dredmorbius, to fediverse

How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?

-- pixl97 @ HN

One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).

There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).

These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.

As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:

  • Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education, or the UK's "Green Book": https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/greenbook.html
  • There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
  • The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
  • The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
  • Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.

Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard ($50 billion), Yale ($40 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.

So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.

I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.

The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:

  • A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
  • A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
  • Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
  • Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
  • Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
  • On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
  • Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.

And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.

There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.

(Adapted from an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249791.)

Notes:

  1. "How the $5500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.

dredmorbius,
grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

A 12" mix from the 1980s is Today's Track Of The Day. The astounding Trevor Horn produced Two Tribes from Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

https://youtu.be/pnh7x8aU26g

Very Scary when you consider the voice over is actually being read from UK advice on what to do when the sirens go off.

Two Tribes at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Tribes

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #TrackOfTheDay #FrankieGoesToHollywood #TwoTribes #Rock #1980s #TrevorHorn

Lorry, to random
@Lorry@mstdn.social avatar

(1/2) I like #Documentary #Drama #Podcasts and there are some great ones around at the moment.

Some #recommendations

#BBC "The Bomb"
https://bbc.in/3NgMmHD

BBC's "Nazis: The Road to Power"
https://bbc.in/3oXsVKH

#MSNBC "Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra"
https://on.msnbc.com/42uyq15

https://ihr.fm/3MWQf36

BBC's "Fukushima"
https://bbc.in/43Kx8A2

All of these are fantastic.

#History #Radio #RachelMaddow #Ultra

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

Said I woke up this morning and felt the blues coming on. The Track Of The Day is from The White Stripes self-titled album released in 1999 - St James Infirmary Blues.

https://youtu.be/HrMUsKa0JHA

St, James Infirmary Blues at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Infirmary_Blues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Stripes_(album)

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #TrackOfTheDay #Rock #Blues #1990s #TheWhiteStripes #StJamesInfirmaryBlues

grooveyard, to Podcast
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

This song haunts me. I have no idea why. From 1984, Soul Coughing with Down To This.

https://youtu.be/Tevx55rRNRM

Soul Coughing at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Coughing

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at:
https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

itnewsbot, to Bulgaria

'70s Sci-Fi Movies Were Kind of Preachy - - https://www.wired.com/2023/06/geeks-guide-70s-sci-fi-preachy/ #culture/culturepodcast #podcasts #culture

grooveyard, to Podcast
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

The Groove Yard rummages through recorded relics finding forgotten 45s, long lost LPs, and great golden gems from the music of the 20th Century.

Lined up in this weeks visit are Little Bob Story , Rupert Hine, A dash of Reggae, a drop of Blues, and lots more.

Listen here: https://ondemand.accessradio.org/StationFolder/coast/wk25%20Groove%20Yard%20Show%2064%201.mp3

Never miss it at: https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #Reggae #Rock #Blues #Motown #Pop

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar
grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

To 1995 for this weeks album. It is a masterful outing from Oasis - (What's The Story) Morning Glory?

https://youtu.be/kwFMdWp4Na0

(What's The Story) Morning Glory? at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(What%27s_the_Story)_Morning_Glory%3F

Listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #Rock #BritPop #Oasis #WhatsTheStoryMorningGlory #Album #Albums #AlbumOfTheWeek

itnewsbot, to Podcast

Hackaday Podcast 223: Smoking Smart Meter, 489 Megapixels, and Unshredding Documents - Elliot’s back from vacation, and Dan stepped into the virtual podcast studio with ... - https://hackaday.com/2023/06/16/hackaday-podcast-223-smoking-smart-meter-489-megapixels-and-unshredding-documents/ #hackadaycolumns #podcasts #podcast

GreatestTrek, to StarTrek
@GreatestTrek@friendsofdesoto.social avatar

Spring Break is over and we're back to Trekkin'! Season 3 or #StrangeNewWorlds if finally here! With Pike off looking to help Number One with her trial, Spock must defy orders to help La'an stop a war with the Klingons.

Listen to the full episode at http://Gagh.biz/greatesttrek

#GreatestGen #StarTrek #GreatestTrek #MaxFun #MaximumFun #Podcasts #FriendsOfDesoto #Fod #Comedy #SciFi #ScienceFiction #Podcast #StrangeNewWorlds

@StarTrek

video/mp4

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

The Groove Yard rummages through recorded relics finding forgotten 45s, long lost LPs, and great golden gems from the music of the 20th Century.

There’s a lot of music in this visit to The Groove Yard ----- We have stuff from Kraftwerk ----- Jimi Hendrix ----- Billy Bragg ----- Some Reggae and much more.

Listen here: https://ondemand.accessradio.org/StationFolder/coast/wk23%20Grooveyard%20Show%2062.mp3

Never miss it at: https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #Rock #Pop #WesternSwing

grooveyard, to Podcast
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

When I look at the date of release for this song it amazes me that it still so relevant today. Released in 1965, Barry McGuire and Eve Of Destruction.

https://youtu.be/_38SWIIKITE

Eve Of Destruction at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_of_Destruction_(song)

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at:
https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

itnewsbot, to random

Hackaday Podcast 222: VCF East Special Edition - Editor in Chief Elliot Williams is spending the week communing with nature, which ... - https://hackaday.com/2023/06/09/hackaday-podcast-222-vcf-east-special-edition/ #hackadaycolumns #podcasts #podcast

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

We are going way back to 1960 now for a track that is pretty timeless. It certainly doesn't sound like a 1960 number. It rocks and has a garage sound to it.

Johnny Kidd and The Pirates --- Shakin' All Over

https://youtu.be/yG_E14Nkyjo

Shakin' All Over at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakin%27_All_Over

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #TrackOfTheDay #Rock #1960s #JohnnyKiddAndThePirates #ShakinAllOver #Pop

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

Turn off your mind, relax and get ready to be astounded by today's track. It is the album version of
The Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today lifted from the 1967 album of the same name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIqwzQ7g-Cc

Wikipedia on the album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Has_Come_(The_Chambers_Brothers_album)

Wikipedia on the single: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Has_Come_Today

Listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

itnewsbot, to random

Spotify Podcast Layoffs Will Affect Gimlet and Parcast Workers - Spotify said it was cutting 2 percent of its work force and absorbing two popular podcast... - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/business/spotify-layoffs-gimlet-podcasts.html #mergersacquisitionsanddivestitures #layoffsandjobreductions #writersguildofamerica #organizedlabor #parcastnetwork #laborandjobs #gimletmedia #podcasts #spotify

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

This Track Of the Day is a tribute to Cynthia Weil who died on June 1. She, together with her husband Barry Mann, wrote many greats including this one from The Animals - We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.

https://youtu.be/UtWJMCbofDc

Cynthia Weil at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Weil

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #TrackOfTheDay #TheAnimals #CynthiaWeil #WeGottaGetOutOfThisPlace #Pop #Rock

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

From 1978 The Patti Smith Group with a Bruce Springsteen song - Because the Night.

Patti added to the lyrics while waiting for Fred to come home one night.

https://youtu.be/c_BcivBprM0

Because The Night at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Because_the_Night

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #TrackOfTheDay #Rock #1970s #PattiSmithGroup #BecauseTheNight

itnewsbot, to random

Hackaday Podcast 221: The Future of the Raspberry Pi, Sniffing a Toothbrush, Your Tactical Tool Threshold - Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi are back in the (virtual) podcast studio to ... - https://hackaday.com/2023/06/02/hackaday-podcast-221-the-future-of-the-raspberry-pi-sniffing-a-toothbrush-your-tactical-tool-threshold/ #hackadaycolumns #podcasts #podcast

gpcd, to queer

To coincide with this week's episode devoted to the Best Queer Film, host Eric also made a Top 10 list of quotes from the iconic documentary Paris Is Burning. Why y'all gagging so? He brings it to you every ball. https://www.greatpopculturedebate.com/top-10-paris-is-burning-quotes/

itnewsbot, to random

Robert Asprin Was One of Sci-Fi's Most Colorful Characters - - https://www.wired.com/2023/06/geeks-guide-robert-asprin/ #culture/culturepodcast #podcasts #culture

wilsonlives, to queer

i want to do more sound design/audio editing and would especially love to work with fellow #queer #trans #lgbtqia people :blobcat_box:

#PrideMonth #AudioFiction #podcasts

grooveyard, to music
@grooveyard@mastodon.online avatar

About time we had some Soul for the Track Of The Day, and when you are talking Soul you can't go past the master, Otis Redding and here is his version of The Glory Of Love. Just love the way this builds to the climax.

https://youtu.be/LPAyfJn-gGk

The Glory Of Love at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glory_of_Love_(song)#Otis_Redding_version#Otis_Redding_version)

Don't forget to listen to The Groove Yard at https://www.accessmedia.nz/ProgrammePage.aspx?PID=bd513235-08f8-4f47-a358-02a2230dd55e

#Podcast #Podcasts #Music #TrackOfTheDay #Soul #1960s #OtisRedding #TheGloryOfLove

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