The a2k world is changing 1: more microcosms

This thread is the beginning in a series of threads I will be starting about community culture and the thinking that is going into my efforts to build technology to support it.

The first thing I want to talk about is community evolution. Many of you have been here a long time and like or dislike things about the community that will inevitably change. I want to outline what I'm doing to try to make the changes work well for the community as it endures growing pains.

When the site started it has a much more narrow demographic of members whose interests were not as diverse as it now is. As the site continues to grow this will change the community, we already have members further outside of our mainstream that push the community's limits but on a basic level growth will do this more an more.

With growth, things will change. Right now it's primarily mature adults who primarily discuss politics and lean left. No matter what direction the community takes this demographic can't be ensured and will drift. I for one welcome diversity, I'd love to see more topics covered outside of politics for example. But with the diversity comes a shift in the community dynamics that the current site can't handle very well.

Right now it's a microcosm trying to be all things to everyone. This is something that is not tenable on a fundamental level. If we try to be one homogeneous neighborhood we are going to have to practice ethnic cleansing within our gated community. If we want one culture we have to be intolerant of all others.

That's not the way to go. Like in real life we need more than one neighborhood. We need our own microcosms. And technology to support that has been being built for years.

We are close to launching it now, and while we won't nail this on the first pass what I am announcing in this thread is the fundamental difference of trying to maintain one culture versus trying to support multiple cultures in an ecosystem.

Neither path is easy. Artificially maintaining a single culture usually means you serve either end of your spectrum poorly and the majority of the members will fall slightly out of the mainstream you serve. Supporting multiple cultures comes with technical and social challenges that come from trying to reconcile the differences. In short, we need to build great tools to minimize culture war.

In practice, here are some planned changes:

1) No longer is there a top-down defined topic structure. In the past, admins made forums and that was that. Now users will tag topics and the tags serve as a dynamic user-driven folksonomy.

So here's a practical difference in use cases: let's say you want to talk about fashion. We have no great place to do that so you can either stuff it into a forum we have where it doesn't fit well or wait for the admins to grow the forum coverage. In practice this means a lot of things just go uncovered now. On the new site tags can be created by users on the fly, and it's a structure where you can essentially make any forum you want.

2) Censorship is going to be less top-down. We are legally required to perform certain censorship (such as removing copyright violations when ordered to) and others make sense due to the volume of abuse we will see (namely spam and porn). A fundamental culture difference we already have is between the various degrees of censorship each person wants on the site. Some want us to clean up nasty personal disputes, others want us to butt out.

Ultimately, the greatest difficulty we've had in running the site is striking the balance, and again most of the community would fall on either side of our mainstream and many of the current members are not well served by our attempt to be all things to all people.

So we need to find ways to let people control their own experiences. Right now we try to enforce a difficult subjective notion of civility and we simply can't do so.

We are already at the point where the top-down censorship can't read everything and can't maintain such tight control over the members that this tightrope requires.

So in practice the first change is that moderators and official employees of this company will have a reduced mandate of the core censorship that is needed: illegal content (defined as illegal for us to have on our site by US law), spam (in a less strict definition than we currently do) and porn (same as we always have, because if this changes the site will be destroyed by porn).

Now this doesn't mean we no longer care about civility, it just means the tools to foster civility will change. Here are the tools we are making:

- Ignoring users: You can ignore a user. Now we ban people when a certain threshold is reached and until we do so a significant number of the members are displeased with the inaction, then when we do others are displeased with the censorship. No more, now the ability for each user to ban another user from their experience on the site means we will use banning very sparingly and expect the users to be more responsible for their own experience.

This won't come without it's cost. We will serve users very well in controlling their own experiences, but users who want to control the experience of others (and just about everyone here does actually want this in some ways) won't be as well served. An example is that if you find a certain individual obnoxious you can ban them from your a2k in a click, but if you want them banned from contact with others it is not going to happen except in very rare circumstances (mostly when dealing with automated robots).

- Ignoring posts and topics: beyond the ability to ignore users, we also made the ability to ignore specific topics and posts. So whenever you vote a topic or post down, that topic or post no longer shows up for you. Right now, if there is a post or topic you don't like, you can ignore it but you have no expression of your disapproval except to post your disapproval. Because of the current topic lists are primarily driven by last posts that means the most controversial stuff is usually the most visible. With the ability to censure through voting the community can drive content out of visibility without feeding the train wreck.

- Harnessing the collective wisdom: We aren't going to make a stupid rating system that just changes a number on the screen. We are going to harness this collective data for the community. In short, posts and topics that many people vote down will have less visibility (more on the details another day) and posts that many people vote up will have more.

The big difference is that instead of top-down censoring we are going to have community-up censure. The content will be more or less visible based on the community's collective take on it.

Now I know that many will rush to concern over voting abuse, but in another post or topic I will address these concerns. In short I will do so by saying we'll put a lot of work into eliminating sock puppetry and bad fraud detection that make this a character assassination feature on other sites.

And lastly I want to talk about the biggest change toward more microcosms: user groups. We tried it before but this software doesn't do it well. We won't have this feature when we launch (and it will take a bit to build) but we intend to allow users to create their own groups on this site where they can control the membership, rules and moderation.

So give us a chance and the odds are we'll nail the user experience you want. There will be some rough transitions but if you accept more control over your own experience in exchange for less control over the experience of others you are going to be happy if we get it right.

And if you don't you will eventually be able to roll your own community and microcosms on a2k will exist as separate entities.