I can’t believe it’s less than a month since I mentioned Dunbar’s number, also in the context of the IndieWeb Carnival, in my Resetting as a Renewal article, and I have to mention it again!
I’ve been a sociable person my entire life, both online and offline as well. Coming from a poor family, I had to make way and make friends, and the online space was the best place, as I could project there whatever I wanted and whatever things worked in my best advantage. How silly I was back then, because I didn’t know that it doesn’t matter how many masks you put on, eventually you’ll realize that you’re only … you. Nothing less and nothing more. Sure, you can project some things that are far from the truth, but in essence, your online persona will reveal the true traits of your personality.
Being a social person and hating loneliness, I always was naturally attracted to social groups, online and offline as well. Forums, IRC channels, Yahoo! groups, Myspace Groups, Facebook groups, football supporter groups (not hooligans tho), university student societies, students NGOs, it didn’t matter to me. If there were good people around, I would definitely find a way in. With wisdom (and age) I’ve managed to learn in time that all these social groups, regardless of their medium are subject to a set of interaction rules, some written and some only implied, while there are impacted by the cumulative effect of the members social decisions, both as individuals and part of the group. I’m not going to talk too much about these, I’m sure there are hundreds of sociologists that did this in their university and that have a better understanding of the phenomenon, but I wanted to point some things that I’ve seen happening repeatedly (sometimes with a precision similar to a Swiss wristwatch) and I’m going to just list them here in no particular order:
The “reason” of the group’s existence gives it a tone. Usually, if a group revolves around a specific topic (a band’s fan club, an IRC channel of a programming language, a Google group for Retro Computers), then the members will get there in search for like-minded people to discuss said topic. It’s a group where nationality, gender, orientation, and other issues that people use as reasons to pick fights are generally disregarded as off-topic discussions and people will usually push away the people who try to hijack the conversation or to steer it into political stuff. On the other hand, when you have a more general topic, where people join only because of their location, either local or general, (think your flat Whatsapp group, city’s Facebook group, #your-country-name channel on IRC), you’ll have people joining there from all over the place, and their only common denominator is the fact that they belong to the same geographical place. This will create a community where people will have different interests (be it politics, sports, etc), and individuals will have often opposing opinions on any of those matters. It’s usually a place where things turn into a cesspool and where toxicity goes from 0 to 100 in just a matter of seconds.
The size of the group is always a bell curve. At the same time, while the number of members grows, the quality of the discussion generally goes down. In online communities, I’ve found out that the member number is always a bell curve, more or less. The group starts fairly small, some early adopters bring in some other early adopters. The discussions now are usually very on-topic, with a few threads and people going off-topic now and then. The quality of the talk is good, everyone has pertinent opinions about the matter of the group and this causes more people to join. At some point, the group becomes so big it’s hard to moderate. Off-topic talks get their own mini-spaces (dedicated off-topic forum threads, for examples, sister ## channels, etc) and people who are more invested into banter than the original purpose of the community start to communicate more. Eventually, the number of member grows so much, off-topic talks are everywhere, people came only for bantering or for pushing their personal politics, and while the community might have been a technical one, now most of the people are discussing politics and cancelling others users for not sharing their opinions and while member (and threads) numbers are at a historical high, the quality of the discussion is so bad that it makes people leave. Losing members, usually the ones that stay are either the vocal off-topic members that alienated the other general population, or the original group members/owners. And sometimes even those go away, too, leaving the place in disarray, unmoderated, or in the hands of the political vocal members. Without an audience, the vocal keyboard warriors eventually leave as well, and silence sets in the community.
The groups have a maximum viable size, and after going past that number (this is where Dunbar’s number comes into play), it’s hard to make meaningful connections with the other members. I remember I was on a very nice IRC channel some years ago where there were only a handful of people, about twenty or so. Although the channel’s topic was a general one, its small size and good quality of members ensured good talks, with pertinent points of views and good arguments. I remember waking up at noon, and scrolling the two pages of text that was discussed while I was asleep. Yes, the talk was that good and the people were that cool! After a while, we all moved to a dedicated Discord server, as that was the new fad, and as the server grew fast to a hundred members, then two hundreds, then more, it was harder to keep track of who’s who, who said what and just very difficult to keep track of the current discussion. I remember I once got up from my chair to get a glass of water and by the time I came back, there were completely other people talking about a completely different thing.
Politics will fuck things up. I know, some people care about being politically correct, some others are full on “fuck this fuck that”-mode. But regardless of your stance on a matter, politics will split groups straight in the middle. The internet is not a safe space anymore, as I’ve mentioned previously, and there are a lot of people that will try to hijack the social group you’re a part of. And the more you allow unmoderated political talks, and I’m not talking here only about who to vote, I’m also talking about LGBTQ+ rights, trans athletes, far left or far right activism, or whatever one side decides today is the good reason to flame the other side. I’m all for freedom of speech and I’m all open for dialogue, but people need to understand that there’s a place for that. And I’m not surprised when I see good people (in their field) going away (or being pushed away) because a group didn’t agree with that person from a point of view. A good example was the removal of some devs from the Linux kernel, just because they were Russian citizens (Link). Does it mean they were bad people, bad coders? Or did they just tick a random box that someone deemed important one day? (Keep in mind that retard Linus Torvalds said “If you haven’t heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day.” two and a half years after said sanctions came into effect. Fucking retard.)
Although groups disappear, people don’t. I’ve joined groups in various stages of development (or decay), and I’ve seen groups go so large, sometimes thinking that they’re too big to fail, and I’ve seen them thin out, outright get deleted by owners with no warning, left without moderation or being subjects to hostile takeovers. The only constant that remained was me. A community after all is just the sum of its users and while the community might disappear completely, the inter-personal relationships that users build within them cannot be broken as easily. People that used to share a digital (or physical!) space and had a deeper, meaningful connection will continue to want to do that and will naturally seek ways to reconnect once the community is gone. They will form new communities, they will build new spaces, they will still look for the like minded people that brought them to that place in the first time. Maybe not instantly, but they will.
I’ve seen these behaviours countless times, communities are created and are broken apart with such ease, and the technology helps a lot, when it’s easy to run your Mastodon instance, create an IRC channel, set up a Facebook or Whatsapp group, but it seems that people are forgetting that behind every nickname, forum user, twitter handle there is a human being (*) and that should be treated if not respectfully, at least in the same way that we’d want other to treat us. And that’s why communities die slowly one by one, and many users have just decided to live a life of a digital hermit, because it seems there are less and less communities that aren’t tainted by politics. But many of us are still out there, roaming around, just trying to find a place where we can talk about our hobbies.
A place where we belong.
