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On Pandemics and Bubbles
One of the hallmarks of social media is the ability for content to spread widely, to "go viral." Sometimes it's something good, like the Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes innocuous fun, What Color Is This Dress?, and at its worst, fake news. The first two offer tangible boons to society at the risk and cost of the latter.
Still, consider how many causes you've heard of, donated to, thought more deeply about because it happened across your screen? What jokes did you read, interesting tidbits did you pick up not because you were looking for them but because someone you know passed it along?
The Problem
Imzy is anti-viral. The core structure as it stands is anti-pandemic. Content is not communicable. This means we're all stuck perpetually in bubbles of our choosing, with no random aspect at play that might bring the unexpected across our screens to broaden our worlds.
Yes, the Share feature exists, but it's paltry. I've tried a few times to describe and suggest a different method of sharing to try to increase proliferation and interaction, but no one has taken any interest.
So I'd like to propose a different solution.
The Proposal
Neighborhoods are currently functionally useless. They don't do anything other than tag another community as potentially something of interest, should anyone care to dig into the community About section that far.
What if, instead, they were lines of communicability. I could envision two different ways for this to play out.
Passive Proliferation
Say your community is in a mutual neighborhood of 3 (C1, C2, C3). C2 has 2 additional neighbors that are not mutuals with C1. C3 has 4 additional neighbors that are not mutuals with C1. Every post has an Activity threshold. If a post in C1 reaches that threshold, it automatically appears in the feeds of C2 and C3.
Now the post is open to more interactions. Suppose a member of C2 sees the post and interacts. If the system can track that that activity is attributed to C2, the threshold count can start again. When the threshold is met, the post spreads to the mutual neighbors of C2, which are not affiliated with C1 in any way but are now seeing something posted there.
If you'd played Pandemic, this is basically the Outbreak mechanic. As thresholds continue to be met, the post continues to move through lines of communicability established by mutual neighbors until it reaches dead-ends.
Suddenly, Neighborhoods mean something. Likes mean something. Activity means something. It all has a mechanic in whether or not the content spreads.
You would need a mechanism for locking a post into something that cannot spread, for people who specifically don't want a post to have a chance of going viral.
Active Proliferation
An active proliferation model would mean basically the option to Post to C1 or Post to Neighborhood. The content creator, or possibly the community Leader, would be responsible for initiating a post to spread to multiple communities.
For a content creator, the communicability would be limited to only first tier neighbors. They couldn't know what neighbors C2 has, nor would they have any way to push the content to the neighbors they have no direct connection to.
A Leader, however, would. C2's leader, upon seeing a neighborhood post, could choose to pass it along, proliferating the content to all of their connections.
It would be slower. There would be no guarantee that anything being passed along had any particular level of activity. But there would be at least some chance of a pandemic, whereas now there's virtually none.




I don't, necessarily, agree with your proposal. However, I agree that there is a problem.
That's fair. If all this post does is make us talk about it, I think that's a good thing.
Same. There are some "more private" comms that don't want to spread, and personal blogs would have to work differently too, I think. But this is definitely an issue.
Cross-posting could be an option enabled by neighbors, but not default
What do you see as the function of neighbors for those communities?
I do think that figuring out a way to get more activity is important for imzy, but I'm not sure about your idea. Having content from comms you haven't joined could be anything from enjoyable, to annoying, to intrusive.
What if someone had deliberate been avoiding a community even though it was in the neighbourhood of one they'd joined, it could be for any reason, from not being interested, to the content being triggering for them - forcing that community onto their feed would almost certainly not be welcome.
From the opposite side, some people may be fine with their posts being spread far and wide, and others may be only interested in talking to members of their community - if it could be controlled on individual posts it could be okay, but not if it was a community based control.
It's not just about activity in general, it's about the happenstance of finding things you didn't specifically sign up for.
On tumblr, you might follow a Teen Wolf blog, but that person reblogs a post from someone who has vet bills they can't pay and is asking for assistance. Or you might follow someone you know IRL and they were the first ones to reblog a post about Standing Rock and suddenly you're sending money there.
Maybe the foodie blog reblogged a post about How Introverts Work and suddenly you understand yourself a little better.
Maybe... it's backwards? Maybe it's not that communities should have neighbors but that personal blogs are things that should go viral while community posts remain contained?
On tumblr though I expect that, but there you do have the tools to pre-emptively block things you don't want to see, or topics you aren't interested in - which aren't available here as yet.
Plus tumblr doesn't have communities, so people aren't signing up to follow content only about a particular topic the way they are if they join a community here.
As for personal blogs going viral, i have an even more kneejerk do not want for that idea. As friendly rambling between friends could make a post look really active, even if it's something of interest only to them.
If you sign up to a bunch of politics comms, it doesn't necessarily mean you're interested in seeing pictures of cute cats just because they're popular with other people, and on the flip side, if you're using your community feed as your happy fluffy place with nothing but fun communities you don't necessarily want to be blindsided with news topics or people begging for help.
I wouldn't want my personal blog to go viral. It's my dumping ground for stuff n' things. I might just post funny pictures or I might ramble about something deep and meaningful. But, I know it's definitely not stuff that I want showing up in other people's feeds.
I'm all for discovering new communities/neighbors, though. But there's got to be a way to signal what you want coming in.
yeah I'd be uncomfortable with posts from my personal blog getting shared to people who haven't intentionally joined it.
You'd end up needing permissions much like FB I'd guess, like Friends and Friends of Friends and Public.
Tumblr and Imzy are like polar opposites when it comes to this. Tumblr is 100% virally based, which has its problems, and Imzy is 100% siloed, different problems (at least I think it's a problem).
I'm not suggesting that any popular post suddenly be on your feed. It would be tied to the communities and neighborhoods. So yeah, I guess if a Leader of a political com was a mutual with the cat photos com, you would end up with cat photos. It would be on the leaders to make meaningful connections. Maybe on them to moderate?
I'm hoping we'll get per-post permission levels at some point, and I assume that would have to be respected by the sharing system.
It's interesting because part of this is following people vs following communities. My other reference is Twitter, where I follow people & get whatever they care about. Here, even if I find I'm usually interested in what someone in a community is saying/sharing, id have to work to find out what else they cared about & if I wanted to follow.
I don't agree with this. To me Imzy is for communities and content I explicitly sign up for, it would negatively affect my experience if I was forced to see content from communities I'm not interested in.
How do you encounter new things?
With twitter and other parts of the internet, not every service needs to do everything.
Hey Magess, thank you for this super thoughtful post. I wanted to let you know that I've seen it and passed it along to folks.
This is an interesting idea. May not be ideal for all communities but I like the idea of it being opt in or something.
I'm glad you still share your ideas. If only as a springboard for discussion.