Beware mixing up different kinds and purposes of communication. Your friend’s LOLOLOLOLOL is understating the complexity by a long way.
For two-person conversations, where both (claim to be) seeking truth rather than signaling dominance or quality, and where both are reasonably intelligent and share a lot of cultural background, and where there’s time and willingness to invest in the topic, https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/double-crux is an awesome technique. Very often you won’t resolve the answer, but you’ll identify the un-resolvable differences in model or weight of utility you each have. And you’ll be able to (if you’re lucky) identify portions of the topic where you can actually change your beliefs (and your partner may change some beliefs as well, but it’s important for this not to be a goal or a contest—it doesn’t matter who started out more wrong, if you can jointly be less wrong).
Where these conditions do not hold (more than two people, some participants less committed to truth-seeking, no face-to-face communication to help reinforce the purpose of this part of the relationship, not everyone with similar background models or capability of understanding the same level of discussion, etc.), the mix between truth-seeking and signaling changes, and there is a tipping point at which truth-seeking becomes obscured. Your failure mode list is not sufficient, even if we had working counters to them—there are unique modes for every site, and they blend together in different ways over time. To paraphrase Tolstoy: great communities are all alike, bad communities fail each in it’s own way.
I recommend you also include temporal value in your analysis of success or failure of a site/community/forum. Even if the things you list do succumb to death spirals, they were insanely valuable successes for a number of years, and much of that value remains long after they stop generating very much good new discussion.
Totally agree that the different failure modes are in reality interrelated and dependent. In fact, one (“necessary despot”) is a consequence of trying to counter some of the others. I do feel that there’s enough similarity between some of the failure modes at different sites that’s it’s worth trying to name them. The temporal dimension is also an interesting point. I actually went back and looked at some of the comments on Marginal Revolution posts years ago. They are pretty terrible today, but years ago they were quite good.
Beware mixing up different kinds and purposes of communication. Your friend’s LOLOLOLOLOL is understating the complexity by a long way.
For two-person conversations, where both (claim to be) seeking truth rather than signaling dominance or quality, and where both are reasonably intelligent and share a lot of cultural background, and where there’s time and willingness to invest in the topic, https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/double-crux is an awesome technique. Very often you won’t resolve the answer, but you’ll identify the un-resolvable differences in model or weight of utility you each have. And you’ll be able to (if you’re lucky) identify portions of the topic where you can actually change your beliefs (and your partner may change some beliefs as well, but it’s important for this not to be a goal or a contest—it doesn’t matter who started out more wrong, if you can jointly be less wrong).
Where these conditions do not hold (more than two people, some participants less committed to truth-seeking, no face-to-face communication to help reinforce the purpose of this part of the relationship, not everyone with similar background models or capability of understanding the same level of discussion, etc.), the mix between truth-seeking and signaling changes, and there is a tipping point at which truth-seeking becomes obscured. Your failure mode list is not sufficient, even if we had working counters to them—there are unique modes for every site, and they blend together in different ways over time. To paraphrase Tolstoy: great communities are all alike, bad communities fail each in it’s own way.
I recommend you also include temporal value in your analysis of success or failure of a site/community/forum. Even if the things you list do succumb to death spirals, they were insanely valuable successes for a number of years, and much of that value remains long after they stop generating very much good new discussion.
Totally agree that the different failure modes are in reality interrelated and dependent. In fact, one (“necessary despot”) is a consequence of trying to counter some of the others. I do feel that there’s enough similarity between some of the failure modes at different sites that’s it’s worth trying to name them. The temporal dimension is also an interesting point. I actually went back and looked at some of the comments on Marginal Revolution posts years ago. They are pretty terrible today, but years ago they were quite good.