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Comments on How granular should network communities be?
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How granular should network communities be?
What are (y)our principles for deciding how granular Codidact network communities should be? The Other Place seems to lean towards more granular communities—one for software development, one for server administration, one for UI design, one for theoretical computer science. For those with experience moderating those communities, has that worked well? I could easily imagine going the opposite route and lumping those all into ‘computers’, with tags to categorize within that. How do we choose?
I'll enumerate some considerations I've thought of here; feel free to edit and add more.
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More granular communities generate more busywork in the forms of finding the right community in which to submit a question, evaluating questions to determine whether they are on topic for a community, and resubmitting questions when they are found off-topic. Broader communities don't eliminate this work entirely, but they do reduce it.
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Narrow communities can deter potential users interested in related subdisciplines if narrow communities for those subdisciplines don't exist yet. Broad coverage increases initial user draw, which might be important for reaching critical mass.
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Communities have a lot of autonomy in determining what is on topic and how they should be moderated. Larger autonomous units need more infrastructure (procedure and/or tools) to function efficiently than smaller ones.
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More granular communities let users select for the sorts of posts they're interested in. Can't tags serve this purpose just as easily in broader communities?
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A question may have multiple answers which would be most at-home in two different narrow communities—a question could get good answers from both a software development and a theoretical computer science perspective. In a model where every question has at most one ‘accepted’ answer, this can be resolved by moving the question to whichever community the best answer belongs in. But in a model with an emphasis on collecting a plurality of answers, that's a tradeoff with no good answer. In the broad community model, this is a non-issue, as long as communities are selected to avoid this sort of conflict. (But maybe this isn't possible? Are there always going to be questions that want answers from, e.g., both cooking and Judaism, where the communities are naturally disjoint for most purposes?)
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More granular communities enable moderators with narrower areas of expertise to make judgment calls on most questions in the community. Broader communities would likely require more moderators per community to get the same expertise coverage. This might not be more moderators overall though, if there are correspondingly fewer communities? I'm not sure this point matters.
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Users build reputation independently in different communities. The Other Place tracks tag-specific reputation for some privileges; perhaps Codidact could do the same. Or perhaps this doesn't matter either.
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Are there technical concerns—is the architecture for the Codidact network opinionated on the ideal size of a community?
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Is it easier to correct mistakes in one direction or the other—i.e., merge a bunch of communities into one, or split off communities from an existing one?
A community with common interests is a part of it too. At Some Other place somebody wanted to combine all the Abrahamic …
3y ago
If you'll allow me to come up with a made-up dystopia community scenario: Suppose you are a professional carpenter w …
3y ago
The main guiding principle should be what fraction of posts a typical user would find interesting, or at least feel are …
3y ago
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The main guiding principle should be what fraction of posts a typical user would find interesting, or at least feel are related enough to their interests to not be annoyed at them for being off-topic babble.
Individual users will have a more narrow focus of interest than a whole site. They will get annoyed and leave when too much of the content isn't interesting to them, or at least doesn't feel like it fits.
And no, tags aren't really solutions to this. At least in my own experience, I never used tags to filter content. Doing so feels like you could miss out when something interesting gets miss-tagged. It also feels like hiding the problem instead of fixing it. Suppose you could put on magic glasses so that you don't see dirt in your house. You may not see it, but it's effects are still there, and you still need to clean it.
A good example was the SE Outdoors site. That's a wide topic, with many sub-topics that don't interest me. As long as the posts I wasn't interested in weren't overwhelming, I didn't mind. I even liked to see what some of the other topics were about. Then a new user came along and posted several questions a day about archery. I'm not interested in archery, but don't mind reading an occasional post. However, this flood of archery questions made everything else move off the front page quickly, and made the place feel like it was only about archery. As a result, I gave up on the site for a while. A year or so later when I took a look again, the topics were more mixed, so I started visiting more regularly.
So, keep sites reasonably narrow. The two factors that push against that are:
- Not enough users would be active for a niche sub-topic.
- Multiple sub-topics are related in that answers for a question in one often would get into the others anyway.
Of course these things will always be subjective, so there's no way to make a solid rule about how wide the topic for a particular site should be.
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