
Tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017 - prostoalex
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter
======
sago
I am a member of three (admittedly weird) niche communities. These have been
orders of magnitude more impactful in my life than Facebook. The friends I met
there have become real-life friends. We've flown around the world to visit
each other, we've laughed and cried, we send each other quirky gifts, and
cheer on each other's kids. These are the only close new friends I've made in
the last 10 years. Two of those communities are based around subreddits, the
other a 90s era web forum.

The thing that makes them work where Facebook groups simply don't, I think, is
pseudonymity. One of those groups has been particularly powerful, and it is a
group that inherently involves being mutually vulnerable, so I certainly would
never have joined under my real name, and I enjoy being part of the community
even though only a handful of people know my IRL identity.

Reddit has some big problems, but is the best platform I have found so far for
these niche communities. And my experience totally chimes with this article:
big social media is as shallow as a puddle. Small niches are where real
communities form.

~~~
dorfsmay
I agree with your last paragraph, and IMO the reason is reddit is based on
common interests, like Usenet used to be, while Facebook is based on random
ways you met people in life and twitter is based on people trying to boost
their ego.

~~~
LV-426
I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it's a really horrible
version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people who use
it, but also due to the karma system - in _theory_ a way to collectively
highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an end in itself
(karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people burying legit posts
they simply don't like/agree with).

On Usenet you could filter anything you didn't want to see, which is
reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult
for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps to
create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber.

Cliques did exist on newsgroups, but they had less tools at their disposal. In
fact one of the reasons people left Usenet for inferior moderated web forums
is because while they could (quite rightly) control their own experience, they
(quite rightly) had no ability to control the group.

Ironically, although Usenet is considered to be dead these days, it's in some
ways in better shape than ever.

20 years ago it suffered from its popularity, under attack from spammers and
trolls attempting and often succeeding in destroying newsgroups.

These days it probably has more users than it had before the mid 90s internet
explosion, whereas spammers and trolls have largely moved on to bigger
audiences elsewhere.

It's strange for me to read people talking nostalgically about how the
internet was better in the past, about online forums they were a part of 15
years ago, or Reddit or 4chan, and seemingly have no experience or even
knowledge of Usenet.

And that something as similar and simple to use as email is ignored by people
who rue the loss of old (web) forums.

Unlike web options Usenet is no-nonsense, free, has no admin headaches, no
advertising, no Evil Corp owner (or potential sell out to Evil Corp when the
community grows enough), it's anonymous, private and allows unrestricted
speech (within applicable law, obviously).

All it requires is for people to use it.

~~~
wott
> _I agree about Reddit being Usenet-like. Unfortunately it 's a really
> horrible version of Usenet, partly thanks to the number of unpleasant people
> who use it, but also due to the karma system - in theory a way to
> collectively highlight good posts, but in reality often simply becoming an
> end in itself (karma whoring, playing to a gallery) and a weapon (people
> burying legit posts they simply don't like/agree with)._

> _On Usenet you could filter anything you didn 't want to see, which is
> reasonable, but you could not - as on Reddit, or HN - make it more difficult
> for other people to read it too, which is not reasonable, and simply helps
> to create a hostile, cliquey, poisonous echo chamber._

( And... you apparently got downvoted :-/ )

The most infuriating thing I experience on the Web is indeed to see awfully
wrong comments being massively upvoted, next to perfectly right, on the point
comments being (even slightly) downvoted. And I am not talking about
opinionated comments, but just factual comments. It just drives me nuts.

I noticed that even here, when I write opinionated, or a bit rough and
definitive, or a bit provocative comments, I often get upvoted (sometimes
downvoted, but that's not a problem, I understand it for this kind of
comments); but when I write to state purely technical, factual, documented,
provable facts, I get downvoted. I just sounds insane. I can understand the
difference of opinions, I can understand being upset about an opinion being
roughly put in a short comment. But what I don't understand is people who
downvote perfectly right _purely technical_ comments (like for example fixing
errors in a program), where there is only one truth, there is no opinion to
have about it, it is either right right or wrong. That's beyond me.

~~~
riffraff
this is a reason slashdot's metamoderation was such a great idea, which has,
oddly, never seen any further development.

~~~
digi_owl
Possibly because it is very strongly anti-gamification.

This while the HN/Reddit "karma" score is a very much a e-peen score board.

~~~
qznc
What is the problem in gamifying Slashdot? You can be "funny lvl 42" and
"insightful lvl 8" for example.

------
htormey
This article is very anecdotal and it doesn’t talk about the underlying
reasons for why niche communities are making a big comeback.

It mentions that Patreon has risen in popularity but doesn’t talk about the
YouTube adpoocalypse or the reasons why that occurred.

The adpocalypse and it’s impact on everything from news commentary to comedy
channels is one of the biggest factors driving creators and hence users onto
YouTube alternatives.

It doesn’t talk about said Youtube alternatives such as minds, steemit etc or
why vidme shut down. It doesn’t talk about their differences or why one is
better than the other.

It doesn’t talk about the economics of video hosting or how sustainable these
platforms are.

It mentions the alt right but it doesn’t talk about twitter giving tons of
those guys the boot or the rise of gab.

It mentions the alt right & Patreon but it doesn’t talk about how many of
those people and other right wingers got booted off of that platform. It
doesn’t talk about the cottage industry of Patreon alternatives that sprung up
to cater to those people.

It also doesn’t mention mastodon or anything that’s going on with similar
technologies.

It doesn’t mention why mastodon got big in Japan or talk about any similar
niche services.

It also doesn’t talk about the possibility of advertising on
twitter/Facebook/google being regulated by the USA/EU. It doesn’t talk about
the testimony all three companies gave in front of congress nor its
implications for the future of niche communities.

In summary this article provides neither a survey of the niche community
landscape nor an explanation for why 2017 was the year niche communities made
a comeback.

~~~
1337biz
Would you mind writing some answers to those questions?

I would love to read these a lot more than the author's weak attempt to force
politics on an otherwise really interesting topic.

~~~
htormey
Sure. I had been waiting for someone else to do this as it seems very obvious
to me.

In the above comment I didn’t even get into the big war that’s looming between
Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat for video ad revenue.

I also didn’t talk about how crypto currency factors into all of this either.

I think 2018 is going to see some pretty big shifts in the online media
landscape.

~~~
pault
Sorry to pile on, but I would also like to see a more thorough treatment of
this topic.

------
kakarot
2017 was the year I left Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. Nuked my
old reddit account and came back to a fresh start with only a few niche
subreddits and of course HN. I don't even frequent 4chan as much because it's
losing its ground as a first-party source of internet subculture and
information dissemination

I've significantly cut out the time spent engaging in communities that don't
give me anything in return, and while it makes it very hard to date other
people in my generation and at times fills me with a lonely sense of
disconnection from society, I feel so much healthier.

~~~
deadmetheny
>I don't even frequent 4chan as much because it's losing its ground as a
first-party source of internet subculture and information dissemination

Like it or not, /pol/ is exactly that for the alt-right. It's also started to
seep out into the other boards, which is something of a problem to be solved.

~~~
kakarot
> It's also started to seep out into the other boards, which is something of a
> problem to be solved

Pretty much why I left. /pol/ is good to follow during important events like
elections but in general the toxicity is unbearable... and the rest of 4chan
culture has been suffering lately as well.

------
krapp
I hope one of the effects of this movement away from mass social media is a
resurgence in self-hosted content and forum software.

------
Spearchucker
2017 was the year in which I pruned my Facebook friends down from ~350 to 46.
It was also the year in which I solidified friendships IRL that started in
1:10 scale truck modelling forums in Canada, the UK and Germany. I still check
Facebook daily, but it's now down to once a day when I get up, rather than
100's of times a day. I only check in on Twitter once every couple of weeks or
so, when I'm bored. For me this trend seems to be... a trend. One of my plans
for this year is to build Clone Trooper armour, which will probably open up
new friendships in the cosplayer world.

So I, as a single datapoint, love the trend. It's how I meet people who are
absolutely, completely commited to the same things I am.

~~~
exergy
Sounds like a great direction to be moving towards. Much more grip on your
social media, and _you_ using _it_ rather than the other way around.

------
zitterbewegung
Weird communities never disappeared they just got overshadowed by the rest of
the social networking place. It’s like saying everyone goes to wal mart and
home depo .

~~~
y_tho
I would say your analogy applies, but in a different way: walmart and home
depot arrived and mom&pop hardware and general stores didn't all disappear,
but their numbers did diminish. Where 8 minimarkets were open, half may have
closed (YMMV).

------
pmlnr
I thought the article would be about something like the rise of SSBC, maybe a
reprise of diaspora*, and I wish this was true - but in reality most of these
are still groups within the larger systems, let that be instagram or tumblr.

------
bencoder
I'm a member of several 'weird' communities on discord. It feels like the old
internet I loved of irc + forums, with voice and video chat bringing it into
my modern times

------
kris-s
I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately and I even briefly
made an experimental message board that limited the amount of posts the users
could make. The idea was that it would slow down the pace of the board and
encourage more people to post.

The idea never really took off, almost entirely due to marketing - I have no
idea how to promote such a thing.

The site is currently down but if anyone has ideas how to regularly promote it
(and maybe keep out jerks who post bad things) I'd love some ideas.

------
kindfellow92
“Weird”

Actually niche online communities aren’t weird. Just because a topic isn’t
repeated over and over again on big media doesn’t mean it’s weird. Big media
doesn’t dictate what is normal.

~~~
throwanem
What's wrong with "weird"? It means: fateful, uncanny, magical. It's never
properly been an insult, and those who misbelieve otherwise and deploy it in a
pejorative fashion accidentally do that which they so label a favor by
avoiding it - nothing ruins a small, special space like an influx of people
who neither understand nor care what makes it special.

~~~
kindfellow92
Nothing is wrong with it, it’s just subjective. Being subjective is usually
not the domain of journalism (outside of op-eds).

------
Noos
Yes, I think VRchat is becoming one of those, with very high emphasis on the
weird. Do you know the way, my bruddas?

------
yakitori
Rather than the size of the community, I'd really prefer if we had more
distributed and decentralized communities.

The pendulum has swung markedly from distributed to centralized communities in
the last decade. Would be nice if it finally swung back somewhat in the other
direction.

I'm feeling a bit nostalgic for the internet of the early 2000s.

------
jrcii
Like lobste.rs, way better than HN with the wacko-fascist mods on this website
that force their political views on the users.

