The FB algo helps this happen. The more you participate, the more content it shoves in front of you.

I participate in groups that rotate every few months, and it can be astounding how "engaged" I get in a new group after awhile, assuming I start participating in the first place; but sometimes when I join a new group, it takes me a long time to realize I'm not seeing any content from it at all.

I used to frequent a relatively niche forum that I think was built on custom code. I don't know how common this is in the popular forum packages now, but it started publishing a list of top posters (by quantity of posts).

Gamifying engagement led to a subset of people competing for the top 10 positions and commenting on literally every thread. This was rewarding for a handful of people, but created a worse experience for everyone else. And from the outside, it looked like these people were suffering from serious addiction.

I suppose it's a universal truth that a small group can poison a large community when given a poorly (or excellently depending on your view) conceived incentive, but Facebook has shown how well this model scales in the digital world.

The algorithm almost certainly maximizes engagement. But I suspect FB's systems have found a local maxima (at least for me) - my engagement did increase for a period and the toxicity in a couple of the groups was so high, that I stopped reading.

I don't think moderation is the problem-

The beauty of the age of forums was that you were forced to seek out communities to discuss similar interests or topics. People were forced to put in the effort to create them as well.

Now it is a bunch of people with nothing in common talking about nothing in particular.

Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the Reddit experience is much better.

/Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin sub was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator who bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow the corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open discussion forum for all things Bitcoin.

The problem is that many new users never make their way to the second most popular version and end up getting fed a one-sided story about how the Blockstream way is the only way to do Bitcoin. They go so far as to demonize the creator Satoshi and people who have done huge amounts of positive work for Bitcoin like Roger Ver because they disagree with the White Paper.

> /Bitcoin is a good/bad example of this. The main bitcoin sub was long ago hijacked by a "pro-Blockstream" moderator who bans users and discussion of anything that does not tow the corporate line. So /BTC evolved to be an open discussion forum for all things Bitcoin.

I was there, and on Bitcoin talk forum back then; and while Theymos may have many misgivings, it was never what you described. Your 'Pro-Blockstream' narrative is really to say the community didn't accept the hardforks as the Bitcoin we wanted to use, they could exist, but to call it Bitcoin was a misnomer. It was a fork and not the main-chain/protocol/network that is known as Bitcoin.

I do miss the days when the community was focused on solving real problems with the tech like with Sean's Outpost and Satoshi Forest, or the crowdfunding for Humanitarian crises and Ukrainian Revolution causalities of war.

But it was never what you are saying it was, Roger Ver was always a tool and a self-aggrandizing idiot who didn't understand the tech at a very basic level and never did anything except out of self-interest within Bitcoin much less 'for the Community.' Just look at his vitriol and ignorance leading up to and in the aftermath of the Bcash hard fork and his limited understanding of blockchain size. Furthermore, look at the lack of volume on their Network to prove just how much of a failure his notions of what made Bitcoin 'successful' turned out to be. The guy was a joke, always was regardless of how many Bitcoin he had/has. Hell, Gmaxwell (a former memeber of Blockstream) after being endlessly attacked by the Bcashers helped them identify and solve a massive bug!

As for Satoshi, you should go to Bitcoin talk Forum and look up his 'don't kick the Hornets nest' thread regarding getting involved with circumventing Wikileak's Financial censorship. This was never 'Satoshi's project,' he created Bitcoin but it was always maintained and modified for the Community, who clearly disagreed with Satoshi's apprehension to solve REAL problems from the onset of what this technology was meant to do: bypass financial censorship.

I was there, I saw it happen and that's actually what made me take this technology serious; when the community could bypass the supposed 'leader's' wishes was incredible and that was what would allow the World to know about the heinous nature of the 5 Eyes Nation's Spying and the Intelligence Communities immense violation of private citizens Rights and the Privacy of the rest of the World via Wikileaks' releases and eventually Edward Snowden's NSA revelations. Proving the Community's intuition was correct to negate Satoshi and kick the hornet's nest anyway as a risk worth undertaking.

I dislike 99% of r/Bitcoin these days, its pointless memes and fake TA and posts about 'mooning' from people who otherwise have never really made any contributions to the Community beyond those kind of posts, but... it still has a few active members from the old days who are/were Coredevs, Entrepreneurs and Key members from the early days that I enjoy seeing/hearing from time to time. It's also a relatively good gauge of how adoption is going, inclusion usually means its original members usually become the minority if its gaining traction, and to be honest as the tech works as it should regardless, wide-spread adoption matters to me more than pointless battles and nitpicking over interpretations of 'what Satoshi meant' when he said this or that which was the main staple of discussion back then, too. Its why the USAF/Segwit took so damn long when we really should have been focused on LN and default privacy layers on the network.

Using the phase "bcash" is unfortunately more than enough for me to understand that you are just another troll who doesn't care about Bitcoin.

Thats fine, most people don't care.

> Some argue that if you disable all of the default subreddits, for example, and switch to more of a whitelist model- the Reddit experience is much better.

This is so true. I use reddit as a replacement to all of the old message boards I loved. I only subscribe to the subreddits I want to see, and it's a pretty solid experience.

It's the social effects of centralization. Different people have a very wide range of ideas, opinions and interests, so the natural thing would be clustering. You stick together with the people who share your ideas, and you don't welcome other into your club. It's OK because they have their clubs where you are not welcome and you understand that it's OK as well. It's like being on different sports teams. You compete, but you don't hate each other. In civilized societies people also agree that some basic human needs are above the club/clan mentality, so if your neighbor's house catches fire, you call 911 even if you are ideological rivals.

Except, having multiple independent communities is a lost profit to the tech oligopoly. Everything must be centralized and automated as much as possible, so one minimum-wage moderator could handle a cluster of 10K users. The moderators also have to be replaceable, so there needs to be a common corporate standard applying to all communities. So now, instead of letting people find others based on the interest, and set their rules, you are forcing the same global average of rules on everybody. Of course, people will hate it.

It applies to the society in general as well. The economy where a handful of big players is telling people what to do, instead of forcing them to build mutual trust and work out business-driven relationships with each other, is making everyone miserable and increasing tensions.

Oh, and one more thing. If you let corporations choose one culture/set of values, and force it on the society, it will be in there interest to pick the one that maximizes their profits and your dependence on them.

>It seems to me that toxicity of online communities has risen immensely.

I don't know if that's the case. For context, I've been posting online for ~25 years; and the Usenet flamewars that preceded me were available to read in archives even then. Truth is, people have been arguing vociferously and personally for their opinions for years.

What has "risen immensely" is people who can't seem to tolerate argument, or heated debate, or trolling, and allow it to impact their personal life. Some of this is because it's no longer under a pseudonym, so it does actually have some potential to roll over into real life; some of this is because we're involved in some efforts to actively change discourse in general, efforts that have amplified over the past few years.

Some of these efforts are good. We can disagree without being mean, we can discuss hard topics without being ghoulish.

Some of these efforts are bad. We can determine truth from fiction without the Ministry of Truth at Twitter telling us what is and isn't a thoughtcrime. We can grow a thick skin and handle someone using mean language without having to dox them and get them fired from their job. But will we?

This is a common failure mode of all online forums, but part of the issue is actually that Facebook groups are harder to moderate than necessary.

Facebook's moderation tools for admins really aren't that great, and once a group gets really big it's actually very tricky to moderate. It's probably easier to run a PhpBB forum than a Facebook group.

Moderation is a genuinely difficult thing, but Facebook really doesn't make it any easier.

HN has exactly the same groupthink hostility against countervailing views. The only difference between FB and HN is that HN groupthink enforcement is depersonalized and hidden behind the downvoting and flagging system, both to keep abusive people from needing to spend the time writing ad hominem replies, and to keep the ugliness out of sight from the casual observer.

Pay close attention to what gets downvoted and/or flagged in threads about social media regulation, disinformation on the Internet, COVID-19--or anything else that touches the glibertarian worldview generally--to see what I mean.

HN policies just convert the level of hostility that is typical of under-regulated message boards from overt hostility into passive aggressive sniping and mechanized bullying.

This post itself will be downvoted in due course, because it goes against HN's own accepted narrative.