This is a special post for quick takes by halinaeth. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
halinaeth's Shortform
2halinaeth
9Viliam
1halinaeth
3Viliam
3halinaeth
4Viliam
3halinaeth
3Viliam
3halinaeth
How to Poison the Water?
I think we've all heard the saying about the fish and the water (the joke goes, and old fish asks young fish about the water, and the the young fish ask "what's water?).
I'm curious the key failure modes or methods that tend to "poison the water", or destroy/alter an organization/scene's culture or norms negatively. Are there major patterns that communities tend to fall into as they self destruct?
Would love for anyone to share resources or general reflections on this- I'm currently part of a (unrelated) community where I see this happening, but am having a hard time putting into words exactly what's wrong.
An example of the type of helpful framework that I'd be looking for:
- Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths
No idea whether this applies to your community, but a pattern I have noticed is that when the community is small and faces existential threats, people stick together, but when the community becomes successful, high status members start to fight against each other, which sometimes leads to a collapse of the community. It's because when the community is successful, infighting becomes more profitable.
In context of business, I don't know whether this is actually supported by statistics, but a friend who is an entrepreneur told me that he knows a few examples of companies where the founders cooperated as best friends and worked hard for a few years to make the company profitable... and when the company was ready to make its first million, suddenly each founder was like: "wait a moment, why should I split all that money with these guys? if I could somehow get rid of them and replace them by employees, I could pay the employees peanuts and keep the million for myself!" (But maybe that's a cultural thing in Slovakia, dunno.)
I have seen similar things in art. People working together to start an art journal, or an artistic competition, doing their best to gain some recognition (and grant money), and once the recognition and the grant money is there, three members conspire to kick out the fourth one, then two of them conspire to get rid of the third, etc. The project usually survives (the artistic grants are probably not very flexible; it is difficult to get them, but once you do, they probably stay for a long time), but becomes completely static, as the remaining person or a very small group of people are unable to make it grow, and probably have no motivation to do so; they just extract the rent (in money and prestige).
Another way for a community to fall apart is to be taken over by another. Could be a culture war, but could be simply another hobby. First you have a group that does X. Then new people join who like X but also Y. At first no one sees a problem, or the first people who do are called paranoid, but as more such people come, the group becomes about Y rather than about X, and the few old members who resist are kicked out of it. Then, sometimes it remains as a group about Y, and sometimes it falls apart after the Y people declare a victory and move to a fresh target.
On a longer timescale, communities can die out simply by their members getting old. Of course, everyone gets older all the time, but it's not a problem if the old people are likely to leave (e.g. because they no longer have the free time) and young people keep joining, so the majority of members is young. But sometimes the older members become a majority and the young people just gradually stop joining (because young people usually prefer the company of other young people), and then the problem keeps getting worse, until it literally becomes an old people's club... and then they die, and the club is over. (An effective treatment is to make a new group, consisting only of the young members of the original group; then the new group can be way more successful at recruiting new members.)
I see, these are great examples "destruction paths", thank you! What I'm hearing is essentially:
- in communities which gain prestige, infighting which causes collapse
- members dying out over time
I think these are different than what I'm observing in my community. Thinking about it, two patterns jump to mind:
- as our community gained prestige, members would start tearing down or attacking "rival" communities to gain in-group points. But this gives us a bad reputation & deters new members from wanting to join, so community doesn't gain "new blood" and calcifies. (seems parallel to the prestige > infighting problem you described!)
- our community has clearly delineated founders, and as it's a financially-based community (crypto community), people who criticize founders' choices are ostracized for creating "FUD" and ridiculed. Thus, now no one wants to criticize publicly for fear of being eaten alive, and I only hear people express discontent 1:1, never in public. (only once the community's performed much worse financially, did more people start expressing discontent publicly, but by then it was too late to give founders actionable feedback as they'd invested significant resources)
I wonder if communities that are financially based like crypto communities would tend to fall into the "tribalism > bad reputation > no newcomers" & "attack anyone who criticizes leadership" more often? For example is this failure mode more common in startups too?
Would love to know if anyone's written on dynamics like this- would love any links.
in communities which gain prestige, infighting which causes collapse
Yes. A bit more cynically, sometimes you have a community with no infighting and you think "that's because we are nice people", but the right answer happens to be "that's because infighting isn't profitable yet". And I think this is much more likely to happen over money rather than prestige; prestige is just a possible way to get funding.
Prestige itself is less fungible and less zero-sum. For example, imagine that the two of us would start an artistic web project together: we buy a web domain, install some web publishing software, and then each of us posts two or three nice pictures each week. We keep doing it for a few months, and we acquire a group of fans.
And suppose that I happen to be the one of us who has the admin password to the software, and also the web domain is registered to my name. It didn't seem important at the beginning; we didn't expect our relationship to go bad, we probably didn't really even expect the project to succeed, and I just happened to be the person with better tech skills or maybe just more free time at the moment. Anyway, the situation is such that I could remove you from the project by clicking a button, should I choose to do so. At first, you just never thought about it, and probably neither did I. (Though it seems to me that some people have the right instincts, and always try to get this kind of a role, just in case.)
So, I could remove you by a click of a button, but why would I do that? I am happy to have a partner. A website with twice as many pictures is more likely to get popular. The effect is probably superlinear, because posting a picture every day will make the fans develop a habit to check out website the first thing every morning. Also, we have slightly different styles; some fans prefer my art, some prefer your art. And if I kicked you out, you could just start your own website, and your fans would follow you there.
Three years later, we get so popular that some art grant agency notices us, and decides to give us a generous grant of €1000 monthly, indefinitely. And that's the moment when I will seriously start thinking about clicking the button. It would require more work from me, but the money is worth it. (I am working on the assumption that as long as the quality and popularity of the website won't decrease dramatically, the agency won't care about the details.) You could start your alternative website, but this grant money would stay with me. So I just need to be smart about minimizing the disruption caused by your absence. In short term, I could compensate by working harder. But in long term, I need to somehow de-emphasize our role as creators, and make us more of rentiers (does this word even exist in English? Google Translate suggests "reindeer" but that's not what I have in mind). For example, I could suggest allowing guest contributions; maybe even make it a competition, like the fans would send us their pictures by e-mail, we would select the non-crappy ones, post five of them every other day, and let the users vote for the best ones every other week, etc. You might like the idea; but even if not, I would probably convince you by volunteering to do all the extra work myself. OK, soon the website is like 40% our contributions, and 60% guest contributions and voting. Perfect; time for me to push the button, and announce publicly that we had some philosophical disagreements about the True Nature of Art, so you decided to follow your own way, and I wish you good luck with your new projects, but the fans don't need to worry, because the website will continue working as usual. (Gee, I am such a competent villain in my stories; I should probably be more afraid of myself. But I am just describing what I have seen other people do. Whenever I was involved in person, I was on the receiving end.)
members would start tearing down or attacking "rival" communities to gain in-group points. [...] seems parallel to the prestige > infighting problem
Sometimes there are no clear boundaries; the insiders in the wider sense of the word are outsiders in the narrower sense of the word, e.g. one community of artists dissing another community of artists. Sometimes, the more similar the groups are to each other, the stronger the hate.
no one wants to criticize publicly for fear of being eaten alive, and I only hear people express discontent 1:1, never in public
An opportunity for a coup? Create a "safe space" for the unhappy people to complain; but only invite the competent ones. You don't want dead weight; and each additional member increases the risk of someone betraying the group. (This would be safer to do in an offline community, where you could meet in person and leave no written records; so if someone betrays you, you can simply deny it.)
would love any links
Sorry, the only thing that comes to my mind is the one you linked.
This may be needlessly paranoid, but consider the possibility whether some "bad choices" made by the founders could have been actually good for them personally, and only bad for the rest of the community. (There is a saying "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", but I would say "Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by selfish incentives.")
This is so fascinating! Your "competent villain" example definitely resonates with me- I also had to learn the hard way to be assertive when it comes to tiny things like domain ownership which could have huge power dynamic impacts down the line.
Yeah. To your founder point, it's very very possible as they are VC backed and even the VCs' interests aren't very well aligned with the community.
In terms of coup, given VC backed nature + other factors it's nearly impossible to take over. But a ideological split/fork might certainly be possible!
Now I'm curious as to history of successful coups. Would the leader usually have to be a prominent member of the old faction as well? Or is it possible for someone with minor power/influence in the old regime to lead a successful coup as well?
I definitely need to study my history, thanks for the food for thought.
In my experience, I only remember one example of a successful "coup". It was a private company that started small, and then became wildly successful. Two key employees were savvy enough to realize that this is not necessary a good news for them. The founders, those will definitely become rich. But a rich company will hire more employees, which means that a relative importance of each one of them will decrease. And the position of the founders towards those two will probably become something like: "okay guys, you spent a decade working hard to make all of this happen, but... you got your salaries, so we don't owe you anything; what have you done for us recently?".
So those two guys joined forces and together blackmailed the founders: "either you make both of us co-owners, right now, or we both quit". And the company couldn't afford to lose them, because one of them wrote like 90% of the code used by the company, and the other had all the domain expertise the company needed. (Now imagine how different the power balance could be one year later, if the company had maybe three new employees understanding the code, and three more employees to learn the domain knowledge.) So the original founders grudgingly accepted the deal. I think there were some symbolic concessions like "but we have spent our money to build this company, so you will have to pay that part back from your future profits", but that was completely unimportant, because until now the company was small, and soon it became huge and rich, so the money was probably paid back in a few months, and the two guys are millionaires now.
(More generally, I get the impression that early employees in companies often get a bad deal, because first they are told "the company is still small, it may not even survive, so you need to work harder and we can't afford to pay you better... but think about the bright future if the company succeeds", and then it turns out that the future is bright for the owners, and the burned out employees probably get replaced by new hires who are full of energy and bring new technologies. Oh, and if they own any "equity", it almost always turns out that for some technical reasons it doesn't mean what they thought it meant, and instead of 5% of the company they actually own 0.005%, plus they have to pay a lot of tax for that privilege.)
I think a much more frequent situation is that people predict that they would end up in a similar situation, and avoid it by starting their own project rather than joining an existing one. Now in certain contexts, this is business as usual -- everyone who starts their own company rather than joining an existing one is doing exactly this. (You don't need to organize a coup, if you are the legitimate owner.)
Problem is, we have different social norms for "business" and for "community". In business, being openly selfish is legitimate. If someone asks you "why do you want to start your own company rather than work for someone else?", if you say "because I want to get rich", this is a perfectly acceptable answer. (The person may doubt your ability, but not your motivation.) In community context however, you are supposed to optimize for some greater good, rather than your own profit. That of course doesn't prevent the smart people from taking the profit! But they must argue that what they are doing is for the greater good. And if you want to start a competing project, you must also become a hypocrite and argue the same, otherwise all the people who are there for the community feeling will boycott you.
This is why "build a 10% better mousetrap" is a legitimate goal, but "build a 10% better web portal for artists" is not. The 10% improvement means nothing if the community accuses you of being a greedy selfish bastard who only cares about money and not about art, and they blacklist you and everyone who cooperates with you. And yes, if you understand how the game is played, the initiators of the backlash are those who profit from the existing system. But you can't say this out loud; it would only prove that you care about the money. So both sides will keep arguing complete bullshit, trying to get the confused people on their side. The important thing is to get confused high-status people on your side, because then the rest will follow. The old group will argue that "we need to protect our current values" and "splitting our small community will ultimately hurt everyone". The new group will argue that "we need more diversity" and "providing more options will attract more people to our common cause". (Then the old group will whine: "so why don't you add those new options to our current community website instead?" And the new group will respond: "you had plenty of opportunity to do that already, which means that you are either incompetent or unwilling, and we need a new space for the new ideas".)
You talk about a "crypto community", which I suspect is another example of the same thing. The people who have the power are there for the money. Everyone else is there for the feeling of community. The community is an important part of how the people with power make the money. But they very likely optimize for money, the community is only instrumental. In the occasional situation where "what is good for the people who make money" is significantly different from "what is good for the community", the arguments of the people with power may sound a bit... confused... but everyone else interprets it charitably as a "honest mistake" or "well, I don't have all the information they have, so maybe it's my fault that I do not understand their perspective". This is because the people who know better are either part of the inner circle, or have already left the community (or have never joined it in the first place); or maybe are there for their own selfish purposes, which are unrelated to the goals of the founders or the community (someone analogical to publishers in the artistic community).
(By the way, these days when I hear a company owner say something like "we are all like a big family here", I treat it as a red flag. That basically means that the owner wants me to apply community norms in a business situation. Thank you, but I keep my communities outside of my workplace, where I won't lose them if one day my boss decides to press the button.)
Wow, this part really resonated with me:
This is why "build a 10% better mousetrap" is a legitimate goal, but "build a 10% better web portal for artists" is not. The 10% improvement means nothing if the community accuses you of being a greedy selfish bastard who only cares about money and not about art, and they blacklist you and everyone who cooperates with you. And yes, if you understand how the game is played, the initiators of the backlash are those who profit from the existing system. But you can't say this out loud; it would only prove that you care about the money. So both sides will keep arguing complete bullshit, trying to get the confused people on their side. The important thing is to get confused high-status people on your side, because then the rest will follow.
Certainly have noticed a similar dynamic where people take pride in & applaud blind faith in the project & founders, and those who profess to be in it for love of community & not money are rewarded socially. Very cult like behavior, which of course is perfect for the leaders & ideal for that startup's "customer base", so I definitely applaud the founders for doing their job exceptionally.
Lately I've been fascinated by these group dynamics, and how power & influence lie among any given "scene". Joined 3 vastly different scenes lately, which have vastly different norms, nearly 0 overlap, and norms/status symbols that aren't even on the same axes- it's been fascinating on my end to constantly context switch & pick up on what the differences vs commonalities are in these totally different communities.
I bet there's many axioms or essays out there about navigating the rules of social scenes, but so far only one leaps to mind for me.
Well, if you figure out something, I would be happy to read a post about it. I usually understand these things only after it is too late to do something about it. Would be nice to get faster at understanding it.
I'd love to, would you be open to being a "beta reader" for my post? Appreciate the encouragement!
1