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That definitely is an interesting issue that could be studied. From the practical perspective, speaking of this particular torrent tracker, I wouldn't speculate much and would just (more or less) copy the organizational structure of some tracker I know and see if it works (I assume some adjustments would need to be made, because people are different, content is different, whatever else I don't keep in mind will turn out to be different). But if I were to speculate, I guess it always propagates from the top. The point is, that the visible community you can speak of is not entirely randomly chosen from the user base, and the user base are people who just want to use the product, not to play corporate mechanics. If in the end the goals of the general public are somewhat aligned with the internal community of ladder-climbers, it works out fine. Otherwise it doesn't. (And, by the way, ladder-climbers in most of these communities tend not to be the nicest people by default... Let's just say, they are Dwight. So if you let them do stuff that is not desirable for the general community, they will.) I think StackOverflow philosophy is flawed by design, the main point of user frustration always was the fact that questions that they very much need to get answered are closed as "too broad", "opinion-based" or something of the sorts. Dwights love to exercise their power by noticing that something can be close "as not good fit for this site", and users who want that stuff to be discussed obviously hate that. That is something that could be fixed from the top, but the top specifically wanted it this way. Wikipedia is similar to that, but users and Dwights stand even further apart, since general user doesn't even make an account to make an edit, doesn't look who makes the edits and doesn't know the internal playground. The main point of frustration here is a user, who knows his stuff well and wants to share the knowledge, but is being shut down by a Dwight, because the subject is "of low importance" to him. This infuriates the user even more, considering that there are thousands of articles about some fucking Harry Potter-universe pokemon or whatever, which, naturally, doesn't raise an issue with Dwights, because they are Dwights and they love this stuff. This is also something to be solved organizationally from the very top. Music trackers are way more meritocratic. People, who eventually get to be moderators can be formalistic or not — it varies — but they generally just want a lot of music on the tracker in a well-organised manner — and this is exactly what general public wants! It's another question how they get motivated by the platform to contribute so much — and involvement sometimes seems to be much more hard work than on Wikipedia — but the point is that they really do contribute useful stuff. Also, music trackers tend to be way more liberal (in a sense to allow freedom, not to be left-wing politically, ironically, quite the opposite is true nowadays). Nobody cares is somebody is rude, racist or whatever, if off-topic flamewar goes over the top — the whole thread goes down. Otherwise, you can post whatever you want and nobody gives a shit and isn't pressured by the media to do something about it. After all, unlike twitter, reddit or stackoverflow, they aren't traded on the stock market. |