Here's a "video tour"
There's a few things I will expand on.
The number for the amount of people in an instance - 150 - is sort of arbitrary, but based on an idea by a guy called Dunbar. Based on studies on other primates he made an estimation about a "natural" group size for humans as a species. You can read more about it here: Wikipedia - Dunbar's Number. I didn't do any further research than the wiki page so it might be total bullshit, but I needed some number and this one had at least some merit.
We've touched on this topic a few times in class, but it still puzzles me greatly that there's a thing called "YouTube community". There's literally millions of channels, how the f is that a community? When people say that do they mean the creators who move to LA to pursue a career in entertainment? I watch tons and tons of YouTube videos every day and I've never seen any of these videos on any YouTube rewind compilation. It seems really unlikely to me that I would've?
Is this Jennifer Aniston joining "Instagram community"? No. She had a new TV series premiere two weeks after her first post. Her Instagram presence is an ad. Orlando Bloom, Jennifer Aniston and me are not part of the same community now and I cannot comprehend what the comments and likes are for. Is is a status thing to be seen to have liked this post? Is this like getting an autograph? I don't know.
The internet was different before all the real life famous people and everyone's mom joined in, when it was just nerds and kids and everyone visited different sites. In 2004 if Jennifer Aniston had shown up in some random movie forum no one would've cared because it would've been impossible to verify that it's actually her. Content mattered in a different way.
Reddit is my favourite place because it has a nice sense of several communities about it. Different subreddits have different sorts of culture. One of my favourite internet community art pieces of all time is Place, that was a million pixel canvas where every user could place one pixel every 5 minutes. The canvas was active for 72 hours (although the duration wasn't announced in the beginning and probably not planned on either) and during that time plans were made, factions formed, people would take shifts defending pixels. The final image is a product of hundreds of different groups planning things together by themselves - only in the instance of a conflict on the borders of their plans do they need to discuss and compromise and maybe make pacts with other factions further down the canvas.
Small communities need to exist to make huge group efforts like this possible.
What I want form Reddit is the feel of a small group without in the group needing to be into some same obscure hobby or interest. In a group of 150 random first year students across three universities, I think the diversity of interests and skills would be very high in a given instance, but the common experience of being a student would tie the group together at first.
What I also had in mind was sort of a fraternity. The people in the group would be in each other's group of online buddies, like neighbours in life, helping each other out when possible.
I think a platform in itself doesn't need to be very exciting or give its users everything they want. I think the users should build themselves a place that suits them. Not being able to leave or ban anyone just because you don't like the content of their messages would mean that you have to communicate and solve problems the old fashioned way. I sincerely believe no one would want to be the one lonely troll in a group of 150 people - if you're ignored, no one else outside the group is ever going to see how much you don't care.
I imagine people would take part and strive to create an interesting culture for themselves, playing games they made themselves, create their own stories, write their own reviews and news, make their own music. Who cares if it wouldn't be the best possible content? It would be their own.
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