Communities tend to find meaning in mutuality and stop moving. You can’t prevent caravans from circling the wagons under threat, but the key is to uncircle and resume movement when the threat is past. At every stage some will choose to stay circled. Social vortex shedding.
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I’ve always been ambivalent about what a few people insist on calling the “ribbonfarm community”. I stopped objecting at some point because I didn’t want to seem ungracious about support I really do appreciate. Thankfully despite the label it has never been a proper community.
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Both in my head and in practice, it’s always been more of a slowly moving conversational traffic jam than a community. At least as many people have been annoyed at getting stuck in it briefly as enjoy it. 🤣
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Relativity theory. When I started writing I thought of my blog as a static place, with readers passing through, some lingering longer than others. At some point the metaphor switched. I was the one passing through. Initially alone, then with a troupe with a churning membership.
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Now it’s a fully relativity theory. Everybody is moving on a trackless land. Some people just enter mutual gravitational capture. That’s community. A stable gravity well of mutuality. It can grow bigger and bigger and warp adventure space.
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Really big ones like hacker news collapse into black holes. Someday somebody will take a picture of this.
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One of the reasons I still do refactor camp is that it’s 50% or so entirely new people each time. Reassures me that something is moving, hopefully me. I don’t think anybody besides me has attended all of them.
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Replying to
As a ribbonfarm dilettante, I get a good deal of satisfaction out of pseudo-membership in a slew of contradicting communities.
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Straddling between LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, YIMBYs, IETF / W3C, Neoliberalism, Marginal Revolution, planning committees, and startup culture keeps you on your toes.
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Plenty of internal contradiction without being disingenuous.
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Interesting that those are your triangulation reference points. Most apply to pre-2014 posts I’d say. More recent stuff doesn’t yet have interesting neighbors. I need to redraw my map.
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