Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities - dsirijus
http://dsirijus.tumblr.com/post/29826465855/controlling-positive-feedback-loops-in-online
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JumpCrisscross
Assuming the conclusion is true, this has interesting implications for our
highly connected political media environment, which suffers from similar
positive feedback loops with a preference shown to cheaply produced vitriol
over informed debate.

I'm not suggesting we censor, in fact I take this articulation as a reason to
be sceptical of the author's conclusion, but any policy for managing a medium-
sized discussion-oriented community should be at least in part scalable to the
national stage.

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lutusp
It would help if the author actually understood what "positive feedback loop"
means in engineering. It's not what he thinks, and social-science terms like
"positive feedback" don't translate well in the more rigorous sciences.

In strict engineering terms, feedback loops must always have a gain less than
unity, and a stable, reliable system normally has negative net feedback. But
this doesn't sound "right" to a social scientist, who understands these terms
in an entirely different way.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
So, is there some way of controlling the gain? Hellbanning is one way but
thats bang-bang (gain is 1 or 0).

How about, limiting the visibility of comments to a subset of the community.
If they comment/answer, then show the thread to more. If they ignore (its a
rant etc) then it quietly sinks into oblivion.

Just an idea.

~~~
lutusp
> So, is there some way of controlling the gain?

In engineering, yes, always. In the social sciences, not always.

> How about, limiting the visibility of comments to a subset of the community.

That would mean the system isn't a single system any more. Apart from making
the system two or more systems, it's undemocratic and probably
counterproductive.

Consider the classic example -- astrophysicist Jim Peebles had an idea about
the Big Bang, that there should be a residual "echo" of the original event,
"audible" in the present universe, in the form of a background radiation with
a specific temperature that was relatively easy to compute. Peebles realized
the radiation should appear in the microwave region of the electromagnetic
spectrum, and it should seem to be coming from everywhere (highly uniform).

Meanwhile, physicists Penzias & Wilson over at Bell Labs had a microwave dish
with an annoying noise they couldn't get rid of. They scrubbed away bird
droppings, they adjusted the front end amplifier, nothing helped, and it
didn't matter which way they pointed the dish -- the signal seemed to be
coming from everywhere.

Penzias & Wilson called Peebles and asked hum what he though the noise might
be. Peebles told them, hung up the phone, and said, "We've been scooped."
Penzias & Wilson won the Nobel Prize.

Now that's feedback. And it only happened because there were no communications
barriers.

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ChrisNorstrom
I agreed with him up until his solution. Because "controlling input" is also
unsustainable when a community grows. Who is going to control input? If you're
talking about HN, even Paul Graham tried to control input and it's not
working. Or maybe he's not doing it enough.

Listen to the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At exactly 49:40 Paul
says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but after 6 months we
changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about nothing but
startup stuff." And yet here we are again, HN is nothing but startup news, I
just gave up and joined in, no use swimming against the current. The sad part
was that HN was originally a much better nursery to startups because all
startups begin their life as a project, a hack, a mod, a solution. HN was all
about code back then, which put off a lot of people who couldn't code (myself
included) and slowly it turned into more startup news to allow for a larger
audience.

The question is which came first?

Was it necessarily a bad thing?

How can PG / Should PG force the community back into more of a hacker culture
than a startup culture?

I came up with an idea to control who the members of a community are by means
of crowd-sourcing ([http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-
and-...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-and-
maintaining-exclusive-communities-through-crowdsourcing/)) but still, how can
one control the hive-mind of the community to prevent it from wandering away
from its original intent? We've seen what happens when one doesn't control the
community. Maybe its time to play secret-dictator?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Federating that power of censorship, e.g. by weighting down-votes by karma
(for HN), could help the community scale. Then one just needs to keep an eye
on the most powerful censors and ensure they (a) aren't abusing their
privilege, and, (b) are effectively policing along the right metrics.

~~~
lmm
You've just suggested solving the problem of positive feedback loops by adding
a massive positive feedback loop in the moderation system. That's not going to
work.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Positive feedback loops are heterogenous - there are sensible discussion and
down-vote taunts and reciprocation. _If_ people can be reliably categorized as
promoting desirable loops and/or dampening undesirable ones, selectively
amplifying their voices will promote quality.

Instead of modulating input, which is not scalable, I'm suggesting modulating
the dampening power (and potentially amplification power, e.g. upvotes from
high-karma users counting for more) of a select and active minority.

------
buro9
I agree with most of this.

In fact I agree so strongly that having witnessed the rise and fall of many a
community I've run or been a member of that I think that there is a natural
lifecycle of a community.

I also believe that whilst you can artificially lengthen the life by
controlling inputs, you can also kill a community by the very same methods...
possible to do but very difficult in the long term.

Instead of trying to control the inputs (censor, dictate), I'm embracing the
side effects of a lack of censorship... a shorter life span perhaps, but a
community that burns brighter during it's life.

Effectively what this means is that I'm building community software that has
at the very heart of it the notion that a community will die, and that a
successful community will schism during the death phase as members attempt to
preserve the bits they love.

The idea being that communities rip themselves apart, and that at some point
HN will do so too. And when it does it won't be replaced by a single "new HN",
but instead by many smaller communities each serving a niche that existed
within the larger.

Even though those niches appear smaller than the thing they emerged from, they
are likely to be larger in volume (active users, posts per day, upvotes) than
HN itself was before it.

As a metaphor for this, think of a kind of community cellular division: the
splitting of a community into smaller microcosms that will eventually grow and
then split themselves.

In some ways you could argue that StackOverflow actually did this preserving
the dictatorship through the Stack Exchange network. Except, I don't really
accept that a dictatorship can know when a specific community needs to sub-
divide itself to survive. I think that comes from within the community.

In the software I'm creating, the very tools to gradually manage the creation
of new microcosms is given to the users... in much the way that users can
create subreddits and that helps reddit to grow.

------
webwanderings
What this article is identifying as a problem is actually not a problem but a
chaos. Chaos in the community is not a problem in itself but rather a next
stage of dialog. You have to cultivate and live through the chaos in order to
get to the next level, which is understanding. By censoring, you are pulling
your community into a wrong and aimless direction.

The bells and whistles like flags, up/down votes, are just distraction between
the authentic dialog/substantive community and aimless/useless chatter.

------
davedx
"You need to be a nazi", that's quite a conclusion to make. Any evidence of
this actually working?

~~~
lutusp
Steve Jobs, who built what is now the world's most valuable company, at least
in part by being intolerable? Parenthetically, I strongly recommend the recent
Iverson biography, it's first rate.

I worked with Steve Jobs, I couldn't stand him, and I eventually refused to
work with Apple. I am sure there are many others who came to the same
conclusion. But this didn't stop Apple as a company.

