I’ve been reading the reddit clone site, Hacker News from ycombinator more lately. It’s got a nice combination of alpha geek tech and small / agile startup topics. While i like the political news on reddit, honestly it’s stopped being very topical for me… to much taken over by link spammers i think who are gaming the system for traffic. The subsites like ruby.reddit.com are still a great source of traffic.
What has surprised me is that Hacker News seems to have found me about the same time i found it. When i went to go do a post i thought might be relevant to the community, about moving email from using smtp to xmpp, i posted it on hacker news. Only after did i discover that somebody had already posted a link to it.
Then yesterday i did wrote another blog post, this time about leaving yahoo brickhouse, and again over half the traffic came from another link posted to hacker news. So what’s going on here? Well first the community of folks has shifted. It’s previous semi-private places have been lost and new places created.
For me long ago i read slashdot, then kuro5hin, then my delicious network, then , then Hacker News. There were others in there too, i get lots of links from reading topical blogs like rubyinside, activist news from indymedia, etc…
The shift of online communities resembles urban development and the gentrification of many hip neighborhoods. The artists and hackers move in first, they are in development parlance, risk tolerant. For urban neighborhoods that means they’ll deal with crime if they can get cool warehouses to take over. Then slowly the neighborhood transforms, and gets some nice cafes and clubs, gets known as the place where the hip kids play, and more people come. Rent gets driven up, the crowds come, it becomes to crowded, and the hipsters have to move on. Just replace hipsters with alpha geeks and you get the same process.
We are creating virtual communities and then by our very own actions gentrifying them!
So why do i like the small sites, not just hacker news, but dzone, rubyflow and a bunch of others? Well for one because they work well for me. I can submit a link, or in the case of hacker news, somebody else in the community links to my stuff, and then i get traffic. A lot of traffic really, I can get 7 votes, but that translates in to 300 to 3000 visits to the article. It’s much harder to get on the front page of reddit, or dare say digg where the true unwashed masses of tech news junkies hang out these days. It’s even harder to get on top of yahoo buzz, where a few hours on the top page can lead to millions of page views.
Are we doomed to keep creating these communities, enjoying them for a while, then having to abandon them and move on? When i helped start indymedia.org back in 1999, we thought open publishing, the ability to put on the internet your own articles, videos, pictures about news was revolutionary. It was a big deal, this was before you could just create a blogspot or wordpress site. Our enemy was CNN the site which only showed you the news they wanted… But today cnn has Unedited. Unfiltered. News. iReport.com which is pretty damned similar to what we were doing with indymedia. Then then take some of the news created on ireport and integrate it to cnn.com’s site and use it in the news. The BBC does something similar.
The point is, we won. We took an idea, which said that the masses should be able to make their own media, and we did it as an example and eventually the people we were fighting against started copying us. No we didn’t win all of what we wanted, we had a political agenda which we able to advance here and there, we stopped the WTO round, ended the FTAA (free trade area of the americas), but in may ways we won.
So what does that mean to online communities, generating and finding news? Well first off it turns out that we, the broader hacker community is doing a good job at coming up with models which change the world. From blogs to wikis to link voting and collaborative editing, we’re coming up with ideas which other people are copying. Or sometimes the hacker community’s tools become mainstream. But we also face the reality that there is a tremendous value in influencing what gets seen.
If you can make a website which gets a lot of traffic, there is money to be made there. That’s the attraction of the SEO / SEM world. They’re not respected by true hackers, but they are huge, and they come in and destroy communities like reddit.
One option is we just keep moving, which is what we’ve been doing. From slashdot to kuro5hin, from digg to reddit from reddit to hacker news.. The other option is we try and build in to our systems anti-SEO / SEM protections. Find ways to use emergent behavior to find real and relevant content without having it be gameable. Twitter stopped spammers by using tinyurl for all links… Delicious did it by making it so my network is people i choose. The link voting sites will have a hard time. Perhaps we’ll just switch sites every 6 months to a year, but there’s got to be a better way.
21 Comments, Comment or Ping
I think democratization is a better word than gentrification. In gentrification, something bad is turned into something good, in the process displacing those who made it good. In democratization, something scarce and luxurious is devalued by its increasing popularity. Niche Communities (like HN) despise the unwashed masses and recoil when their community is invaded.
July 7th, 2008
“in the process displacing those who made it good.”
Two problems with that:
1. Gentrification does not imply displacement. It can happen but is a political attachment to the term.
2. Displacement does not necessarily displace “those who made it good”, whatever that means.
“In democratization, something scarce and luxurious is devalued by its increasing popularity.”
Huh? Again more political attachments. How is the ability to read and write devalued as more people learn?
I think the gentrification term is more appropriate.
July 7th, 2008
“Find ways to use emergent behavior to find real and relevant content without having it be gameable. … Perhaps we’ll just switch sites every 6 months to a year, but there’s got to be a better way.”
Switching sites every so often is emergent behaviour. The Alphas don’t all huddle and make a decision to move on, they just happen to see something better and start using it at (roughly) the same time.
And if doing so takes less aggregate effort than building something to block spam… it sounds like the right solution.
July 7th, 2008
We don’t have to keep moving. There is a better way.
July 7th, 2008
It’s not gentrification. The way you describe it, it’s White Flight.
Can you not see the irony of playing up your role in Indymedia and calling yourself “Anarchogeek”, then leaving for the the most elitist community of them all, Hacker News, leaving the “unwashed masses” as you call them in your trail?
July 7th, 2008
Perhaps what’s needed is something like “hot tubbing” as described in Hot Tubbing an Online Community.
Basically what you want is a poll tax. If what you want is to keep out the rabble and be exclusionary, then you need to set standards for participation.
For those of you who argue that’s elitist, undemocratic, and wrong, I reply that you’re right.
The gold standard for non-filtering or very very weak filtering is YouTube, whose comment threads are all but unreadable. Actually, no, they’re utterly unreadable.
Metafilter, a place with great comments has restrictions on membership, well executed flagging of comments and participation, and a loyal community. It works because there’s are standards set for participation.
(came in via Waxy.org. Interesting stuff you have here)
July 7th, 2008
So joe i’ve been to that hot tub, and there are a few rules not mentioned which keep it running. First codes are revoked if they are abused, and secondly only women get the codes. There are rules about being quite and the like, but the first two rules are pretty much enough to keep things in check.
The question is, how do you compare that to online communities. And how do you create online communities dedicated to finding new stuff, which is what these link voting sites do, which retain quality.
How do you find the women to keep the keys, the people least likely to abuse the situation, yet also create space for participation.
Regarding keeping the rabble out, what a very funny concept… To me it’s about how to do we create a space for the multitude, many different identities, communities, subcultures, which can share and discover without being overwhelmed by a dominate monoculture, which is the gentrifying force of online communities.
July 7th, 2008
Here is an example of how we keep the signal to noise ratio at top level:
http://people.squeakfoundation.org/trust-metric.html
July 7th, 2008
This is something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to. Your analogy to gentrification is excellent.
I don’t think the trust metric solution is appropriate; it’s solving a different problem. That might allow a community to grow without being taken over by spammers. It does not allow someone to continue to have that cool little neighborhood they had when they started. As they grow, sites like reddit drift towards lowest common denominator news items, like cute pictures, because they are the most generally popular. You can recover some of the original community by going to specialized topics, but that wasn’t as interesting as being involved with a community of people who shared the pioneer spirit. I wonder if one can create a cohort group for people that joined around the same time as oneself.
July 7th, 2008
From what I can tell, I’ve had a similar experience to yours. As sites like Digg and Reddit became more popular, they became less and less interesting for me.
That’s why I don’t tell anyone about Hacker News.
It’s a bit selfish I know, but one of the great things about Hacker News is that the names there often look familiar. The community seems small enough that you feel like you know people there.
Oh and by the way, I submitted your brickhouse post to Hacker News. I found it on someone’s del.icio.us network. I hope you don’t mind.
July 7th, 2008
Great post. I went and checked out kuro5hin for the first time in at least a year. I can’t tell if sites like Digg are less interesting or if I’ve just gotten much better at surfing. Now when I go to digg, anything that shows up of interest to me I’ve probably already read.
July 7th, 2008
I don’t think that I’ve ever hear of, or visited, Hacker News. I visit kuro5hin perhaps once a year. I hate to say this, but I mostly rely on Digg and Slashdot for tech news, despite the fact that Digg is overloaded with shit. The comments at Digg are pretty much worthless, so I don’t consider Digg to be a community in any sense of the word. The comments on Slashdot are more relevant and probably are better because the annoying tech fanboys have migrated to Digg and other hip tech sites.
I recently sent an email to somebody where I outlined my analysis about why the Indymedia project has essentially died except for a few active sites. I guess I should put those thoughts into a longer analysis.
I understand your gentrification analogy, but I disagree that gentrification as a metaphor can be used to describe online communities. I think that gentrification is an overused, misunderstood concept by activists. Through my recent experience working in a poor neighborhood, I’ve come to be more skeptical about activists throwing the “g” word around. Poor people welcome economic development and they are pretty savvy about wanting independent businesses and not chain stores. I’ve also read some recent stories which indicate that the gentrification process is not as bad for residents as people commonly think.
Online communities go through lots of iterations in flavor and participants. This is something that really hasn’t changed in the past 20 years. The technology changes, but people still act the same. We’ve entered an era where Internet access is ubiquitious, so everybody can show up in your community. So you get more people who act in ways counterproductive to a healthy online community. That’s why you establish rules, guidelines, and boundaries.
July 7th, 2008
Its hard for me to articulate (in the same way that it was difficult for me to describe the value proposition of del.icio.us), but FriendFeed seems to have an interesting thing going on—it is social, it has the flavor of news (though it could use ratings), twitter, IM and IRC, but it allows you to choose who you see (with a an extra degree of separation folded in). The model shows promise.
July 7th, 2008
Another approach, while probably not appropriate for a link voting style site, is not to filter your userbase, but to filter posted content with some kind of clever rule, a la Randall Munroe’s #xkcd-signal.
July 7th, 2008
My own take on Social Networking lifecycles:
http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/investing-and-the-social-netwo.html
July 7th, 2008
My own take on Social Networking lifecycles:
http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/investing-and-the-social-netwo.html
July 7th, 2008
The ability to read and write is devalued in the marketplace as it becomes a common skill. Once you could get paying work solely because you could read and write; nowadays, employers will not pay a premium for workers who are merely literate—they demand other skills as well. This is why in the long run mere education cannot lift large groups out of poverty, though it can of course help individuals.
July 7th, 2008
I can’t speak to the hacker news consumption side, except for my early temporary watching of slashdot, which I compare to my early experiences with micro-brews. I have moved on generally. I can speak to the indymedia / news production side of things (as opposed to consumption). I posted an article in response to a poster on portland.indymedia.org about indymedia being “dead”. It is over here: http://www.salaud.net/blog/?p=50 and I think that Rabble and I share a lot of common perspective on this…. I would not go so far as to say that iReport.COM or the others are like what indymedia does in the sense of the intent/method.
I see the intent/method as being more important than the ends…. the means are more important. In the same way, I believe that a possible solution to the problem that Rabble is describing is that, just like indymedia, the alpha-hackers (did I just say that?) need to create an INTENTIONAL community. This intentional community can choose whether to sell out its space or not. If the ends are “get page hits”…. that’s one choice, if the ends provide a space for open-publishing of RELEVANT information, that’s another. Just as in a gentrification, which I agree is loaded word, it does not really matter, except in extreme cases, whether hipsters or bohemes WANT to buy homes or businesses in the area, the people already living there have to SELL OUT. Some cases, of course, the city forces out undesirables by taxes or other things. Long story short, prosperous, informative, and empowering hacker news sites need to have PRINCIPLES of unity that are not sold out. If they do this, then a few of these intentional communities will not turn into roving tent cities.
July 7th, 2008
Hmm. Regarding ‘White Flight’ vs. ‘Gentrification’. These actually seem to be very similar phenomena, distinguished largely by cultural baggage and the direction of property price changes. Is there a phrase that manages to encompass both?
Also, compare ‘virtuous/vicious cycle’, and these two quotes:
“when a place gets boring even the rich people leave.”—Jane Jacobs
“No one goes there any more, it’s too crowded.”—Yogi Berra
July 7th, 2008
“Everything delicate & beautiful, from Surrealism to Break-dancing, ends up as fodder for McDeath’s ads; 15 minutes later all the magic has been sucked out & the art itself dead as a dried locust. The media-wizards, who are nothing if not postmodernists, have even begun to feed on the vitality of “Trash,” like vultures regurgitating & re-consuming the same carrion, in an obscene ecstasy of self-referentiality. Which way to the Egress?” (H. B.)
http://www.left-bank.org/bey/immediat.htm
but don’t forget the cyber zombies
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/seduct.html
July 7th, 2008
We are trying to handle this problem by creating a filter (topic based) for multiple aggregators.
Voting is subjective and too general. When I vote for something, I am sending a different message than some one else. I think this technology will get more sophisticated over time where personal profiles (private, if need be) can be matched with the items to create special feeds. The sub-reddits are just a step in that direction by not good enough.
July 7th, 2008
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