Everyone's threshold will be different, but for me, a community is lost when it's impossible to avoid the fundamental attribution error.
For example: I might get into a mood. I rant, I take the least charitable reading of a situation, I move away from people. I know I'm not always like that, I just get like that sometimes, and I move on.
When someone else does it, if I don't know them, I might think "Wow. White t-shirt brown shorts is an asshole. Stay away from them." See what I did? I said they are an asshole, not that they're in an assholish mood.
(Side note: This is one reason E-Prime, an English without the verb "to be", exists.)
The cure for the fundamental attribution error is knowing the person in multiple moods. Some people, OK, are snippy little shits who will self-aggrandize and look for every opportunity to start a fight, but most people have ups and downs. Knowing a person means seeing beyond any given mood or action to the person beyond the moment-to-moment.
Make a group big enough and there's no effective way to do that. You can't keep track of 50,000 names. You can't keep track of 50,000 unique images attached to names. Everyone fades into the mass, unless they're Power User level celebrity scale, and then they're reduced to a few broad strokes in your head. All you have to relate to them is what they're doing at the moment. The fundamental attribution error is the entirety of your social context.
That means you can't give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Are they arguing in favor of an unpopular opinion? Downvote and move on. They're an asshole because right at this moment they're taking the asshole's part. The biggest voting block wins, and the space is a hive mind, since there's no way to make a good argument for an unpopular position and have it be heard, whereas bad arguments for popular positions are promoted.
> community is lost when it's impossible to avoid the fundamental attribution error.
In addition to the problem of maintaining community when the number of people increases, I also think that it’s a function of communicating in writing, rather than in person.
I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.
In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.
> I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.
People can make "I know" sound like anything from a death threat to an erotic tease using everything which doesn't come through in text.
> In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.
Even within a language there's plenty of room for people to misunderstand: How much swearing is necessary to avoid sounding like a stuffed shirt, and how much makes you sound like you're too ignorant to be worth reading? Which specific words are comradely and amusing, and which ones are going to derail everything the moment they appear?
If two people have a relatively slight disagreement on that, you can end up with a rather loud argument over a horrible perceived insult, on one side, and some weirdo who got extremely bothered by an adult talking like an adult, on the other.
While I agree that writing has its limitations and that a lot of non-written info is lost, I don't think the written part is the problem.
For if that were the case, YouTube would be a thriving beacon of clarity, when it clearly isn't. And as an effective counter-example of a only-written-yet-successfulish-conveying-meaning you have HN.
So no, communication by writing is not the problem.
But HN seems to be the exception, rather than the norm. Whether that's because of good moderation, or demographic, or something else, I'm not sure.
It's certainly easier to get the 'road rage' mentality when writing, than when conversing in person. As well as losing information, communicating through text makes it more difficult to relate to other people as people. It can lead to people behaving in terrible ways that they'd never do in person. Road rage does a similar thing: ordinarily nice and well-balanced people can be enraged by other road-users, but would never have such a response walking down the street. (This was captured rather brilliantly by a comic [0].)
I wasn't the only one who was surprised to see that real-names policies (such as on Facebook) fail to get people to behave themselves.
I guess I should find friends in real life (also known as 'meatspace')
Note: that's literally what I think, I'm not trying to sound smug , neither am saying this ironically. Stupid limits of written communication, haunting me even here!
For example: I might get into a mood. I rant, I take the least charitable reading of a situation, I move away from people. I know I'm not always like that, I just get like that sometimes, and I move on.
When someone else does it, if I don't know them, I might think "Wow. White t-shirt brown shorts is an asshole. Stay away from them." See what I did? I said they are an asshole, not that they're in an assholish mood.
(Side note: This is one reason E-Prime, an English without the verb "to be", exists.)
The cure for the fundamental attribution error is knowing the person in multiple moods. Some people, OK, are snippy little shits who will self-aggrandize and look for every opportunity to start a fight, but most people have ups and downs. Knowing a person means seeing beyond any given mood or action to the person beyond the moment-to-moment.
Make a group big enough and there's no effective way to do that. You can't keep track of 50,000 names. You can't keep track of 50,000 unique images attached to names. Everyone fades into the mass, unless they're Power User level celebrity scale, and then they're reduced to a few broad strokes in your head. All you have to relate to them is what they're doing at the moment. The fundamental attribution error is the entirety of your social context.
That means you can't give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Are they arguing in favor of an unpopular opinion? Downvote and move on. They're an asshole because right at this moment they're taking the asshole's part. The biggest voting block wins, and the space is a hive mind, since there's no way to make a good argument for an unpopular position and have it be heard, whereas bad arguments for popular positions are promoted.