[steauengeglase]

Really it all boils down to a lack of community. Yeah I know, it sounds like something the dad from Leave it to Beaver would say.

My favorite example goes back to the days of Quake(World). It was a surprisingly bright and sunny place. You'd pop on to a few community run servers to say "hi". Maybe play a few rounds of whatever mod you were into.

When bad actors showed up, they were punted. If they came back they were literally gunned down (whoever had admin access would put them on a team by themselves and everyone would finish them off). As a result of having access to self-policing the number of bad actors were generally low in a healthy community.

As time wore on the goal became customer retention. I can remember publishers selling this as "curated team building" around the time the first X-Box came out. It all went downhill from there. You weren't a member of a community anymore, you were a license holder and a subscriber, and soon the very concept of community largely dissolved.

A likely "better" internet isn't a world of several thousand descending on a single comment thread. It's a hundred at most aimed at the goal of useful interaction. The internet as it stands doesn't need more pan-continental megalopolises, it needs neighborhoods of people seeking common interaction.

[anant90]

Hey steauengeglase!

>> A likely "better" internet isn't a world of several thousand descending on a single comment thread.

I cannot agree with you more! We have been thinking about this problem for a while, and recently started https://www.commonlounge.com/ because we genuinely believe a community-based approach is the right way to win the battle against trolls.

Most people don't realize how much care a community moderator needs to put in a community to keep it a healthy place, and building tools to make their job easier usually takes a back seat at most "community platforms".

[nebabyte]

the "community" solution only works at small scale/for niches. Given any degree of mainstream attention, 'just gunning them down' is like fighting the hydra.

Niche sites thus chug along fine, but any generalized effort to form communities falls victim to this. For niche communities on reddit, this has basically become a repeatable lifecycle (not including the countable-on-one-hand subreddits with leadership large and dedicated enough to wrangle their topics into submission.)