Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.
Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.
Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.
Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.
If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.
Like many technical people, my personality naturally gravitates towards introverted behavior. I am very comfortable being alone for long periods of time, and in spending my day writing code or fixing bugs with just me and my computer.
But I also enjoy interacting with other people. It just takes the right 'community' to draw me out of my shell. There have been periods of my life when I was outgoing, because I was in the right environment (college, certain jobs, sports, etc.). Other periods allowed me to retreat into my own isolated world.
There just isn't a magic formula that produces the right kind of community that we want on demand.
A lot of introverts are best served by parallel proximal work and the only stratification should be around noise levels of the activity.
But frankly it's best for everyone, the isolated computer age has made in person get togethers have friction when they historically have had zero friction and were just things we did along the way.
This is part of why I love going to NYC, as long as you understand and respect the local rules it's an incredibly positive, effortless social area, so much pleasant casual interaction.
He not implying impermanence is an effective primary argument for killing a community, as in "This community is impermanent, therefore we must destroy it" in a vacuum. Additionally, humans and communities occupy different ranks in a moral hierarchy. I'm not sure your point is coherent.
An unchanging community is a dead community, period.
Attempts to "preserve" a community, both online and offline, tend to end up preserving unhealthy power dynamics within the community as well, which would have been slowly replaced with something else if you had just let the community evolve (or disappear) naturally.
Often, members of the community who benefit from the status quo are the ones who cry the loudest for such preservation.
I suppose in many ways this is a deeper philosophical discussion. Your observations are correct, and as others posted, a healthy community is an ever changing one. Effectively it becomes the Community of Theseus. All its parts, the people, the technology, the geographic aspects can and maybe have changed. Is it still the same community and can it be referred to as such?
I think the authors point about history is a key element of this. If I can track how the community has evolved and changed, I can still identify that community in its current form as the sum of all its changes.
I’m not sure that holds true if an outside entity tries to dismantle and rebuild the existing community without the context of the history.
You don't have to preserve a community definitely, because you can't snapshot a state of a community.
Yes, a community is always evolving, but there's a lower level culture, the textile as Westenberg puts it. Even though some people leave, their mark on the textile remains, and newcomers are got affected by that.
This is the same substance which makes "company culture", but applied in a different context. The people coming in are partly shaped by that while bringing in their own. This is what triggers that evolution. Same is true for leaving people. They'll mix what they bring to the new community they join. Oftentimes is has an effect, rarely it doesn't. As you said there are also other variables that the community can't control.
The beauty arises from that mix. The connections maybe temporary, but the effects are small, yet permanent and profound. That's the sediment which collects at the bottom, builds the history and shared values step by step.
It's not the change we shall be trying to snapshot and keep alive, but the meta-organism which happens to be and evolves over time. Nobody is trying to stop that change, but prevent the killing of these meta-organisms which forms the basic building block of a society. Because these structures becomes stronger and resilient as they evolve, regardless of who comes and goes.
Seeing the same people on your neighborhood even though you don't even talk to them creates an invisible mortar and layer of trust and safety. This is one of the most important things in a community.
You need to preserve that fabric. Not the people, connections and "state" of that community. As an extreme example, you can find this fabric between people even in the most "dangerous" neighborhoods. Because they are dangerous for outsiders. Not for the people who're living in that. There's always an equilibrium and a layer of authenticity even under all that violence and nastiness.
Community as described in article also isn’t the default. If you’re in a rural area and urban sprawl comes to you, it may bring with it establishing of this type of community but it also generates resentment from those that liked their rural setting and the lack of community.
Everything has to evolve to progress. We can’t just say protect community at all cost because it also means you must prevent expansion and improvement of the status quo of other quality of life metrics.
In other words, forking punishes poorly managed projects by depriving them of some fraction of their developers, users, and mindshare, and that's fascism?
Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?
BREAKING NEWS: the "Old Web" was far, far more than just blogs and feeds. It was full of bulletin boards and chat systems and listservs and other such "social" software artifacts inherited from BBSes and commercial timesharing systems popular for decades before the World Wide Web was even invented.
Blogging died IMO because its authors felt (and still feel) entitled to compensation for practicing a hobby, and started forcing advertising down their reader's throats as a means to extort them for money.
The point of the refresh (which can be activated with a meta tag) is that JavaScript is disabled in the game's server-rendered mode, so AJAX/Comet is out of the question.
You don't need JS to do long-polling, just keep the main page's connection open without writing the trailing `</html>`
This does limit what you can do with the poll-added content, but simply allowing the refresh to take place is a strict improvement over refreshing eagerly.
Meta succeeded in cloning Twitter only because it picked up engineers who were let go after Musk acquired the company.
Dead weight, albeit dead weight who understood how Twitter works under the hood (the timeline data structure has confounded every would-be Twitter competitor until now, which is circumstantial but probable cause that the former engineers have transferred Twitter's fundamental trade secrets to Zuckerberg).
How does this idea even pass your bullshit detector? Threads is an Instagram post without a picture attached. Something that's existed for a decade.
Twitter trotting that accusation out was just stupid but people believing it and repeating it, that's just amazing. A timeline data structure confounded Twitter competitors? You're seriously fucking suggesting that? A timeline. Yikes.
Fundamental trade secrets... like how to build a large social network platform. Yes, it would surely be impossible for the Facebook and Instagram folks to build another platform without stealing “trade secrets” from Twitter. /s
You mean there are dating sites for people who have a killer app idea but can't program, in search of developers who will work for free until the app goes viral in return for a small cut of the profit if that ever happens?
In find it interesting that Wirth would accept needless complexity as jihad, and then put an object oriented programming language at the heart of his "back to basics" workstation Oberon.
Sweeping complexity under the rug isn't the same thing as removing it.
* promote helplessness by abstracting away fundamental but tedious tasks one ought to know how to do,
* erode the capacity for innovation by making it difficult to contemplate or impossible to implement solutions outside the framework's feature set,
* achieve an equilibrium I call 'mutually assured mediocrity' in which a programmer or organization necessarily vows to remain at the same low level of technology as their competitors.
Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.
Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.
Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.
If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.