Usenet, Size and Communities

[jducoeur]

So in her own journal, cellio posted this link to a rant about Usenet, and its then-imminent demise due to spammage. I started to reply in a comment, but decided it was an interesting enough topic to be worth a top-level posting here.

It's a very interesting rant, and site. Pity that the Usenet II thing didn't take off, but it illustrates a couple of extra dangers of its own. For example, the side-rant against HTML looks both dogmatic and outdated from this late vantage point. (While I still tend to send plaintext email myself, I think that HTML is increasingly well-established as the key format for text transfer, and is going to win at least for the medium term.) And the social mechanisms proposed are fairly heavyweight and centralized, so I suspect they would have encountered their own problems with time.

In general, though, I've found that Usenet as an entity has been superceded by later events. I can sympathize with the rant (having been around r.a.c long enough ago to disagree with him using Chuq as the example of a net.god instead of Moriarty), but I just don't have the time for Usenet any more. And that isn't because of the spam and abuse -- it's just too coarse-grained and unfocused. It's too damned *big*.

I mean, consider the Rialto. Rec.org.sca doesn't really get much spam; when I check in there, the spam level's been low enough that I don't notice it. Most of the postings are more or less on-topic, even. But there are just too damned many of them to keep up with, and there are too many for the whole thing to really feel personal any more. Giving up on the Rialto's been a slow process for me, and not a little painful -- I was one of the people who worked to create the group in the first place. But it has long since stopped being my community.

One thing the rant manages to completely miss is the nature of communities. We had a very interesting panel at Arisia last year, talking about organizations and communities, and the key takeaway from that was the difference between the two. You can have an *organization* of unlimited size, but a *community* is, by the nature of the idea, fairly small. This has some useful correlaries: for example, the SCA is an organization, but the local branches are communities. That alone explains about half of all high-level SCA politics.

Hence, I don't pay much attention to the Rialto any more -- once it grew past the size of being a truly viable community, it wasn't as interesting to me on a day-to-day basis. Heck, I scarcely even follow the Kingdom mailing list any more, for the same reason. I do follow a bunch of more "vertical-market" mailing lists, in part because they are communities. And I pour a lot of time and attention into LJ, because by its nature it tends to foster loose, self-defining communities.

Frankly, that why I find LJ so cool, and tend to bristle when people say that it's just a blog site. The blogging is the least of it, really. The power of LJ is in the friends list, and the way that it encourages these fuzzy communities. That is really cool, and a model for future ideas and experiments...

Comments

[keshwyn]

May I point some friends at this post? They've been having a discussion about very similar things and I think this clarifies a lot of the running in circles they've been doing down to the salient, important points.

[jducoeur]

Sher -- feel free. (I've never been one to turn down more readers...)

[gower.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with you. Creating a journal, posting to it, and reading friends' entries while I was in Texas was the single most important thing I did to keep me from despairing over last year. It also made me realize *how much* I like my friends.

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Yup. The USEnet isn't [didn't] die because of spam, it's dying [it died] because it was too big to live.

I posted a link to this talk a few months back in my own journal: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" by Clay Shirky (http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html).

Clay touches on the same issues but from a community creation (and community tool creation) standpoint. Near the end, he cites LiveJournal as one tool that helps with the scale problem:

And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit.... But each [LJ] user is a little bit connected to other such clusters, through their friends, and so while the clusters are real, they're not completely bounded -- there's a soft overlap which means that though most users participate in small groups, most of the half-million LiveJournal users are connected to one another through some short chain.

Oops.

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Other random community thoughts I forgot to ^V in.

With traditional boards, there has to be an entry cost or relative obscurity for it to live. TWoP message boards, some of the comment threads of popular bloggers and MU*s to name three that I'm familiar with not only have some entry barrier but are self limiting--if it gets too crowded, overall performance goes down, so you need to be reasonably committed. Slate message boards, on the other hand, have too low an entry cost (just an MSN Passport) and as a result are just awash in noise.

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

I recall my first reaction to usenet being that it was already too big , hard to filter, and unsearchable. That was about 1984. I read way too much of it for a few years. To me, any ranting about it is being done by people who have loved it, and are unhappy about change. It's the same resistance that I feel about switching to an automatic transmission, or that the RIAA members feel about losing the tangible objects that they sell. It was funny to look at the rant you linked to. It looked so quaint and old-fashioned. I got a bit of that same sensation I get when I visit historic recreation villages, and see a room that reminds me of my great-grandmother's place. Or perhaps it's more like when I found that box of Selectric font balls in the bottom of the electronic junk closet [when WAS the last time I used one of those things?]. If the usenet dies, I won't be the first ot know.

There did use to be communities on Usenet. They had names like rec.org.single, and rec.org.volleyball. New newsgroups were added to keep the volume on any one topic small enough that reading the list was still possible. The web matured as we figured out how to flame, and also how to suppress flaming. There were people who must have spent ten or more hours a day reading and posting. If the usenet goes away, they will still ahve impacted people's lives, but there will be a tendency to feel like their contribution to the world has evaporated.

LJ is cool, so are a lot of other web-based things out there; but they will be superseded by even cooler things. Try not to get too attached to the medium. Do get attached to the community.

[cellio]

I agree; any net-based communication medium that you want to stick around has to be about the community. I wouldn't have ever bothered to keep a journal before LJ; the interaction with others is what makes this worthwhile. And it was the same with Usenet; posting into a void is no fun, but getting into discussions with the gang -- a set of people you know somewhat, and that is bounded -- was fun.

(Aside: a few years ago I was in a situation where I was required to keep a journal. The only reason that worked is that I had a small mailing list of people I was talking with about the subject at hand anyway, so my "journal" was the collection of messages I sent to that group. The opportunity for dialogue made a huge difference; I probably had the most thorough journal in the recent history of that group.)

I stopped reading Usenet a few years ago. I'm on more mailing lists than I used to be, but the ones with large numbers of posters are noisy in a way similar to Usenet. Those are the ones where I mostly delete messages unread, and they're the first ones to go come purge time. (Side thought: switching to the daily the digest is often the first step to dropping a mailing list.)