Final Task part 3

Here's a mock-up of the Wiggly website

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.

Final Task part 2

I gave my social media the name "wiggly"for several reasons. I wanted something short, pronounceable, and something that wouldn't make you think of anything else. There's a decade old concept for an open-source social media platform that is named Diaspora*, and I think the name's rather unfortunate because it's not neutral enough. I googled "wiggly" and nothing of note came up. wiggly.com has been "coming soon" for the past 10 years so that's out, but wiggly.dog was available and that feels memorable and fun.

One of the core mechanics of the wiggly platform is the weekly cycle of creating, curating and erasing. So like read it -> reddit, weekly -> wiggly. The tilde sign would be used in place of an @ sign to indicate users.

An instance is a group of randomly selected 150 people with tuni e-mail addresses to skew the userbase young and educated, to verify they are actual people and to make the some more local and thus more relevant. For the first 30 000 people, the groups would be all mixed up, but starting from next semester the groups would usually be first year students, just from different campuses and majors.

These groups of 150 would be called instances. You could think of it like a private group on Facebook, or a subreddit.

There's one chatroom for all of the 150 users. Instant messaging is impossible.

Every week, a group of 10 moderators will be chosen from the instance at random. Their mission is to curate content created by the instance users for the newsletter (published at the end of the week), keep the peace and act as support between the users and admins of the whole system, if technical issues come up.

Every user has their own page - like a blog of sorts - where they can post whatever they want. Hashtags are an important part of the site functionality, because the users would in time build their own hashtags for threads that continue from week to week, so everyone can find the people and discussions they want.

Everyone is anonymous every week, their username a random number between 100-999 that changes weekly. You can find a specific users post with searching with the tilde sign, and posts about them with the hashtag. Anyone can use any hashtags they want to mark their posts.

Posts could be tagged to be either meant for public discourse (to be possible included in the newsletter) or for only the instance to see. The moderators would be assumed to respect these hashtags. The chatroom could be used to direct attention to longer posts on the blog.

Every newsletter would have the mod teams chosen content about things that they felt were most relevant to the instance that week. These are all public for everyone, and in their own instances people could and would discuss the things they saw in other groups' newsletters.

Even though everyone has weekly anonymity, the people in the group don't change. Eventually you would probably figure out people in your group - no rules about this would be set, and different instances could form their own culture about it. Maybe some would often meet each other in real life. Maybe some would value their anonymity more highly. Once you've outed yourself, everyone will always know that you are in the group. There is a possibility to request to swap groups with someone though, so no one could ever be certain that someone who was in the group a year ago would still be in it. Swaps would be somehow limited though - maybe one person could leave change a month.

The amount of privacy about separating an online presence from your physical one might feel overboard, but it's mainly a countermeasure to avoid hierarchies, as much as possible. Everyone has the ability to start over every week, and if some week you want to post content that you don't want to tie to yourself, then that's possible.

I'll probably continue this a bit after I get some sleep...