Discussions Derived Due to Dense Data Drilled Discretely at Discretion

标题没有特别的意思——它甚至不是一个有合适语义的句子，但是很有趣。

As we -- well, I -- have decided since the creation of this blog, the content will be presented in half-arsed English, once again. If you are using any machine translation software, it won't be looking good.

Let's talk about the increasing awareness of anthropomorphic related content in Domestic Online Communities, shall we?

In the last post (which is not linked here due to Restrictions on Disclosure of Certain Topics), I have made statements on a noticeable identity crisis and its resolution. The Domestic Online Communities, notably a video hosting platform, which the name shall remain undisclosed for legal reasons, has gained its awareness about the given topic, as presented by the update of the Community Guidelines. I personally do not disagree with the updated Guidelines, but rather it suggested an overall growth of the content related to the Topic.

A rapid growth of a niche community can lead to all sort of unforeseen consequences. Misunderstanding is certainly among them. Clashes of context registers make communication between members and outsiders even harder. A club requiring loads of priors creates barriers that would be impossible for others to climb.

There is an innate conflict between content growth and community growth. The conflict is more pronounced for communities that have a lot of priors and establish various specific rules based on the priors. Content growth provides exposure, increasing the overall awareness of the community on the platform. However, persons that didn't learn the priors often cannot use the proper registers, leading to a frustrating exchange. This renders the community to be unfriendly, even toxic and hostile towards outsiders.

This is a rather cynical perspective. It dismisses the idea of effective communication between entities. More often than not, successful communication could be established and everyone leaves with a novel idea from the counter-side. But more often we would witness a community that is much more toxic than a neo-nazi group with an average age of 12. So, why is that?

Let's talk about trolls.

Trolls are inevitable. For a community that is large enough, there will be trolls. Hell, even the community itself can be a troll towards other communities. (Usually, you would call them Hate Groups. But I am well aware of the Implication of Expressions.) It is clear that the majority of community members are nice and patient to outsiders, while only a certain few take more hostile moves.

But our brains are biased. We would tend to remember negative experiences even if those were just isolated incidents since we had experienced an emotional disturbance much more intense than the average line. Hate and Anger are strong feelings and trolls are pretty good at evoking them.

Trolls would be isolated in a functioning community, either by being completely ignored or just straight banning. But for a community that has no effective authoritative voice, moderation measures could not be taken in time, rendering the community unfriendly and toxic. Even if an effective moderator was in place, they can only keep the water clean at one site. Trolls that targets a community doesn't even have to join the community they want to hunt down. They can just make a fuss on a general social media platform and rendering that everyone in the community is as hostile as them.

How about memes? Isn't that also a catalyst?

To be more specific, "meme" here stands for mimicking, the action of imitating others' behaviours. There is, apparently, another definition of meme, which seems to be highly relatable to the community in discussion but it comes with a lot of asterisks. We are not referring to the latter one.

Mimicking is not perfect. As a primitive form of learning, it takes a lot of material to train a multi-layer perceptron made of wet meat. But exposure to the material is always too limited to actually mean anything. What we are left with is a mal-trained network either doesn't understand the basic concept of anything or simply tags everything with the newly acquired label. Small sample learning still requires at least some sample to learn and we are expecting everyone else to basically gork the deepest and darkest lore in a text shorter than a tweet and was filled with in-jokes. I mean, what the hell?

There is an excuse called "the Curse of Knowledge" -- that once you learned something, you would unintentionally assume that everyone has learned such thing like it's a part of the consensus. What's worse, you would gradually forget how you have acquired such knowledge that it is difficult for you to explain the idea to others.

In addition, memes are not a medium to pass authoritative information. Memes are made to be altered, to be derived and rewritten. They are a thought nugget that could be reused and remixed in any way possible, creating an information smoothie that can be consumed quickly. Memes are not a serious thing, even if they can be extremely offensive at some point.

Memetic thoughts are also a propellant of the Echo Chamber. Too often we broadcast an idea of others without prior judgement of whether the idea is honest or appropriate -- it's just a click away. Although we do have a knowledge structure based on authorities, it does not necessarily mean we have to take everything said by the authorities we chose as axioms. But in most online communities, the majority is made of replicas.

I am not trying to sound like "most people are dumb and stupid and they don't have their own thoughts blah blah". Mainstream ideas do exist for a reason:- They are the foundation of consensus. A community is built upon consensus. A group however small does rely on a shared goal to be functional. Replication of ideas is essential. But the replication of emotion, I believe less so vital.

Memetic hatred is not a new thing. I personally believe it exists when the Neanderthals were still alive. But with the power of constant internet connection and the migration of communication habit, we are now living in an Orwellian age when we can't even express our likes and dislikes with our own words. We are now living in a Kafkaesque society where we are judged by the people we don't know and governed by the rules we can't see.

But I guess it doesn't matter much if you are just getting dragged on twitter, right? Right? 🙃

It could get much more complicated than we have anticipated. Ms Lindsay Ellis could be a great starting point. But I really need to finish this off. It is already a year worth of reading exercise for most of you guys.

I would like to stress more on decentralised community structure for the conclusion.

The internet is decentralised at its heart. Centralisation, although a global trend, does not affect the fact that communities tend to split due to various reasons. Niche communities shall stay niche since it is the definition of "niche" -- not being mainstream. Exposure to the mainstream tends to lead to either corruption or corrosion. Neither of them is a good thing for a community. Hell, we have already witnessed the corruption AND the corrosion of a Domestic Online Community. The name of which shall remain undisclosed for legal reasons.

Decentralization is still the solution, albeit a rebelious one.

之后还会继续有用半吊子英语写的内容么？那自然还是会有的。但要不要把之前发的翻译回中文呢？我认为那些不属于有限公开的内容还是有必要的——算下来就是没几篇嘛。

和 Ellis L. 女士有关的接下来的内容，我认为还是有必要用中文写的。我认为这一部分有必要加入基础指导方针，所以没有必要再套一层壳。