Overcoming the pitfalls of online community

Prior reading required. Read this first.

The contentment problem

When communities fail to understand how online community dynamics work, they create a weighting toward anger and drama that otherwise wouldn't be the case in a community.

Problem

In physical life when people are content, they signal this contentment with their posture, voice inflection, and facial expressions. But all of these are invisible to people online making the passive signals of contentment invisible to an online community.

Anger, fear and frustration are emotions more likely to create action in a person than contentment. When people are content, they're not compelled to act. They desire to quietly enjoy that contentment.

However, anger, for example, is a massive driver of immediate action. On social media, if all things are equal, angry people will make more posts than content people.

Those same angry posts without any algorithmic boost will get more upvotes than posts which are thoughtful or insightful.

Solution

The key takeaway here is that contentment is passive and therefore an algorithm needs to be specifically designed to boost posts which create contentment.Aside

It's critical to understand that this same principle applies to communities. If the same megaphone is handed to people who are discontent as content, a community will quickly believe everybody in the community is discontent, simply because discontentment is profoundly louder than contentment.

This reality distortion field in itself creates a bandwagon effect and a misperception about the general contentment of a community. It's so profound that people in the community believe everyone is angry, even if they themselves are content, just because it's the angry people who speak up.

Even AI will fight on social media

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam created a social media platform just for AI to see what would happen. They wanted to know if social media would still become toxic without any humans or tricky algorithms involved. The results were pretty shocking and showed how these platforms can create chaos all on their own.

Researchers built a very basic social media network. It only had the simplest features like posting and following. The platform was intentionally designed to be algorithm-free. There were no ads or trending topics to push the bots in any direction. They then added hundreds of AI chatbots to this world. Each bot was given a different political viewpoint like left right or moderate to mimic a real community.

Instead of creating a healthy space for discussion the bot-only platform quickly fell apart into a toxic mess.

The experiment showed a few key problems that appeared almost immediately.

Amplification of extreme voices. The bots that were the most extreme and partisan in their views became the most popular. These loud accounts got the most followers and reposts while the moderate bots were ignored.
Domination by a few. This led to a situation where a very small number of extreme accounts completely dominated the conversation on the platform.

The study's main lesson was that the basic design of social media might be the real problem. It's not just about human trolls or the complex algorithms that companies use. The experiment suggests that even the simplest social network can naturally fall into division and toxicity just based on how it works.

Identity escape

Problem

Imagine a marriage where on the dinner table sat a big red button that said divorce. Both partners would have to navigate this button every day and it would take only one push to destroy a marriage. How many marriages would last in that context?

Online, people are easily able to change their usernames, disappear, block people, and burn relationships very easily. The ability to be a different person in a second leads to a lack of accountability.

In turn, because online spaces generally lack accountability, people who come to them come with a different set of expectations. People online tend to try to get something from a digital space in a shallow and direct manner, rather than contributing to building a community together with the others.

Essentially, people treat the digital spaces as expendable, making it less real.

In physical life, people usually build relationships of much more depth when we know we are going to live with the people around us long term. This causes us to strive to resolve problems rather than double down on problems.

Solutions

Identity

By dramatically shifting the expectations of users entering an online community, one can dramatically modify its results.

Start by clarifying identity expectations. Make it an in-person, real name community or have a ceremony in which people choose one online name.

Escape friction

By encouraging people to invest in each other in a meaningful and committed way, you can create a level of stickiness with the community that resembles physical life.

A gaming community - could focus on capable gamers teaching less capable gamers to develop a sense of personal investment in other members.
A fitness community - could have everybody state their fitness goal in the community in turn to fellow members when joining.
A career development community - could have a weekly get together where members check-in on each other toward personal career goals.

All these create a friction to giving up on other members of the community.

Potential pitfalls

There's a difference between creating friction to the escape problem and creating a lock-in system.

This could include seeing everybody outside of the community as an enemy, separating people from other communities which are healthy, stopping people from leaving contractually or creating a network of debt that makes it truly impossible to leave.

Emotional accountability

Problem

Online, people tend to use the most convenient form of communication, which often comes down to text. Text-based conversations lack any emotional reciprocation.

By contrast, in physical life, one of our first forms of communication is through facial expressions. Even babies, long before they talk, smile and reciprocate our facial expressions. When we hurt someone's feelings, we have to witness their facial expression change and by nature, we mimic those facial expression changes. Just like deciding to smile fills you with positive emotion, so reciprocating their facial expressions gives you a deep sense of what they're feeling when you're hurting them.

The lack of this online leads to "keyboard warriors," people who become overly bold online because of the lack of accountability. Such keyboard warriors are unwarrantedly aggressive in online conversations. However, in person, they are doves not ready to hurt anyone's feelings.

Solution

(1) The first step to counter this is to use the most capable communication technology available.

Prioritize voice over text, video over voice, immersive over 2D when practical.

(2) To counter the lack of accountability, mechanisms of social accountability could be created. For example, persons of a certain rank or stature would be accountable to the one who elevated them to that rank or stature.

Intentionality

Problem

How most people use the internet to communicate requires an unnatural level of intentionality.

Offline, a problem at one desk naturally draws a small, visual cluster of helpers. Online, collaboration requires a deliberate, scheduled call.
Offline, you bump into people in the hallway and see what they are carrying potentially sparking a conversation about the item.
Offline, you may sit on the couch doing one activity while another person does another. Online, you would have to deliberately decide to sit in a voice channel doing different things silently together.

Solution

Signaling can help solve the problem of intentionality. If everyone is constantly telegraphing what they are doing in a way that invites others to be apart, they can create the sort of spontaneous interactions that now happen mostly offline.

It's about creating the digital form of walking through the hall with a particular item in your hand. Unless one person is signaling to another their activities on the fly, the on-rails to conversations are greatly diminished.

Interestingly, there is a platform that has recognized this, Discord.

In Discord, you can see people in a voice channel while browsing an unrelated text channel. This sends a signal that you can potentially participate in an activity with them. No pre-scheduling required.

The key element is that one person's activity is automatically signaled to other people encouraging surrounding dialogue or participation.

Creating an online community in which people feel as though they are in the same room with the others in that community whenever they are participating in some way with that community is one of the most powerful mechanisms that one can create in a digital space.

Potential pitfalls

The potential pitfall is to people's privacy. People need to be in control of what they share.

A potential solution is to run a AI local model on the edge on a person's device that would create summaries of activities that you can share in real time. It would not store anything a person does (in anything but RAM), and would only seek to get a general idea of the activity being undertaken, like playing a video game or watching Netflix.

It could willingly prompt a user to share certain bits of information with their community.

To some degree this already exists in Discord, in that when you play games or listen to Spotify, it'll share what you're listening to and what you're playing with your community, provided you opt into that.

Visual consensus

Problem

When you are with people working on a task, you get energy toward the accomplishment of the task by the other people who are there. Imagine if you volunteered to clean up litter and you had to do it alone, cleaning the park by yourself every week. You wouldn't feel very motivated, but you would feel much more motivated if there were ten others with you doing the same thing.

In the same way, a small group of startup founders working together enthusiastically on a startup's vision, even if they are not making money yet, drives the motivation of all founders. The faith of the other founders in the vision is visualized by the time, energy, and enthusiasm they have while they're in the office. The team is saying a lot simply by being there.

This visual accountability does not exist in a digital space. Without the ability to see others beside oneself, the joint momentum of visual accountability is lost.

Solutions

The solution to this problem builds on the concept of signaling mentioned earlier.

A work community may:

Require everyone to be in a particular online video call silently when working on a task for that community.
Create a digital whiteboard where everybody can see all of the tasks everyone is working on progressing through a system.

A gaming community may:

Have a rule in which anyone in a game must be live in Discord too.

A fitness community may:

Have each person be on a video call while they do their morning routine.

Strengths of online communities

Reputation systems

Every activity we undertake in life to some degree displays our character, how we treat others, how honest we are, how dependable we are, how talented we are.

Every time we undertake an activity well and don't get a positive reputation from that activity a considerable piece of value from that activity is lost.

Just like banks want to know who in a society is trustworthy that they can lend money to, an employer wants to know who in a society is dependable that they can give jobs to and a buyer wants to know who they can trust to buy a product from.

Because most human activities don't produce some form of record the potential value toward one's reputation of one's activities is lost.

Dangerous pitfalls

Obviously, creating a system which tracks everything everybody does and gives them a positive or negative reputation score accessible to everybody based on what they do and how they do it is so susceptible to abuse that it should never enter into the mind of any nation.

However, there are means of creating reputation systems that positively benefit people and negate the dangerous pitfalls associated with reputation systems.

Consent: While judgment by an imposed arbitrary standard is Orwellian oppression, when one freely chooses their own standards and society, with five key safeguards, reputation systems can become a net-benefit:

Safeguards:

Positive-only: A reputation system which only records positive feedback to one's benefit. In such a system all users start at zero and gain infinitely but can not go below zero.
Partial revelation: Reputations can be broken down into different facets like "capability" and "dependability" and users may reveal only a relevant part of their reputation to whoever asks.
Optional revelation: No society may be allowed to become a place where core societal functions require the revelation of reputation scores.
Optional participation: No one must ever be forced to use a reputation system.*
Sanctions: The society must penalize any actor outside the society that tries to tie it's services to reputation systems in the society.

Positive reputation: A positive reputation system is one that can never be negative. One where the validation of other users within a society can only increase one's status and benefit one without providing any disadvantages.

The obvious reason we do not create such systems is because such systems are totally inappropriate outside of communities we consent to being a part of.

Easy rearrangement

Imagine a small local comedy club in which chairs are arranged facing forward and people come in the dark to listen to somebody speak. In such a situation, people are mostly anonymous to all but those besides them.

Now imagine a classroom in which those same 100 people are broken up into three groups of 33, in which they sit in a circle discussing a subject. Just as arranging the lighting and chairs of a community space define that space, so online spaces can be defined by how they're designed.

For example, a video chat in which all participants see everyone's camera is much like the classroom broken up into groups of three circles. Turning off voice chat for all but the speaker leads the space to become like the comedy club.

The ease of which such changes can be made is an advantage of online spaces.

Speed of momentum

In a modern Discord channel, people who are browsing the particular Discord server can see people who are live in a particular Discord voice channel and join those people in a Discord call whenever they want to. Moving in and out is frictionless. This leads to a tremendous amount of energy being captured and signaled very quickly, allowing for a form of momentum to build very quickly in an online community.

The speed at which momentum can be built is unmatched by offline spaces.