Internet community architecture can be seen as a bi-level optimization design, similar to evolution or economics or war or reinforcement learning. There are fast and slow methods of interaction, and ideas or knowledge (or just ‘memes’) are created, varied, and selected on. These interactions happen inside discrete communities which are themselves created, varied, and grow. So, they are instances of multilevel selection.
Motivations
I like forums
- Their threaded nature make it ergonomic to pck up an existing topic and extend upon it in the future, compared to the “reply” feature in chat apps that result in multiple interleaved conversations.
- Threads make for nice, self-contained units of sharing.
- Replies are slow and substantial enough to turn on notifications for.
But it strikes me as a bad idea to make Yet Another Place To Have Conversations On; given how many there are already. On the other hand, many of them are dying, and new places struggle to be born. These things go in cycles, so maybe it’s time to move on from micro-blogging to mid-posting?
I would like a shared library
I like when people have bookshelves on their sites, I like Tom Critchlow’s Library JSON idea for a protocol for open bookshelves (even though I agree that it should just be RSS, lol).
And yet, the first community-sized books collection I ever heard of was Craig Mod’s A Good Book project, with features exactly the ones I was considering myself:
Since all the books are good books, the idea of “favoriting” was redundant. So popularity is based on engagement: How many notes / quotes a book has, and how many shelves it’s on. I tried to inject some whimsy. The more quotes a book has the more “tabs” poke out of the side.
Craig Mod, Go Knicks, A Better Goodreads, ‘Cheap’ Killer Films
Not that a library should limit itself to just books, of course. Custom views for other media would be nice. Seems quite useful to have a group-created version of https://worrydream.com/refs/, for example.
I like visual journals
A Better Journal 2.0 is about images, thanks to raw power of screenshots as a communication medium. Unlike text, which is incredibly lossy and requires painful effort to capture the right feeling, images almost just “are” the thing they’re talking about.
I liked the initial idea behind Campsite, as a place for WIP design to be shared with other people in the company. It was much like having an internal Twitter of sorts. Low effort enough to make a post, but because it’s a group with a specific topic focus it doesn’t really get noisy the way a wide open commons might.
Concepts
A forum
Classically designed for now, with replies + reactions + upvotes. Encourage personal projects to be turned into a thread so that they can be followed + commented on in one place.
A shared library
Custom designed views for each kind of media. Ideally with archiving the actual media too, both for preservatin reasons and to give members easy access. Piracy, hell yeah!
Rich user profiles
Links to current projects, long-term planning, wishlists, etc.
A feed
For posting to when something doesn’t deserve to be in a thread, but also every item added to the library shows up as an update in the feed. Maybe add a constraint that all posts should contain at least one image?
Misc.
- Events
- Online statuses
- Graphs of stats
References
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