Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities
dsirijus.tumblr.com
dsirijus.tumblr.com
I'm not suggesting we censor, in fact I take this articulation as a reason to be sceptical of the author's conclusion, but any policy for managing a medium-sized discussion-oriented community should be at least in part scalable to the national stage.
In strict engineering terms, feedback loops must always have a gain less than unity, and a stable, reliable system normally has negative net feedback. But this doesn't sound "right" to a social scientist, who understands these terms in an entirely different way.
Where from have you drawn that conclusion? Genuine interest.
I posted only because you used the entire term "positive feedback loop", which is so specific that it loses flexibility -- it can only refer to one thing and conflates the engineering and social sciences meanings.
"Positive feedback", when not accompanied by "loop", can be stable. But a loop with positive feedback is generally unstable, because the output feeds the input.
Here are pictures of loops with positive, unity and negative feedback:
Very clear, and all solutions to this classic damped oscillator equation:
Where:
a = angular frequency
b = damping factor
Without any reference to the present exchange, this kind of language is often used by those who want to elevate an argument, make it seem more like physics -- more scientific, more deterministic, but usually in a field that doesn't have those properties.
There's life to positive feedback loops outside engineering without any conflation. If it's more defined in one field, it doesn't mean it has no value in plenty of others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback_loop
How about, limiting the visibility of comments to a subset of the community. If they comment/answer, then show the thread to more. If they ignore (its a rant etc) then it quietly sinks into oblivion.
Just an idea.
In engineering, yes, always. In the social sciences, not always.
> How about, limiting the visibility of comments to a subset of the community.
That would mean the system isn't a single system any more. Apart from making the system two or more systems, it's undemocratic and probably counterproductive.
Consider the classic example -- astrophysicist Jim Peebles had an idea about the Big Bang, that there should be a residual "echo" of the original event, "audible" in the present universe, in the form of a background radiation with a specific temperature that was relatively easy to compute. Peebles realized the radiation should appear in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it should seem to be coming from everywhere (highly uniform).
Meanwhile, physicists Penzias & Wilson over at Bell Labs had a microwave dish with an annoying noise they couldn't get rid of. They scrubbed away bird droppings, they adjusted the front end amplifier, nothing helped, and it didn't matter which way they pointed the dish -- the signal seemed to be coming from everywhere.
Penzias & Wilson called Peebles and asked hum what he though the noise might be. Peebles told them, hung up the phone, and said, "We've been scooped." Penzias & Wilson won the Nobel Prize.
Now that's feedback. And it only happened because there were no communications barriers.
Listen to the Mixergy.com interview with Paul Graham. At exactly 49:40 Paul says, "[hacker news] was originally called startup news but after 6 months we changed it to hacker news cause we got sick of reading about nothing but startup stuff." And yet here we are again, HN is nothing but startup news, I just gave up and joined in, no use swimming against the current. The sad part was that HN was originally a much better nursery to startups because all startups begin their life as a project, a hack, a mod, a solution. HN was all about code back then, which put off a lot of people who couldn't code (myself included) and slowly it turned into more startup news to allow for a larger audience.
The question is which came first?
Was it necessarily a bad thing?
How can PG / Should PG force the community back into more of a hacker culture than a startup culture?
I came up with an idea to control who the members of a community are by means of crowd-sourcing (http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/invention-creating-and-...) but still, how can one control the hive-mind of the community to prevent it from wandering away from its original intent? We've seen what happens when one doesn't control the community. Maybe its time to play secret-dictator?
Instead of modulating input, which is not scalable, I'm suggesting modulating the dampening power (and potentially amplification power, e.g. upvotes from high-karma users counting for more) of a select and active minority.
In fact I agree so strongly that having witnessed the rise and fall of many a community I've run or been a member of that I think that there is a natural lifecycle of a community.
I also believe that whilst you can artificially lengthen the life by controlling inputs, you can also kill a community by the very same methods... possible to do but very difficult in the long term.
Instead of trying to control the inputs (censor, dictate), I'm embracing the side effects of a lack of censorship... a shorter life span perhaps, but a community that burns brighter during it's life.
Effectively what this means is that I'm building community software that has at the very heart of it the notion that a community will die, and that a successful community will schism during the death phase as members attempt to preserve the bits they love.
The idea being that communities rip themselves apart, and that at some point HN will do so too. And when it does it won't be replaced by a single "new HN", but instead by many smaller communities each serving a niche that existed within the larger.
Even though those niches appear smaller than the thing they emerged from, they are likely to be larger in volume (active users, posts per day, upvotes) than HN itself was before it.
As a metaphor for this, think of a kind of community cellular division: the splitting of a community into smaller microcosms that will eventually grow and then split themselves.
In some ways you could argue that StackOverflow actually did this preserving the dictatorship through the Stack Exchange network. Except, I don't really accept that a dictatorship can know when a specific community needs to sub-divide itself to survive. I think that comes from within the community.
In the software I'm creating, the very tools to gradually manage the creation of new microcosms is given to the users... in much the way that users can create subreddits and that helps reddit to grow.
The bells and whistles like flags, up/down votes, are just distraction between the authentic dialog/substantive community and aimless/useless chatter.
I worked with Steve Jobs, I couldn't stand him, and I eventually refused to work with Apple. I am sure there are many others who came to the same conclusion. But this didn't stop Apple as a company.
It seems to me that once critical mass is reached, closing registration is a good move. It works for other quality-oriented social sites like Oink too.