

Is fragmentation bad? - jmorin007
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-fragmentation-bad.html

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mhb
"Decentralization" would better convey the positive connotation he wants to
emphasize than "fragmentation".

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BrandonM
I agree, in a way. I clicked through because I was wondering how anyone could
possibly consider disk fragmentation to be a good thing.

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sanj
What happens if we extend this notion beyond online conversations?

Does it lead to gated communities? The segregated townships in South Africa?
Ignoring people because they're not part of your fragment? To the extent that
we make people into "others" we reduce their humanity. And it might be that
full populated fragments would reduce any tendency you'd have towards reaching
out and making an "other" someone in your fragment.

There was a meme some time back about the way that cable TV changed the nature
of water-cooler conversations because no one watched the same stuff anymore.
I'd argue it is even worse now, because you can hop over to
TelevisionWithoutPity and have a substantive conversation with people that DO
care about the retcon in the 8th season of Buffy. And you'll still have
nothing to talk about at work.

Do we want things reduced to limiting possible cultural touchstones to
sporting events?

I don't have answers, I'm just asking questions.

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amichail
I think users should create their own communities by picking the set of people
whose posts they would like to see. These people may not be friends.

For example, for a discussion on startups, I might specify that I would like
to see PG's posts along with any posts that PG would like to see.

One could also provide exceptions. I could for example exclude certain people
from the set above as well as posts from people that they receive (though not
excluding someone for which there's an acceptable path to that person).

Of course, such a scheme has problems since you may reply to someone's posts
yet you are not included in the set of people whose posts he/she will see.

But maybe one can find a way to make this workable.

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akkartik
It works great if you pick the set of people whose _threads_ you would like to
see. That way encourages discoverability since you see your 'followee's posts
but also other people on those threads that you may find you're interested in.

This is the approach I took with my hystry interface for HN. I have whitelists
and blacklists, and show _threads_ involving people on the whitelist but not
_comments_ by people on the blacklist.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71827>

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mwerty
One other advantage of fragmentation (which I'm surprised he did not touch)
that became apparent as I've been trying ffeed is that I am free to say stuff
relevant to me as opposed to a public forum with people who do not know me.

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paul
Yes, exactly. Because it's fragmented, it's also possible for it to be
personal, and inside jokes or off topic comments are fun instead of annoying.

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ivankirigin
I like the idea of a inside jokes from sub communities. There was a cool talk
about this recently: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU>

I think a good unified commenting system that allowed for friending would be
an alternative.

If comments from my friends boiled to the top of Disqus, it would be the best
of both worlds. For Tipjoy, I had been thinking that using Disqus could be
useful for comments if we could feed to and from the original thread on a
blog.

~~~
ryanmahoski
So commenters could tip the blog poster for useful content, and likewise the
poster could tip commenters to reward intriguing comments. Commenters could
tip fellow commenters. Lurker nonmembers could tip everbody.

~~~
ryanmahoski
Yecch, I fat-fingered that.

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TrevorJ
I bet someday somebody comes up with a formula that describes the optimal
amount of fragmentation for any given community.

I would think that there must exist some sort of rational percentage of
fragmentation that is beneficial to prevent stagnation, but above which
creates a less than optimal signal-to-noise ratio and leads to a steady
decline in the percentage of useful or substantive interaction.

Hmm, I can only hope whoever it is names it "Trevor's Law" :-P

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phaedrus
His argument could apply equally well to explain that the fragmentation (read:
number of) Linux distributions is not such a bad thing either. It is just a
sign people have freedom to do what they want, and guess what, when people
have freedom, they will not always all do the same thing as everyone else.

