I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
- There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
- The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
- The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
- Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: <https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities>.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...>). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions?
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
- A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
- A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
- Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
- Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
- Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
- On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
- Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes,
utopian towns, and the like
What makes HN work is two things. One, dang's insanely great moderation work. HN's guidelines are simple, opinionated, and tailored to a specific niche user audience. Dang is an excellent benevolent dictator, enforcing the guidelines with world-class skill and kindness.
Two, there's no direct profit motive with HN. Can't underestimate that. It is optimized for user happiness rather than anything else.
These factors work great for an online community but they don't have easy analogues in the physical realm.
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite
small towns to be found around the world, though the US might
be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or
college
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns,
even for relatively small schools.
I agree that college/university towns in America are generally pretty nice places. Not utopias but generally cooler than others, as a vast generalization.
I always see them as kind of a... unique byproduct of a flawed system.
The average lifetime earning advantage of a bachelor's degree was about $1 million cumulative USD last I checked. So schools can charge a lot of money, and it is still a good deal, and people will pay that money, and the government subsidizes a lot of this via grants and loans.
So you have a gigantic money faucet pouring money into the town, and a lot of people (students, faculty, and graduates who never move away) who have certain demographic traits: they tend be more intelligent and/or more driven and/or are more educated and/or enjoy more privilege.
And that certainly creates a certain kind of place, although I think the key factors are hard to duplicate elsewhere w.r.t. founding intentional communities.
(Although, maybe that is the ultimate lesson: found your intentional community in the shadow of a giant money faucet and/or a privileged niche community)
Another element of the "small" bit
Yeah. Small is key. I founded a (now defunct) online niche community that had a very committed fanbase. I viewed smallness as our moat, actually. Big players could never be as small as us; could never have the "small town" or "local bar" feel. This is still an extremely viable business plan for a lot of things IMO if you are willing to stay small and target a max of like... several fulltime employees. There is a lot you can do with a business if e.g. $250,000-$500,000 is your target revenue and are content with that rather than trying to conquer the world, but that requires you to bootstrap and avoid investors more or less.
I think Reddit's approach was awesome, actually. A bunch of small, mostly-independent communities (subreddits) under a single roof.
It would work if they could downsize and have a razor focus on the core functionality people actually care about. But no, they have to enrich investors, and pay SV rent and SV salaries, and therefore can't turn a profit even on hundreds of millions of revenue.
I hope a leaner operation takes their approach and runs with it. I have seen a few mentioned in this discussion. And the StackOverflow network has AFAIK managed to prosper with an approach that is somewhat similar if you take a 50,000ft view.
I'd agree that dang's role is key to HN, though pg also set things up in terms of direction and focus. I've been diving into some of his comments on HN, goals, initial direction, and lessons learned. These are informative and address topics, questions, and issues frequently raised over the ensuing 17 years. Both execution and constitution matter, IMO.
What you discuss regarding the enabling mechanisms of college towns is fair commentary, though it should be noted that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, excluding the rapid boom/bust variants, don't give rise to the cultural aspects of a college town. Tourist attractions may, if, say, arts and culture are significant elements of this (say, a Sedona or Ashland, OR, or Bayreuth), though it can be difficult to disentangle tourism from other elements for larger destinations (Disneyland and Hollywood in the Los Angeles region, San Francisco as distinct from its economic and tech-sector activity). Heavily merchantilistic cities can draw wealth, but are less effective with culture (again, trying to isolate for those without a major academic centre, so NYC, London, and Paris would be confounded examples). But a Hong Kong or Shenzen or Dubai or Singapore whilst having an extraordinary merchantile / trading role, does not have a commensurate cultural or academic one.
And at the other end of the scale, you can have college towns which are too successful. I'd put Stanford and environs here: Stanford, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Altos, say. These are so wealthy that the cultural amplification of the educational institution is dampened by the lack of affordability of the region (housing, etc.). Several of the US East Coast college towns have similar issues.
There's still something particular about the college town dynamic, and I think the points I've raised are fairly key to it.
Regarding Reddit:
The larger encompassing community was useful for a time, but with brigading and even just having a smaller sub appear on the front page or cross-posted to a larger one, the local in-group culture could very easily get overwhelmed. (This is hardly specific to Reddit, and there were examples of trolling and other cross-newsgroup attacks on Usenet.)
Reddit does little to foster conversation. I still miss Google+'s dynamic of having a Notifications pane which showed all threads in which there was ongoing discussion (whether it directly involved you or not), and both presented those threads and enabled replying directly from the Notifications pane. This meant that:
- Conversations could continue for a prolonged period of time. Days, weeks, even months or years in instances. And do so productively. (Yes, the thread host would have to delete spam and trolls, but a well-tended thread was a delight to behold.)
- Other participants would be made aware of the ongoing discussion, and could choose to rejoin if they wished. Or to opt out (mute the thread). Again, with a principled and intelligent host, this could result in long-ongoing discussions.
On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only to the author of the comment replied to. There's no sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller region, say, the three or five preceding comments' authors). This means that conversation tends to die rapidly on Reddit.
For HN there's a similar issue, though with the "Threads" link it's possible to see if there's been general response to a specific comment of yours. There's no notification mechanism, and unless a third party is higher up on the thread, they're not going to see the activity within their own Threads view.
The G+ mechanism can be abused, of course, and is again affected by scale. On G+, a "thread" consisted of an initial post and up to 500 replies, a limit I saw reached occasionally. This limited total participation, though it seemed to be sufficient for most discussions. I'd make a practice of splitting off sub-discussions or linking a continuation thread to preserve integrity of the origin discussion. With 500 comment slots, 20 people would have an opportunity to comment 25 times each, which is reasonably comprehensive.
One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and underpowered, in terms of features, notably search) is the built-in wiki. That could serve far more than it does as an informational repository. There are some subreddits which make good use of the wiki, far too many which ignore it completely. Not being able to search the wiki means it's a bit of a roach motel (text checks in, it never checks out), but ... the concept is useful.
though pg also set [HN] up in terms of direction and focus.
[...] Both execution and constitution matter, IMO.
100%.
that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, [...] Tourist attractions [...]
Yeah, there are other distinct factors with college towns relative to other money faucets.
- The (putative, anyway) core mission of colleges is one of education and research. There's a hell of a lot of other stuff going on at colleges, to the point where that core mission often feels like an afterthought, but it is a unique factor relative to the other examples we can name.
- While colleges sure love to suck up money, it is not their core focus in the way that it is for a corporation.
- Colleges have a markedly younger demographic than just about any other money faucet we could name
There are more of course.
And at the other end of the scale, you can have
college towns which are too successful. [...]
These are so wealthy that the cultural
amplification of the educational institution is
dampened by the lack of affordability of the region
100%.
On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only
to the author of the comment replied to. There's no
sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller
region, say, the three or five preceding comments'
authors). This means that conversation tends to die
rapidly on Reddit.
This is very true for me, especially on large threads with more than ~100 replies.
Ultimately I don't find this to be a dealbreaker but it is for sure a shortcoming.
One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and
underpowered, in terms of features, notably search)
Yeah. On the subreddit I moderate(d) we saw the same questions over and over and we wanted the wiki to be the solution to that. But realistically nobody looks on those wikis unless a mod or somebody explicitly links them to the wiki.
I don't know what the solution is there. A wiki is such a different paradigm w.r.t. a threaded discussion forum. And their functionality overlaps. I don't know how you weld them together.
To really make it work in a synergistic way there'd need to be some thoughtful integration. First we'd need to define the purpose of each.
This is an admittedly arbitrary distinction but IMO it would be useful to have the wiki be a place for higher-quality information that has been accepted as canonical or at least reliable by the mods and the community.
This would need to be coupled with a way to "bless" or "promote" information from discussion threads to the wiki. And a helpful and magical way to automatically surface relevant wiki information in threads, for example if you are asking a question whose answer already lives in the wiki.
The wiki search should, as you say, be better. But the underlying problem there is split-brain syndrome: the bit of information you want could lie in the threads and/or the wiki. At a bare minimum there needs to be a unified search.
On Wikis: even with search, most people simply won't look at them. Search is most useful for a very small set of power users ... and for mods who are looking for the appropriate cluestick to whack an offender with. Even with a relatively small wiki, I'm often struggling to find content I know (or am pretty sure) exists. The whole thing reads like an intern's summer project, and I strongly suspect it was.
The notion of having both an ongoing transactional dialogue and an accumulating finished work, somewhat analogous to a financial journal (transactions) and statements (finished works) is something that I've long wanted to bring to online discussion. Again, Wikipedia (and similar projects) most closely resembles this, though even back in Usenet days there were newsgroups and the periodically disseminated FAQs of accumulated knowledge and behavioural norms.
Determining what each should do is key. There's a long history of discussions being bundled up as books (lectures, meeting notes, bull sessions, etc.), of serialised publication, of collected letters or other epistolary exchanges.
There's the case of Stack Exchange which as I see it somewhat has the opposite problem: it tries to treat the transactional discussion as the finished work, with a great deal of feather-ruffling. I'd think that SE would benefit from a different approach in which the live / current Q&A discussions are allowed to happen, but examples of especially good answers being canonicalised and surfaced in search, perhaps refactored into articles.
Another problem with knowledge corpora is that they both get out of date and/or are subject to malicious (or simply uninformed or misguided) edits with time. These are problems which long predate online versions and variants (one joy of mine was discovering a 19th-century encyclopaedic edit war: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...>).
Ultimately, this requires real work, with procedures and time devoted to review, screening, and updating articles. It's not what every group will want to take on, but some most definitely would see benefits.
I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
- Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...>, or the UK's "Green Book": <https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/...>
- There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
- The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
- The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
- Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: <https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities>.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...>). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions?
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
- A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
- A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
- Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
- Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
- Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
- On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
- Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.