>> There’s an association that still lingers between a “community” and a physical location — the idyllic small town, say, or the utopian village, real or imagined. It evokes a cozy, friendly, simple place in which people live in easy harmony and cooperation, each with a role to play, each mattering to the whole.
>> “Community” makes everything sound better. It makes “the activist community” sound approachable; it makes “the skin-care community” sound important; it makes “the Christian community” sound inclusive and kind; it makes “the medical community” sound folksy and skilled at the bedside; it makes “the homeless community” sound voluntary; it makes “the gun rights community” sound humanistic; it makes “the tech community” sound like good citizens.
All these "communities" that we're told we're part of all the time are really just labels. Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have. They exist, but are much fewer and far in between than everyone uses the word for.
> Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have
There is a tradeoff between freedom and community.
Organic bonds with real feeling come from a true alignment in interests. One of the simplest ways of creating interest alignment is making sure everyone has a long-term commitment. But the flip side of 'commitment' is that people can't be free to leave whenever they want.
A highly mobile society where everyone is largely free to join or leave any virtual community, neighborhood, is one where nobody feels any form of permanent attachment to that institution or to their fellow community members, because there is no long-term commitment, either from themselves, or from their fellow members. A neighborhood where everyone has the ability to freely come and go is one where nobody has a strong incentive to sacrifice for their neighbors, because who knows who your neighbors will be tomorrow, or whether you will still be there?
You can see one aspect with the rise of no-fault divorce; in the past, perhaps many people were trapped in unhappy marriages, but by the same token, the lifelong commitment may have encouraged many couples figure out ways to make it work. Nowadays, it is no longer possible for both members to bind themselves to one another. And since both partners can walk out at any time (and both people know it), why go to extraordinary lengths to make it work?
> There is a tradeoff between freedom and community.
This largely depends on the conception of freedom in question. If freedom implies that individuals as a result of a the proliferation of human rights are able to live atomistic lives without much interaction with most anyone else than the state and their employers, then I agree. The last ~100 years is empirical evidence of this.
If, however, freedom implies that beyond a few obligations and non-intrusive rights (e.g. a right to free speech doesnt impose on anyone else, whereas a right to education or health care does), then freedom and community are correlated goods. We can see the evidence of this in the 19th century. Alexis de Tocqueville for instance wrote extensively about how in America, people organically formed their own communities in the absence of de jure social classes (beyond citizen and slave, which he found grotesque), and that this was a unique aspect of the relative freedom found in America at the time.
All of this is to say that the conception of freedom dictates the cohesion and veracity and quantity of organic communities. Or, perhaps stated another way, there is a trade-off between organic community and both inclusion and state intervention in private arrangements.
> there is a trade-off between organic community and both inclusion and state intervention in private arrangements.
I think this line becomes heavily blurred in a democratic society where laws are authentic expressions of people's preference for how their society should be ordered. The laws surrounding marriage being the obvious prototype.
You can see the proposals to abolish marriage in the wake of the French Revolution as a recognition it is the ultimate intrusion of the state (and Church) into deeply private affairs, but one which we as a society tolerate due to long practice and because we ultimate recognize that the necessary freedom to enter into a binding commitment is more valuable than, say, the freedom to be able to change your mind at any time (modern, unilateral no-fault divorce notwithstanding).
I agree that the way freedom is defined strongly matters and I attacked a bit of a strawman, but one that represents a trend. A naive conception of freedom, where all rules, traditions, and authorities are seen as inherently limiting, ultimately leads to normlessness and anomie.
I'd say that what many modern societies lack are meaningful commitments, freely entered (strong, cohesive communities being one aspect).
You can have self selected individuals working on an interest who integrate and form a community.
My favorite example is the bay12forum for Dwarf fortress.
High barriers to entry, you need to actually be highly engaged to get over the interface - means that entrants to the forum (used to) stick around and get to know each other.
What you are seeing is the difficulty of paying matching costs for complex types of matches.
In the old system you didn't have options, so shopping around didn't make sense.
In the new system you do have options, so shopping around becomes more attractive.
>> Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have
> There is a tradeoff between freedom and community.
I think you misunderstood the comment. People who "like" a particular cat photo page likely don't think of themselves as being part of a _community_ but FB uses the term to try to con them.
I'll cop to taking the topic off onto a tangent, although you can see FB's appropriation of the term 'community' (likewise 'friend', 'like') as indicative of the general cheapening of what these very important words and their meanings.
Or maybe since the partner can just walk out, you have to try harder. Afaik, domestic violence is down. The partner "cant walk out" works great when you are aggressor, because it forces target to stay no matter how bad you treat them. It works less well for the one that is treated badly. Trying harder wont help you if the other person is bullying you. The "people tried harder to keep it together" interpretation ignores that the trying harder part was unevenly distributed.
It does not even have to be about big things like abuse. If one spouse cease caring about relationship, the other one can work as much as he/she wants, but it will do nothing. Because it takes two.
The employer/employee power dynamic can be like this too.
People are happier in a job when they have the freedom to walk away from it (and still afford to live). Typically this is because they have skills and experience that are in demand, so they can easily find another job to pay rent.
Unskilled workers don't have this freedom because they need their boss more than their boss needs them. Hence unions are necessary.
Universal basic income would give this freedom to everyone.
universal basic income would also forcibly extract money from those who have money to support those who choose not to work for no reason other than sheer sloth. The ultra wealthy are very mobile and can move their money at will, unless the government somehow gains the will to confiscate private assets for the good of the collective, but what would that say about a society willing to do that?
The solution is to instead tax the means of capital, or collective ownership similar to a B Corp. That way if jobs are replaced through mechanization the cost of the job loss is incurred by the company directly profiting from replacing a human being.
I completely agree that in the US there is a massive power imbalance that exists due to regulatory capture and oligarch rule, but UBI isn't the silver bullet everyone seems to think it is.
Some of those people remarried. Of people who married at least twice, 41.4% are in their second marriage. The other 58.6% got divorced. Note that this is much higher than the first-marriage divorce rate.
The upshot is that many measurements of divorce rates (again, depending on what you measure) are highly affected by people who get married and divorced multiple times. People who can't make one marriage work are much more likely to also not make another one work... The divorce rate for first marriages is not over 50% in any data set I've seen for the US. If you have a citation for it being higher than that, I'd love to see it.
Divorce rate is actually calculated by the number of divorces each year divided by the number of marriages each year. So if married couples flipped a coin each year to decide whether to get divorced, we'd have a similar divorce rate but almost no one would stay married for life.
On the other hand, if 90% of married couples stayed married for life but the remaining 10% got married and divorced 10 times each, we'd also have about a 53% divorce rate.
So the 53% number could support almost everyone getting divorces or almost everyone staying with their first marriage for life. It's a bit hard to measure this statistic, but every source I found says that a majority of Americans who get married never divorce.
Even if it were only 47%, that's still a really high success rate. We're talking about people in their 20s and 30s making a commitment that lasts until they're 80 or so. That doesn't support the idea that our society no longer has long-term commitments.
To me the greatest issue with the Facebook 'community' is that it is the conglomeration (the umbrella) of sub-communities which, in not being a Facebook member, excludes me from accessing any of them. It's basically like having to obtain a passport just to enter the neighbouring town's pub.
A specific example: a local tabletop gaming store has a 'Facebook community' but no alternative forum. There is potential friendship and worthwhile discourse to be had by joining the community, but it is not accessible without joining Facebook.
This problem just doesn't seem significant because so many are already in the 'Facebook community' already. It's not that Facebook set the rules or defines the community, it's that they own the front door and you need their key to enter.
Facebook killed my favorite real community's local discussion forum on their own hosted website. Everyone just uses the Facebook group now and so I can't just leave facebook which leaving the communication I have with this group.
I had an active forum before facebook and twitter. the forum died and was not transferred to facebook. Rather it seems like people’s free time to participate in tb forum got occupied with their time on fb and twitter.
Unfortunatelt neither fb nor twitter are really designed to support forum style interaction. No list of topics and threads
I agree with your sentiment, its a shame to see Facebook displacing independent forums. But, just to offer another aspect to think about: I have a child with a rare and serious medical condition. There is a facebook group for that condition, and nearly every family in the UK who is affected is in that facebook group. Its very powerful to be able to share notes like that, between us we are able to zero in on best practice and then suggest things to doctors. I suspect that without Facebooks reach we would not have been able to get so many people in one virtual space. I notice there are facebook groups for practically every rare condition you can imagine.
tldr: Facebooks ability to reach beyond the sort of people that sign up for forums can be very useful in certain important scenarios.
A single communication network with wide reach is very valuable, for exactly this reason.
It's not necessary — and I think it's harmful — for that network to be controlled on the whim of one person (assuming you accept that Zuckerberg isn't a robot or a lizard or something).
Do you really think Zuckerberg is personally concerned with the "Rare disease - UK" Facebook group to the point where he personally will wipe it out arbitrarily?
What if this group was in Reddit and all of a sudden the mod, on a whim, locked all the threads? What if this group met in the local community center and the building owner, on a whim, decided to sell the building to someone who didn't want such groups to meet there?
Someone has to be in charge of a "single communication network". If your community owes its existence to it, they are at their whim, and in a way, that's the cost of doing business. This isn't unique to Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg. If the community is strong, they can find a way to overcome such whims.
> Someone has to be in charge of a "single communication network".
This is false. Pen, paper, English and walking is a communication network.
If there are multiple competing implementations of a shared spec, in practice no one group can control it. (This is why it's important to have multiple competing web browser engines.)
You have to own an internet-connected device and have internet access.
My point is, Facebook is a de-facto standard for almost any non-technical community these days, and if not Facebook, then it's some other social platform, like Whatsapp or Telegram. Turns out, centralized platforms are much more user-friendly, have better network effects and easier to set up and administer for majority of users.
Is this unique to Facebook? I'll grant that FB is really good at it, but who isn't trying to track you, to sell your info, to target ads to you? If you use a smartphone, a web browser, supermarket loyalty program, etc., is there a way around this?
It just doesn't make any sense to me how people expect that you can use a web service without the webservice like...knowing that you're using it?
Reddit knows what subreddits I'm subbed to. Usenet servers know what groups I post to. Gmail knows what email I get (sortof) etc.
If I didn't want anybody to know that I was interested in amateur radio, then I wouldn't post to /r/amateuradio with my real name.
This is a classic "have your cake and eat it too". You can't both share your real name with people and also not share your real name with those same people at the same time.
It depends on how much you trust the web service with your data and how much meta data they gather about you, and how much you care about that.
It is not as simple as you are making out because of
1. The vast amount of meta data that can be mined from your browser requests, scripts running on sites, your logging into multiple devices.
2. The scripts that run on other sites when you are not using FB, that know your FB identity or might send data back to FB. Safe to assume it's being shared with 3rd parties. Safe to assume those parties are in different countries with different laws.
3. The amount of computational power FB has, machine learning technology etc.
4. What we learned from Snowden.
It is naive to think of giving information to Facebook as being the same as giving it to a small community site running PHPBB.
There are personal privacy concerns, as well as aggregate ones. I.e. by being on facebook you are helping other's to have less privacy unless you use it in a very restricted way.
> It just doesn't make any sense to me how people expect that you can use a web service without the webservice like...knowing that you're using it?
This is true, but what you seem to disregard is that [webservice] can monetize differently.
You can set up your own forum for almost free, or your community could pool a couple of bucks each month for server cost.
You can use some experimental p2p mesh hosting for your conversations.
You can charge users a low low price for the cost of your service.
Or you can sell userdata like facebook et al.
All these services would know everything I'm willing to share with users on said service, but how that data is used could be very different.
Wanting to both share your data and have that data used scrupulously isn't having/eating your cake. It's very reasonable and possible. Maybe not for free, but close to.
My solution is that if you want to join a public community, then you should only share information with that public community that you want to be public.
Well written and makes a lot of great points, however... I am no fan of Facebook, but you have to give it and other social networks some credit for giving communities - real communities - tools to organize. For example, we've rapidly gone through a generational shift in how people view lgbtq persons in the past 20 years, and I entirely (admittedly without any hard data) attribute that shift to the tools the internet and social networks have provided that have allowed lgbtq communities to connect, organize, and educate non-lgbtq folks like me.
I think many people (not just FB) have made mistakes on lgbT acceptance, and trans acceptance can be one of the harder areas to get right (many people just don't know what accepted behavior is).
I had no idea about dead-naming etc. I think FB should have done better, but I think their apology did seem genuine.
So I think criticism is valid, but they also deserve some credit. It's not like anyone knew how to run a social network in 2012.
More of a "customer service" problem: there were plenty of people telling them it was a bad idea right from the start, but they didn't listen.
> It's not like anyone knew how to run a social network in 2012.
Only if you try hard not to see prior art. "Online communities" of one sort or another have existed as long as the internet, and wrestled with questions of what constitutes abuse.
Really the problem is that Facebook has gone from a mere product to something quite important to society without going through a self-examination period. It's also, oddly, never really tried to have a relationship with its users as a community or communities. Tom being your "friend" on Myspace may have been a gimmick but at least it was pretending that the relationship existed.
Perhaps, but those tools do exist anyway. Facebook increases 'discoverability' of groups/communities, but a forum/blog/etc aggregation/search capability would do the same without requiring login to a different service.
For most non-techie communities, the pre-social network tools (e.g. having someone set up a website and a forum for that community) had a so high barrier to entry that they did not use them. The few communities who happened to have a skilled member eager to volunteer would use such tools, but the rest of them could not. Being able to reliably use social networking tools made and maintained (though also controlled) by others was important to make this accessible to them.
The non-"lazy" (as you call it) way simply is not a realistic alternative for most of the population.
Nobody feels any personal kinship with "community" of billions of fellow Facebook users
That's kind of disingenuous, no? I'm sure this fits some dictionary definition of "community", but it is quite different from the context the rest of the article is using. That's like comparing my kinship to a human across the world I've never met because we're humans vs my kinship to my gaming group, whom I meet with weekly.
These two "communities" are very different, and yeah, even in my offline gaming group, we are beholden to the gaming store (and to a lesser extent, the companies who make the games we play) who set rules, in a similar way to the way Facebook users are beholden to Facebook. I don't think this is unreasonable, as they are providing a service. I also don't certainly feel like a loser for playing by these rules, even if the gaming store, or Facebook, is winning (I guess by profiting more? or asserting their rules? I'm not really clear on what the author's premise is here).
The premise is that FB is the target of lots of recent scrutiny about how they've exposed your data and that of many, many other FB users, even turning a blind eye to companies collecting that data in violation of FB's own terms of service.
While being beholden to standard terms-of-service arrangements are to be expected, it's very different from your gaming example where you've paid someone for a product and must simply abode by certain community guidelines when interacting with other users. To FB, you are the product. If you're really not aware of this dynamic, googling "Cambridge Analytica" is a good place to start.
The way FB and others have capitalized on people willingly giving up personal info so that advertisers can pay for more effective ways to manipulate its users is rather disengenuous given all the talk about "community."
Boy, I really want a 17-year-old making all the macroeconomic decisions for my currency! I guess we're doing a deflationary currency now, because he did a "joking not joking" April Fools "prank"!
Well written article with excellent points. "community" is another instance of using language to frame or spin an issue, with the consequent diluting of what a real community is.
"Community is the spoonful of sugar that makes the othering go down." was particularly evocative.
Someone else is always making the rules. Because we are always only one amongst billions. Why would I expect to make the rules?
And many of the rules we have to follow are handed to us by nature.
What matters is what we do within the rules that exist. Which can potentially be a lot if you don't hobble yourself with self-made rules that aren't really valid. The rules in your head are the biggest challenge.
Rules of most groups are, directly or indirectly, decided by the same group. Such as professional associations, your local tabletop gaming group, homeowner associations, or democracies.
They’re not perfect, but at least there is a chain of input. For Facebook, that group has opposing motivations to this “community” – its lets and requirement is to exploit this resource, ie your cold hard data.
This is not a critique of capitalism – it is an argument that large corporations cannot create communities.
Local tabletop gaming groups have rules set by store that hosts the meetings. It is not members setting rules, but the place setting rules. Professional association have rules set by few companies with others not having realistic chance to change the rules.
In many places, homeowner associations is something you have to be member of, whether you want it or not.
In all those examples of communities, the members have real channels of influence over the rules, they are not merely subject ones handed down by a distant authority. HOAs have boards that members can petition or join, etc.
In response to the title, nation states and employment and companies is not that much different. We may gravitate to certain countries or companies because we like the culture those rules create. I don’t see why online social networks should be different.
we used to have this debate over and over in grad school.
People would invent things and hope for a "community" to form--- that was the ultimate validation. But it was naive and pretentious to expect that any single invention could lead to community, especially within the time frame of grad school.
LOL. I seem to recall spending a grad school time sitting in a cubicle in a remote corner of the library with a pile of books and papers. Not too conducive to 'community' except for the 2 or 3 people who -had- to read my scrivening.
It's sort of like the idea from Peopleware: a manager cannot create the social bonds that make a real team, but he can destroy them. You could generalize that to: a leader can't create a community, but he can destroy one.
What I find interesting now is many people do not know their neighbors in a physical location. I know a few people in my neighborhood, but for the most part everyone is a stranger.
I happen to live in an HOA where a select few make rules for everyone else. This idea of an online community and the draw back of rule makers seems to extend to the real world in this situation.
Your problem is capitalism, subset: private property. The idea that essential mass communication infrastructure can and should be owned and fully controlled by its owners, and that outweighs the wishes and intent of fully a quarter of all humans alive.
It seems every other day something on HN makes me glad we built an open source platform to empower people and unite communities.
Open source removes a lot of the criticism in this article. The trick is to make it powerful and easy to use enough to compete with Facebook. Like Wordpress or Discourse do a great job doing.
>> “Community” makes everything sound better. It makes “the activist community” sound approachable; it makes “the skin-care community” sound important; it makes “the Christian community” sound inclusive and kind; it makes “the medical community” sound folksy and skilled at the bedside; it makes “the homeless community” sound voluntary; it makes “the gun rights community” sound humanistic; it makes “the tech community” sound like good citizens.
All these "communities" that we're told we're part of all the time are really just labels. Very few of them actually have the organic bonds or genuine feeling of comraderie that real communities are supposed to have. They exist, but are much fewer and far in between than everyone uses the word for.