I agree that a big part of the problem is financialized capitalism (whether VC money or Reddit’s stock market speculation or the Putin regime realizing that they could just buy LiveJournal). We also have the right to take generous paychecks from Substack, or host all our video on Youtube for free. But we can’t expect that Substack will be as generous forever or YouTube could offer exactly what it offers today minus the ads and tracking and pay for itself. There are lots of Internet communities which are decentralized or nonprofit or democratically governed but they don’t have the budgets of giant corporate services.

Online communities can also fade for mundane reasons like “failure to recruit new members as fast as old members leave” or “founders have a tiff and the community breaks up into warring factions” or “old site was designed for laptops and dialup, now we have smartphones and broadband, but our user base does not want to change.” Financial speculation make this worse but community management is hard.

Not at all. I am saying that we cannot all have our own digital Versailles and servants forever after. We can have our own digital living room and kitchen and take turns hosting friends there, but we have to do the work, and it will never be big or glamorous. Valente could have said “big social media sucks but small open web things are great” but instead she wants the benefits of big corporate services without the drawbacks.

I have been an open web person for decades. There is lots of space there to explore. But I do not believe that we will ever find a giant corporation which borrows money from LutherCorp and Bank of Mordor, builds a giant ‘free’ service with a slick design, and never runs out of money or starts stuffing itself with ads.

A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into “spend big” until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer ‘social-media-like’ experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone else’s money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.

In an ideal world, reddit communities could have moved onto a self-hosted or nonprofit service like LiveJournal became Dreamwidth. But it was not a surprise that a money-burning for-profit social media service would eventually try to shake down the users, which is why my Reddit history is a few dozen Old!SneerClub posts while my history on the Internet is much more extensive. The same thing happened with ‘free’ PhpBB services and mailing list services like Yahoo! Groups, either they put in more ads or they shut down the free version.

Its not nihilism to observe that Reddit is bigger and fancier than this Lemmy server because Reddit is a giant business that hopes to make money from users. Online we have a choice between relatively small, janky services on the Internet (where we often have to pay money or help with systems administration and moderation) or big flashy services on corporate social media where the corporation handles all the details for us but spies on us and propagandizes us. We can chose (remember the existentialists?) but each comes with its own hassles and responsibilities.

And nobody, whether a giant corporation or a celebrity, is morally obliged to keep providing tech support and moderation and funding for a community just because it formed on its site. I have been involved in groups or companies which said “we can’t keep running this online community, we will scale it back / pass it to some of our users and let them move it to their own domain and have a go at running it” and they were right to make that choice. Before Musk Twitter spent around $5 billion/year and I don’t think donations or subscriptions were ever going to pay for that (the Wikimedia Foundation raises hundreds of millions a year, and many more people used Wikipedia than used Twitter).

I think I read that post and thought it was incredibly naive, on the level of “why does the barkeep ask if I want a drink?” or “why does the pretty woman with a nice smile want me to pay for the VIP lounge?” Cheap clanky services like forums and mailing lists and Wordpress blogs can be maintained by one person or a small club but if you want something big, smooth, and high-bandwidth someone is paying real money and wants something back. Examples in the original post included geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter and those were all big business which made big investments and hoped to make a profit.

Anyone who has helped run a medium-sized club or a Fedi server has faced an agenda item like "we are growing. Input of resources from new members is not matching the growth in costs and hassle. How do we explain to the new members what we need to keep going and get them to follow up? "

There is a whole argument that VC-backed for-profit corporations are a bad model for hosting online communities but even nonproffits or Internet celebrities with active comments face the issue “this is growing, it requires real server expenses and professional IT support and serious moderation. Where are those coming from? Our user base is used to someone else invisibly providing that.”

I have never met Ceglowski or talked to anyone involved in his movements. These days I am doing some local things rather than join in the endless smartphone arguments about “everyone should be an activist and organizer!” vs. “I tried that and the things that make me good at writing long essays about politics / viral social media posts make me bad at organizing to elect a city counselor.”

I wonder what would have happened if Ceglowski had kept focused on talks and on working with the few Bay Area tech workers who were serious about unionizing, regulation, and anti-capitalism. It seemed like after the response to his union drive was smaller and less enthusiastic than he had hoped, he pivoted to cybersecurity education and campaign fundraising.

One of his warnings was that the megacorps are building systems so a few opinionated tech workers can’t block things. Assuming that a few big names will always be able to hold back a multibilliondollar company through individual action so they don’t need all that frustrating organizing seems unwise (as we are seeing in the state of the market for computer touchers in the USA).

There is a Yud quote about closet goblins in More Everything Forever p. 143 where he thinks that the future-Singularity is an empirical fact that you can go and look for so its irrelevant to talk about the psychological needs it fills. Becker also points out that “how many people will there be in 2100?” is not the same sort of question as “how many people are registered residents of Kyoto?” because you can’t observe the future.

His talks are great, but his time as a union organizer and campaign fundraiser left him so disillusioned that he headed in a reactionary direction (and neglected the business that lets him throw himself at random projects). He is a case study why getting on twitter is a very bad idea.

Maciej Ceglowski said that one reason he gave up on organizing SoCal tech workers was that they kept scheduling events in a Google meeting room using their Google calendar with “Re: Union organizing?” as the subject of the meeting.

The latest poster who is pretty sure that Hacker News posts critical of YCombinator and their friends get muted like on big corporate sites (HN is open that they do a lot of moderation, but some is more public than others; this guy is not a fan of Omarchy Linux) https://マリウス.com/the-mysterious-forces-steering-views-on-hacker-news/

I have never found sociology which is useful for solving the practical problem of keeping a community for nerdy introverts a community for nerdy introverts. To spot characters like Shermer and keep or shunt them away from power takes experience and judgement and ethics, and as Chapman says the people best equipped to spot them are often poorly equipped to get power in the community and do the shoving. Realizing that you are in a cult and its time to leave (or that Scott Alexander is really in to the race stuff and Yud is serious about the apocalypse) also takes experience and judgement.

I think you are confusing fanatics-the-common-noun with fanatics-the-terminus-technicus. Chapman’s fanatics are (eg.) the people who organize the independent film fest and talk endlessly about independent films but don’t direct or act in their own films, or the people who reply to posts but don’t initiate their own threads. Thus in his model the fanatics get tired when there are to many MOPs, whereas the “barroom lawyer” type just ignores them or has more newbies to put in awe.

Personally I don’t think I have met anyone fitting this description: “They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space.”

Jane Street have an ‘old money’ secretive culture but have employed SBF, Caroline Ellision, and Kelsey Piper’s patron James McClabe. McClabe created a $37 million foundation to fund EA causes (although he spends more on campaign contributions than Vox Future Perfect and GiveWell). Given the 80,000 hours side of Effective Altruism I suspect Jane Street have other friends of Yud who post pseudonymously if at all.

Pinkerite is interested in what RationalWiki calls the ThielSphere. I think its likely that the two Scotts or some of the Jane Street people have connections to Thiel which they don’t talk about on the Internet.

Reason (American Libertarians) and Vox often introduce LW and EA people into US mainstream media.

Kelsey Piper has an up-to-date RationalWiki page including how she connected with SBF (she was on the board of an Effective Altruism club with Caroline Ellison at Stanford)

There was a creepy time when all the ex-Scienceblogs / Atheism Plus / Skeptic circle of bloggers posted an angry post about the enemy of the day. That was not at all what I understood as skepticism or free thinking, but they had already discovered that original, independent, research-based posts are hard and repeating the party line about what someone said on the Internet is easy. So is beefing with a friend who had the wrong take about what someone said on the Internet.

I must have confused my memories of the really nasty era around 2010-2012 with my occasional checks on FreeThoughtBlogs afterwards. I have not really thought about that world in the COVID era.

That reminds me of Kelsey Piper randomly posting that she helped James Damore get his first job after Google and she would do it again gosh darn it! So much of social media is people in the Bay Area recruiting people for their petty feuds. One of the shibboleths as ScienceBlogs broke up was posting that Damore was a bad bad person and not just a very ordinary clueless wealthy young dude you never met.

The blogger Pinkerite has studies of people around Steven Pinker but focuses on public intellectuals over the kind of people who serve on boards and organize meetups. Ever since I learned about the face-to-face, Bay Area aspect of all of this I have been wonder how to rethink it. The people who post the most on the open web are not necessarily the most influential.

Extropia’s Children show that you can do scholarship with someone you disagree with (he is a chatbot fan but his timeline is reasonable).

The only people from those days who I met face to face were Randi and Shermer. I remember sitting at a table afterwards talking about how I wished Shermer would go back to writing skepticism and ditch the bad arguments for Libertarianism.

Myers was happy to have Carrier as one of his bully boys against anyone who refused to toe the constantly shifting party line. He jettisoned Carrier only after the later became embarrassing (it became public that Carrier kept hitting on women who said they were not interested). IMHO that was like the Kray twins ordering a hit on an enforcer who went off the leash. Edit: The FreeThoughtBlogs take on their separation with Carrier begins with Myers and Carrier speaking at a two-speaker event where Carrier meets a young woman.

Two things with echos of our friends were Carrier’s undisclosed sexual relationship with one of the people who hired him to speak, and that the term “polyamory” was used to cover behaviour which does not look good when you describe the specifics. A third was that Dawkins and friends were allergic to history and philosophy, but wanted to share their thoughts on history and philosophy.

Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.

Hall published a noncommittal review of a dodgy-sounding book. Scientific skepticism is a method of inquiry not a set of shibboleths. I suspect that her review was not good skepticism, but nobody is a good skeptic on every issue, and it did not seem worthy of retraction (maybe a note that the editors did not endorse it). Back to the original comment, this brings us to the difference between the thing (critical inquiry) and the symbolic representation of the thing (yelling that bigfoot is not real and homeopathy is sugar pills).