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Fanworks: Tron: Essays: 2024: We Have to Make Plans
Small Groups
2023/07/27
First posted here on Tumblr.
I think the only sustainable form of online interaction is the small group-- be it a Discord server, a Mastodon instance, an email cc'd to a dozen friends who've been replying to each other on it for a year, or what-the-heck-ever.
And I'm not saying such online groups are likely to be sustainable individually. I'm saying that 1. they theoretically CAN be, and 2. when they fail they aren't utterly destroyed or fundamentally changed in their nature, they just break up into similar small groups that retain whichever social connections want to continue.
And this is a feature that only small groups can really manage...
(cw: troubling and depressing thoughts about Moderation Drama, debates over banned content and the boundaries thereof, potentially triggering topics)
The reason is because any moderation done on such groups is done by a person or people who have some capacity to grasp the job they're doing.
And who are doing it because they care about it. Not because they have some delusion that free social media can ever be profitable.
Now, their job is NOT EASY. It's extremely hard, sometimes. Even if you have a small number of people to moderate, you can get very overwhelmed very fast by the task of trying to enforce rules, trying to decide just what is and isn't covered by the wording of the rules, fielding accusations of bias and second-guessing yourself on whether you're enforcing rules equally and consistently for all members of the group. I tried it once, and I don't want to again.
But if the group is small, at least there's a good chance that the people in it will be making a good faith effort to get along with each other and resolve disputes reasonably.
The bigger the group, the more likely that there will be a large number of people on it actively trying to exploit loopholes in the rules or gaps in their enforcement-- often with the goal of spamming, scamming, or harassing people. And there is simply no way to moderate this sufficiently.
Say I'm in a small group of fanfiction writers, and the rules of the group say "no explicit sexual stories involving minors."
So far-- thank goodness --every small group I've been in lately has respected that rule-- no attempts to challenge it or debate its boundaries.
But ...That's a rule that could be a subject of intense debate if people WANTED to argue about it. How do you define a minor in, say, the world of Tron programs (who can look and act like adults on the same day they're created... and whose time system is so enigmatic that we can't even agree on what's the equivalent to a "year")? And how do you define an explicit sexual story, in the Tron fandom (where many of our erotic scenes are about characters touching each other's circuits nowhere near the genital area, and the climax gets called things like "overload" or "restart")? How in the world could you define any of the borders of that rule?
But a small, cooperative group will probably just go with it, and will have an overall agreement on what is meant, and will probably have no interest in breaking the agreed-upon spirit of the rule or debating the gray areas.
Now imagine a group large enough to have subcultures of not only spammers and scammers and trolls, but also bitterly feuding armies on both sides of a culture war. Right away, you'll be dealing with countless members finding ways to use that rule against each other:
"If you won't ban him over how he acts when he's debating social justice, you should at least ban him for posting a sex story about that character who never canonically has an age but In My Opinion is clearly an underage teenager"
"Moderators are biased against me! They used the no-sex-scenes-about-minors rule to ban my story where the character has flashbacks to being abused in childhood, but they won't ban that story about him hooking up with the AI right after creating him, even though the AI is less than a day old so it's clearly eroticizing this thing between a man and his newborn infant son"
"He has no business moralizing about other people's writing after THAT thing he wrote! just because no one's circuits turn purple in the scene doesn't change the fact that energy transfer is SEXUAL and between that pairing it's seriously CREEPY"
"I'm not slut-shaming her, I'm just saying that the OC she uses in her slutty roleplay claims to be 21 cycles old, so she'd BETTER make it clearer what side she's on in the argument over whether 'cycles' are days or years"
And the moment you get enough people questioning the boundaries of a rule like that (with or without ulterior motives against others, or accusations of unfairness) ... the moderator suddenly has to deal with constant attacks from all sides regarding their interpretation and application of the rules, no matter HOW many times in how many ways they tweak the wording and enforcement.
Not only can you not make everyone happy-- you can't even make everyone stop actively rooting for your death, calling you an oppressor/abuser/predator, and trying to cause you real-life harm. With enough people, the category of People Causing Serious Problems becomes far too big to be dealt with.
At this point a conscientious moderator who cares about the group will likely just give up.
A corporate owner of a social media site, who's gotten rich entirely by convincing stockholders that this venture will someday make money, is going to keep trying... but is not going to care enough to do it well. At all.
So... part of me hopes every online group I belong to will always stay small.
And I take at least some comfort in knowing that if the small ones get just slightly too big, parts can always break off and start anew.
(Dividing after reaching a certain size is natural cell behavior. Whatever is going on with major social media..... is not.)
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