• Lurk More, Fa**ots

    Building a community is hard. Online, even harder.

    This is what I’ve noticed from recently participating in some online community building. It’s not a big project, just a small online forums for a very specific niche.

    And one of the things that surprise me is how important ‘seeding’ the community is.

    For example, from talking to several other forum founders, we found that at the beginning, they use bots, to increase the community engagement rate.

    Yes, bots. Some fake accounts created for the sole purpose of creating and replying to some threads.

    See, the funny thing about human is, we all like to participate in a community but we rarely wants to be the first to do so. By using bots, forum founder can ensure that there’s a constant flow of new threads and discussion happening.

    Plus, people who just landed in the forum from Google or some other external source, will see a thriving community with active posters, sometimes very, very helpful, that it makes you wonder how did they have all this free time to spend on online forums.

    Little did they know, they are replying and discussing topics with robots, not real people.

    Another benefit of using bots to ‘seed’ the community, is that you can actually design the culture of the community.

    By culture, I mean people have the tendency to follow certain patterns of interaction based on the types of interaction that they’ve already seen. So if you see an old forum, usually they have this pattern of speaking, that characterized the community. The types of posts, the types of response, are uniquely theirs. And this ‘culture’ does not born overnight. It develops slowly over years of interactions between members.

    And this leads to the title of this post.

    I used to be quite active on 4Chan. I saw them as a unique community. In fact, all the chans are pretty unique, in that they’re constantly the source of new content, especially offbeat content like a meme, and yet, the creators of those content never got the attribution that they seemingly deserved. Why? Well, on 4Chan, everybody’s anonymous.

    So oddly enough, 4Chan in my eyes, with all its broken ways, can be said as a perfect community. It’s a community that’s always giving something without hoping for tangible rewards (they want some laughter, maybe). And the community has cultures that are so uniquely theirs, that an outsider will get spotted pretty quickly. This outsider then will get egged on and this term usually will come up:

    Lurk More, Faggots

    That is, in a way, a form of community-run-moderation. And it’s very effective. You can cull the bad from the good (well, the good according to 4chan), without having to resource to banning, because if you’re out of the 4chan line for even a bit, you’re gonna get policed. Unless you’re a pretty dedicated troll, you’re gonna hit the x button and get out. I wonder how many moderators 4chan actually has, and the ratio of moderators to users. Because from an outsider’s perspective, these unique characteristics of 4Chan should decrease the moderation cost quite a bit.

    So, how should a community enforce a lurk more policy? Unfortunately, you can’t. Not in this day & age, unless you want your forum to be branded hostile to new members. But still, that’s a pretty interesting way to look at community moderation.

  • The PC Is Coming Back, Thanks to Youtube and PC Gaming.

    This argument is controversial because the sales data of the PC is mixed, to say the least. Worldwide, it’s decreasing. But in the US, it’s slowly coming back[1][2], especially the retail PC market. Apart from the sales figures which I personally think show more about the state of consumer tech hardware industry and the economy, I am slowly seeing more and more about the conventional PC being discussed and talked about.

    Personally, I believe we’re in a period of PC renaissance, especially in the western hemisphere, and amongst the younger demographics. A renaissance that in my personal opinion is fueled by the fire of two things: Youtube, and PC Gaming.

    Thanks to youtube channels like LinusTechTips, JayzTwoCents and the likes, for example, I’ve seen more and more people thinking about going back and buying a PC. Not only that, meme-ish terms like PCMasterRace and its passionate advocates has made the PC sexy again, especially for teenagers.

    Now, this is of course just pure anecdote not backed by any real data, but I can’t remember a time in my young adulthood where the PC is the sexy computing gear to buy, especially among people with actual social skill. But now PC gaming and internet idol subculture complete with the increasingly popular form of entertainment known as Let’s Play has turned the PC into a desirable item again.

    I mean, Markiplier, a popular Let’s Play YouTuber, generates 65 million views for the past 30 days, and has 16 million subscribers. Most of the games he played are on PC. That’s not counting the multitudes of other twitch streamers and youtubers with millions of followers who watch their content daily. This is a free advertising and evangelism platform that the PC never used to have.

    The barrier to entry to building your own PC also can’t get any lower. LinusTechTips channel has been very helpful in packaging hard to understand and usually geeky topics in a playful, fun manner. Just today they made a video about unboxing petabytes of storage and got 400k viewers in 12 hours. Some PC geeks I knew actually hate the channel since it’s not informative to them. But what they’re doing is brilliant.

    The PC is a backdrop to their wild antics and extravagant purchase habits. It’s suggestive marketing. It’s the Top Gear of the PC industry. And as you can see, they are showing a hockey stick kind of growth for their total views per month.

    Now, unfortunately, these contents are very biased to the western hemisphere. For the average people in said hemisphere, they together constitute the new UX to getting a PC. First, from consuming all those contents, you slowly got enticed to buying a PC, or components for a PC.

    Then, you look for complete specifications, and information about things that you want to buy, and whether that’s the best you could buy at a certain budget. Tools like PCpartpicker and Logical Increments has made this so very easy an idiot could do it.

    Then, you need to finally make a purchase. Well, what do you know, with Amazon prime, you can get these things delivered in a day with just a single click.

    Here’s the experience of getting a PC in my country (Indonesia). There is still no popular youtube channels that make it easy for people to understand what is good or bad about the PC, or the components for the PC that they want to buy. So you usually got baited by advertising.

    And then you need to make sure it’s actually good, and the only way to do this if you don’t have any geek friends is you go to online forums, get mixed response, get confused, and then you decide to just get a laptop instead. And then you find out there are Z124s4-t3 and Zq252-t5 types of laptop you can get depending on the regions, and you’re not sure which is which and which one is good.

    I mean, here’s a locally popular site where people get their PC. It’s called Enterkomputer and their site is a total UX nightmare.

    So the ecosystem in other place worldwide is still not very supportive for the average people trying to get a PC. It’s a decision which involves many moving parts, of which I believe has been made very easy in North America thanks to these multitudes of tools and contents. It’s beautiful in its own way, solving fragmentation and marketing issues by making the contents supporting the purchase decisions freely available and interesting to consume. That’s why I’m very optimistic about the future of the PC. Well, in North America, at least.

  • Happy Local Election Day, Indonesian

    Today marks the first time Indonesia held a nation-wide gubernatorial election on the same day. I’m hopeful the best candidate will win and there’ll be no election riots. I’m also hopeful for the future of our state autonomy. It’s the main reason why we now have some of the brightest people acting as governors and mayors.

    And hopefully, Ahok wins the Jakarta election.