The article stated that explicitly as its central thesis, yet I came away with a different insight.
> In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
What I find especially insightful in this description is that it applies to lots of communities at all scales, both online and off, as diverse as a childhood friend group, a technical project team, a corporation, or an alliance of world superpowers. What defines the village is that the members you interact with are mostly the ones you have been interacting with. Change happens, but it is gradual.
What destroys the village is whatever upsets that defining trait. In the article's telling, a sustained influx of strangers is one way to kill it; there are others (for example, a large set of village members exiting, or the village splitting in two would also work.) And as you rightly point out, a way to effectively manage that change can allow the village to survive, be it tools to manage onboarding, or gradual acceptance (ala SO's points-based permissions), or a well-led corporate merger where changes are introduced gradually and with the buy-in of all participants.
I think the thesis is wrong. It’s not that the average interaction is with familiar individuals. I’ve been a mod, lurker and commenter on a lot of subreddits. And on each of those, there are maybe 10 users I recognize and whose comments I see occasionally.
What is the case, is that on short timescales, the average interaction is consistent with what I expect from the community. The anonymity of Reddit has show that the specific face or individual doesn’t matter. It has a ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ option that I’ve never used and really never felt like I needed to use it.
Reddit actually became less familiar to me when I saw users tag other users in a post to share them with other users. The same with user specific subreddits. It’s when Reddit moved from content centric to user centric.
> In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
What I find especially insightful in this description is that it applies to lots of communities at all scales, both online and off, as diverse as a childhood friend group, a technical project team, a corporation, or an alliance of world superpowers. What defines the village is that the members you interact with are mostly the ones you have been interacting with. Change happens, but it is gradual.
What destroys the village is whatever upsets that defining trait. In the article's telling, a sustained influx of strangers is one way to kill it; there are others (for example, a large set of village members exiting, or the village splitting in two would also work.) And as you rightly point out, a way to effectively manage that change can allow the village to survive, be it tools to manage onboarding, or gradual acceptance (ala SO's points-based permissions), or a well-led corporate merger where changes are introduced gradually and with the buy-in of all participants.