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David_Gerard comments on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough - Less Wrong
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It's a revelatory document. I've seen so many online communities, of varying sizes, go through precisely what's described there.
(Mark Dery's Flame Wars (1994) - which I've lost my copy of, annoyingly - has a fair bit of material on similar matters, including one chapter that's a blow-by-blow description of such a crisis on a BBS in the late '80s. This was back when people could still seriously call this stuff "cyberspace." This leads me to suspect the progression is some sort of basic fact of online subcultures. This must have had serious attention from sociologists, considering how rabidly they chase subcultures ...)
LW is an online subcultural group and its problems are those of online subcultural groups; these have been faced by many, many groups in the past, and if you think they're reminiscent of things you've seen happen elsewhere, you're likely right.
Maybe if you reference Evaporative Cooling, which is the converse of the phenomena you describe, you'd get a better reception?
I'm thinking it's because someone appears to have corrupted DNS for Shirky's site for US readers ... I've put up a copy myself here.
I'm not sure it's the same thing as evaporative cooling. At this point I want a clueful sociologist on hand.
Evaporative cooling is change to average belief from old members leaving.
Your article is about change to average belief from new members joining.
Sounds plausibly related, and well spotted ... but it's not obvious to me how they're functionally converses in practice to the degree that you could talk about one in place of talking about the other. This is why I want someone on hand who's thought about it harder than I have.
(And, more appositely, the problem here is specifically a complaint about newbies.)
I wasn't suggesting that one replaced the other, but that one was conceptually useful in thinking about the other.
Definitely useful, yes. I wonder if anyone's sent Shirky the evaporative cooling essay.