Pros and Cons of Communities

12/21/14

Recent actions have convinced me to stop perusing fan communities. It basically only ruins my enjoyment of the various films, TV, and games I consume.

Don't get me wrong, Stephan, I think there's a lot of value in communities. I continue to plan to interact with the node.js community, and other craft-based communities. Fan-based communities, however, I'm going to work on avoiding. I've come to find that I lose more than I gain with fan communities. Fan communities over-hype the content they anticipate, and pick apart every little detail. Basically, they hype content to be better than it actually is, and also ruin it with amatuer analysis.

Now, I like analysis, and feel it can actually really improve enjoyment of content, even if that content is bad. Analysis is like watching additional episodes of a TV show. Good analysis empowers the other episodes and also stands alone on its own as entertainment. Bad analysis implants itself in your brain like a nightmare, and will come back to mind whenever you try to enjoy the show it analyzed. Fan content is much the same.

Unregulated fan communities are full of such scarring fan content. And most commnity sites aren't properly regulated. I think as far as focused communities go, I'll stick with craft communities that focus on making things. I get a lot more out of those communities.

Which really gives me good guidelines for sites like Reddit: focus on craft-based subreddits, and avoid the fan subreddits.

I will continue to consume fan content of entertainment, but I will do so through people-based streams, like blogs or twitter. People produce content in a consistent matter, and keeping track of people also leads to other interests that because of overlapping interests usually leads to finding even more content I'll enjoy.

On fan communities, I don't pay attention to the usernames or people posting content, and so the fan content I end up perusing there is inconsistent and unpredictable.

I really like this plan of community interaction. I hope I am able to execute it as planned, and that it works out as I think it will.