|
This is not nested because it is only partly a reply to Jessealdridge. I am new to hackernews, so I can't claim any idea of how to apply these ideas to that site. However, I find the notion of a "town center" a very intriguing one for the web, especially apropos of footnote 7 of the article. Most social sites act like huge suburbs, and many of their users are invariably suburbanites trying to escape the suburbs. In this way, the problem of a lack of place gets abstracted, and suburbanite communities emerge around topics that the real people can't discuss in their physical environments for lack of a place to do so. Their place to discuss things they would explore in the real world itself becomes amorphous and isolationist. But this is too broad; enter Dunbar's number. I don't think Dunbar was the first to suggest that communities need a finite size, but his observation that that size is proportional to the volume of a brain region is interesting in that it provides an example of a willingness to assign a metric for community size to which human beings would be subject. This raises the question I'm trying to ask and the point of this long-winded comment. How can we create fulfilling communities on-line that will enhance the essentially human aspects of such communities? Jessealdridge suggested breaking large communities up into smaller numbers (perhaps something like www.fluther.com allows). But if any metric like Dunbar's number is to be believed, this number should be a reflection of a deeper determinant of identity in a community, which itself requires an obvious representation in the allowable forms of interaction on the site. In the high-quality sites in the physical world, human communities are delineated by spatial relationships according to the organizing principles of architecture. But such places are rare in the physical world, and are mostly confined to very old cultures or small liberal arts colleges. Perhaps one of the reasons that such frameworks of fulfilling human interaction are so rare is that they are very difficult to understand and very expensive to make. The web can do better at creating frameworks for human interaction because it uses information explicitly, potentially clarifying the underlying principles generating the framework, and because it is much less expensive for people to come together and create something on the web than it is for them to come together and make something architectural, in the physical world. Unfortunately, this seems to mean (as you pointed out in your article) that sites much less often impart a sense of a change in place, or of a place at all. I wonder how the problems you've outlined (trolls, stupid comments, mean people) map onto the architectural representations of these problems, and how the solutions you've come up with could map onto architectural solutions to the analogues of those problems. In short, the article makes me wonder, however tangentially, how the web could benefit from being more than a surrogate, and perhaps more of a support structure, for physical human communities. Could hackernews benefit from having some relationship to physical places? |