The anti-community machine.

23 Mar, 2024

image credits to: Blame!

Rusted, restless, and neglected, there laid the anti-community machine.

The 'machine' is a complex array of mechanisms that unknowingly, and inevitably hurt a community.

Before understanding the mechanisms, we need to talk about convenience, and the myth of the 'lazy' brain.

The brain is anything but lazy, it is constantly attempting to optimize everything around it to spend less energy, only a madman would call this gargantuan task 'lazy'. It is a perfectly logical strategy for any organism attempting to survive in a complex world.

This constant attempt at optimization is both great and terrible. The greatness arises from the fact that you will always improve at a given task (as long as you get some sort of reward from it), and the terrible part comes from the fact that the brain does not care about the quality of the reward; it cares only about it's quantity.

Due to this lack of discrimination, the promise of small constant rewards will be preferred over a big delayed reward, because the small reward implies little effort, hence little is lost if it fails to deliver. The big reward on the other hand is already a task (to wait), hence the brain suffers a much bigger loss if said reward does not pay-off.

Now, this is where convenience becomes an issue.

The problem with convenience comes when complex things are simplified in order to make them convenient. This sort of thing can happen when the person attempting to make the thing convenient lacks the knowledge of the inner-workings, purpose, and or end-goal of the thing.

For example:

image credits to: unknown

The man in the picture made his work convenient, by assuming that the shape of the rock did not matter.

This is [badly-done convenience]. It hurts the community, and in some cases, it also hurts the person practicing the [badly-done convenience].

*The machine is a convenient proxy for human interaction, but it became a [badly-done convenience] *

Let's talk about how community managers and individuals accidentally turn a convenience into an anti-community machine; I am talking about cutting the corners off a community to fit-it into a chatting program.

A chat is a huge convenience when it comes to instant communication: both urgent matters and quick questions can be answered fast, it is generally fun for banter, and it works great in groups of less than 10 people. It is a rewarding experience in general.

Now, as soon as someone tries to use a chatroom as the 'house' of a community, it becomes a [badly-done convenience]. Here are some examples of how this practice hurts a community:

It's hard to keep track of a conversation when everyone is talking.

Chats are usually fast, It encourages small messages, reactionism, and emotional outbursts.

Messages get little exposition, the value of each message decreases a LOT since they will at most get ten seconds of screen time, this encourages low-quality messages.

It is harder to moderate since everything is happening too fast, at all times, everywhere.

Messages lose relevancy very fast, a message from yesterday is already as irrelevant as a message from two years ago. This makes users feel like their messages are ephemeral, giving them a reason not to put-in effort.

Backing-up messages is hard: if the chat gets deleted, barely any piece of information will survive.

The chat is most likely part of an app, website or otherwise hosted on a single 'instance', this makes the chat feel less of a 'home', and more of an 'addon' that the user may check sometimes to see if anything is happening right that instant. On other platforms, the user would browse through the latest community activity.

Conversations between members happen between small groups of a few individuals, this alienates new users. (They do not have an original poster inviting them to respond to his posts and read other people's posts, just someone asking a question to the chat and the usual people responding.).

The chat-log is a limited resource: If there is a lot of activity, every user competes for their message to get a quantum of screen time. No matter how many 'secondary channels' exist, there is always a dominant channel where people conglomerate.

Chats are a commodity that members of a community can use to banter and chit-chat, but the 'house' of the community will always require a forum or place that allows for the proliferation of long text posts, slow conversations, personal corners, and easy backup of conversations.

Anyone that attempts to build a community around a chatroom is falling victim to the [badly-done convenience], but sadly, the effort required to interact with a forum is much greater than the one required to interact with a chatroom.

In other words, the anti-community machine promises the user a series of small constant rewards, whilst a forum promises delayed rewards.

As a footnote, by 'reward' I am not talking exclusively about dopamine, but anything an user might deem rewarding: be it the realization of a job well done, a spike of dopamine, feelings of love, money, or whatever else that may come to mind.

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This post was written in commemoration to Agora Road's 8th Travelogue