I think that normal people should never be in charge of online communities.
The reasoning for this is that online communities naturally attract lowbrow sorts of people, so one can expect the majority of any online group to have shitty normie opinions. If you allow this majority to have power, they’ll be able to bully anyone they dislike. The alternative is to have a gated group structure which only allows decent people, but you can expect those people to be very few and so you would have a teeny tiny group. Decent norms need to be enforced from above by a decent individual.
It’s analogous to the leftist motto, “Never let liberals lead.” You need to have liberals in your movement, but if they control your movement they’ll fuck it up.
Normies have the advantage in numbers. I would like to have high-quality walled gardens, but the people who could moderate them are rare, and they usually have better things to do.
Looking at the websites I read: LW had to be rewritten from scratch at some moment, and ACX currently has a problem with a certain low-quality high-quantity contributor who was already banned repeatedly but always registers a new Substack account. The standard platforms require too much moderator activity.
And the better your community gets, the more attractive target it becomes.
I think that normal people should never be in charge of online communities.
The reasoning for this is that online communities naturally attract lowbrow sorts of people, so one can expect the majority of any online group to have shitty normie opinions. If you allow this majority to have power, they’ll be able to bully anyone they dislike. The alternative is to have a gated group structure which only allows decent people, but you can expect those people to be very few and so you would have a teeny tiny group. Decent norms need to be enforced from above by a decent individual.
It’s analogous to the leftist motto, “Never let liberals lead.” You need to have liberals in your movement, but if they control your movement they’ll fuck it up.
Normies have the advantage in numbers. I would like to have high-quality walled gardens, but the people who could moderate them are rare, and they usually have better things to do.
Looking at the websites I read: LW had to be rewritten from scratch at some moment, and ACX currently has a problem with a certain low-quality high-quantity contributor who was already banned repeatedly but always registers a new Substack account. The standard platforms require too much moderator activity.
And the better your community gets, the more attractive target it becomes.