17. Schelling Points, Flagpoles, Drip-Trays

Communities exist. This much we can hopefully agree on. Some communities arise naturally, while others are founded for purpose - anything from a desire for companionship to the need for more than just a few people to participate in some activity to the assembly of a lever to move the world with. One type of community is what I’d term a “flagpole”: a community that can be either intentional or accidental, but is always about something in particular: some cause or trait or practice. It’s generally the only one of its kind in its catchment basin, whatever that basin might be - walking distance, easy driving distance, or even nested within some nebulously defined internet subculture; if it isn’t the only one, there sure aren’t that many of them. It must also make itself prominent, often explicitly advertising to a large potential audience. After all, if a community isn’t growing, it’s shrinking - so goes the aphorism. This makes the flagpole a natural place for people who wave its metaphorical flag to gather at, even in the absence of coordination - a Schelling point for anyone looking to find anyone else into the flag. Notably, flagpoles are not (centrally) about organizing people to make some activity possible; they’re more often groups about common traits or shared appreciation for something, especially for some (often leisurely) body of work.

Interest groups like fan clubs and study societies are generally flagpoles. Student associations - ethnic clubs, aspirational professional associations, and anime clubs, to name a few - are frequently flagpoles. Homeowner’s associations aren’t flagpoles, and neither are businesses (generally). Choirs, dance clubs, and even dining clubs are generally not flagpoles, either. Puzzle and tabletop game clubs usually aren’t, but can easily become so if there’s a fanbase aspect to some single topic or body of work that comes to dominate.

What makes some communities thrive and others wither? I don’t know the full answer, but here’s a piece of it I’ve observed, of how flagpoles in particular can easily go sour. It goes like this: there’s a particularly miserable failure mode nearly any sort of community can fall into but to which flagpoles are especially vulnerable. The ingredients are these: the community must be extremely visible and have some obviously attractive trait; the community needs to welcome all comers, and explicitly turn away or eject few or none; the community’s purpose, if it has one, must be one that private friend groups can just as well satisfy; obviously, the community must be one where joining and leaving are both fairly easy.

And that’s all that’s necessary for the community to die, or if they’re less lucky, for it to become a shell of its former self. Some of the most desirable members leave - because of some other opportunity, because they’re dissatisfied with some of the other members or some other aspect of the community, because they’re overinvested, or simply by chance; now the community is notably worse in quality but no less attractive at first blush to random members of the public who find the community’s focus to be of some interest. Evaporative cooling of groups kicks in: the group’s members who an average member might most want to stay, instead leave, and disproportionately often, and they find their own little private communities just as dedicated to appreciation of the public community’s focus. On the other hand, those that can’t find private communities, don’t, and stick around the flagpole instead. The flagpole has become a drip-tray: a runoff point for anyone who’s into the community’s focus and can’t or won’t find anywhere else to go.

It gets worse. Now that there’s a drip-tray for the community’s focus around, it likely sticks around - after all, it’s frequently an obvious place to go, if you’re looking for a certain kind of company and you’re not too picky, or maybe just very new or isolated. It sucks up all the local resources that hypothetical other communities about the same focus might have used to grow - tentatively interested established or otherwise desirable members who have instead already been burnt out; the larger pool of newer people who are instead funnelled to the largest group around, by virtue of its size; even the time and goodwill of the few people willing to organize community events. The drip tray overflows, and ruins the whole catchment basin. Bad end.

I don’t have a solution for this, sadly - it just seems to be a fact of life for the dynamics of communities that satisfy all the conditions I laid out above. The obvious solutions all fail badly: you could be more proactive about showing existing members the door even without major cause, but what message does that send to newer folks? You could make the community about some large group activity, and then anyone who can’t participate for any reason no matter how good gets driven off. Probably you can’t just keep the community private and secret and exclusive, not without totally defeating the purpose of gathering interested and interesting people. (And the less said about making leaving difficult, the better.) Maybe some kind of scaling escalating commitments kind of structure could work? But then that’s vastly more structure than is often workable and can lead to particularly toxic power dynamics. Perhaps there’s nothing to be done but hope to find your way into one of the little private communities instead.


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