So, think through how this looks in the long run. Hell, just think about what this prioritizes.
You have five communities covering the same topic. There’s, what? 500? 1000? 2000 people active in them? Enough that there is a steady stream of posts and comments in all of them. They’re all housed on separate websites, and those websites maybe have different goals and different rules. So, people start lumping them together in aggregate feeds.
What does that look like? In practice, how do users treat this?
They treat it as if they’re all one community. As if they’re all in one place. All managed by one cohesive set of rules (or, realistically, most people treat all spaces as if none of them have rules, and then put up a stink when they’re met with the consequences of this).
Then, they start expecting to not see duplicates. So, which community’s posts do they see when there are multiples? Oh, that’s easy: all of them! They will start expecting comments to be merged. So, now you have people treating all of the communities not only as if they’re interchangeable, but as if they’re all one.
This is a backdoor to not just homogenization, but to quiet hostile takeovers of smaller communities by larger ones. All because users are too damn entitled to just pick one that most closely meets their needs and contribute to it.
We don’t need meta-communities. We need people to get over their fucking FOMO.
![Fusion of [email protected] and [email protected]?](https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/d1d07cd7-c35c-4748-87c7-5a20e1c68006.jpeg){kind=link}
So, think through how this looks in the long run. Hell, just think about what this prioritizes.
You have five communities covering the same topic. There’s, what? 500? 1000? 2000 people active in them? Enough that there is a steady stream of posts and comments in all of them. They’re all housed on separate websites, and those websites maybe have different goals and different rules. So, people start lumping them together in aggregate feeds.
What does that look like? In practice, how do users treat this?
They treat it as if they’re all one community. As if they’re all in one place. All managed by one cohesive set of rules (or, realistically, most people treat all spaces as if none of them have rules, and then put up a stink when they’re met with the consequences of this).
Then, they start expecting to not see duplicates. So, which community’s posts do they see when there are multiples? Oh, that’s easy: all of them! They will start expecting comments to be merged. So, now you have people treating all of the communities not only as if they’re interchangeable, but as if they’re all one.
This is a backdoor to not just homogenization, but to quiet hostile takeovers of smaller communities by larger ones. All because users are too damn entitled to just pick one that most closely meets their needs and contribute to it.
We don’t need meta-communities. We need people to get over their fucking FOMO.
Those are actually all really good points. Nevermind about my idea then…