This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model. An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth.

Great writing on the current Reddit saga. The author put down in words a lot of things in my mind I couldn’t find the right words.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 years ago

    IDK, it seems that once a community gets big enough, it devolves into an echo chamber so the unique perspectives get drowned out. Sometimes the unique perspectives wins and slowly propagates through the community, and sometimes the unique perspective gets buried, but uniqueness is rarely highlighted.

    For example, I used to be active in /r/personalfinance (kind of a cesspool imo), and there have been times when my perspective won out and I saw it get parroted (often incorrectly), and I was later corrected by yet another perspective and that one got buried and to this day people are parotting my incomplete perspective instead of the more correct perspective. I tried correcting it, but ended up giving up.

    So a community needs to be big enough to have diversity, but not so big that the hive mind takes over. I think that magic number is somewhere around 10-100k people.