The Spoor of Forum Death

Signs of senescence in online communities

I first discovered arguing on the internet in college.  Well… arguing at scale, at least.  It’s one thing to argue 1:1, but it’s another entirely to put your thoughts out into the universe and take all comers.  Both are fun, but the second is the true crucible of the mind.

When it’s done right, it’s a thing of beauty — a theatre where one can reenact classics such as “does might make right?” (Plato vs. Thrasymachus) in real-time in front of an audience who has never heard of them before.  It’s beautiful.

But just like Plato’s Academy or Epicurus’ Garden, these things eventually fall off.  They are fragile venues, and their survival depends largely on the prowess of the host.  Having seen a number of these web communities die, it seems to me that twitter is pretty sick.

There’s a familiar cadence to it, and it typically includes some form of moderator disengagement. Moderation is important, you see, as this forms the boundaries of any community. You may think that there’s no moderation in some community you’re a part of, but that just means you agree with the moderation choices. There are always edges — a sort of implied Lockean proviso regarding the host’s rights, baked into how we go about socializing.

In a local parish, for example, a shared belief system binds the discourse of those who arrive, and aggressive speaking out against that belief system is unwelcome and will be moderated out. A bar has vibe to it, and patrons who don’t respect that will be asked to leave. Most spaces are moderated spaces, and if the moderation experiences a sudden, drastic shift then the people who once frequented that space will no longer go there because… well, it turns out they were there for more than just the booze. These things can evolve over time, but they cannot be changed too quickly or the community will reject them and find somewhere new.

Twitter is experiencing a sudden and drastic shift here.

In addition to this, aggressive changes in monetization also pose mortal risk — the parish suddenly expecting a $20 tithe every visit, or the bar imposing a cover charge to get in. These change user behavior pretty significantly, so when some big brain comes in with a new monetization scheme that impacts the core user experience of the space, it’s very risky. Digg and Slashdot both fell to this sort of attempt.

Twitter is, of course, attempting this as well.

And all of this is without mentioning the direct attack on many of the core services that keep the lights on, as described beautifully in threads here and here — if these things degrade the quality of the service patrons expect (which seems likely, given that Twitter is now reportedly attempting to rehire those they fired), then they will look elsewhere.

So what happens next? What is the sequence of events to expect if this decline continues?

Well if it escalates, the conversation will turn increasingly inward: it’ll no longer be a wide ranging chat about varied topics, rather it will increasingly drift to conversation about the conversation. People debate how moderation should work and how they should interact with one another, instead of experiencing effortless and fun interaction on topics of their choice. A Great War of the Poasters ensues as big accounts unload on one another, expressing deeply-held views with new vitriol — a glorious clash of the titans!

But here’s the thing:  ‘radical honestly’ is not pro-community.  It’s a narcissistic indulgence of the ego, the view that everyone meet should meet ME all the way, and I should never have to be considerate of others, or modify my approach for consumption. Bare-bones honesty, while truthful, can be rather ugly too.

This sort of wine-drunk Dionysian reverie is always the same — yes there is wisdom in the Greek saying “there’s truth in wine and children” but… well, those are expensive truths.  We wake up the next day in the harsh Apollonian daylight and realize that many of those truths were being held back to serve the higher goal of a camaraderie that has now been somewhat diminished.

Unfettered, no-holds-barred personal expression erodes the social graph, which is why human communities have norms in the first place.

And that social graph is what Elon bought, he just doesn’t know how to run it because, as the richest man in the world, he sees the graph as a web emanating out from him. After all he purchased it; it’s his right to be the spider at the center of the one big web now.  You can see this in the way he’s approaching managing it — he believes his opinion about features and what advertisers should think matters.

It doesn’t, really.  Social graphs are relativistic structure:  we are, each of us, at the center of our own graph, and any platform that wants to host us must recognize that, and be very careful not to overly disturb the connective mechanisms valued by those million points of light.

Does Elon strike you as a careful player?  Does he strike you as someone capable of running this type of product?

What he’s currently doing is defining a set of rules that HE wants, and people with similar personal-graph construction rules are cheering and saying “It’s about time! It’s about time we have our day in the sun!” And while I understand that sentiment, this sort of polarization is toxic for communities — how many friends did you lose due to their different views on how we should handle Covid? Has your social circle narrowed lately due to political polarization?

The lure of a social platform is defined by scale, and so is its health. That’s why the focus was on inclusivity, not because of some moral view. It was a capitalist imperative for the platform.

Twitter is sick.

The sickness is metastasizing quickly.

And all the doctors have been humiliatingly fired.