Tea Club < Football Team
Stop communities from degrading
Category: Community building
Epistemic status: My own views & ideas. Pinch of salt, please.
A batch of new people joins your community. Some of them are smooth: nice to be around. Some of them are a bit rougher: less nice to be around.1 And some of them… well…
A batch of community members leaves your community. Smooth members have an easier time finding new communities. Rough members are less likely to be welcomed elsewhere and tend to stay locked in.
Over time, the number of rough members increases, making your community less nice. The reduced niceness causes a new batch of members to leave.
Unless you stop this cycle, the roughness will accumulate. Some communities are unusually resistant to roughness increase. All communities need to take some steps to self-preserve. Without taking these steps, the community will be pushed into the final stages of its lifecycle.
At the end of the community's lifecycle, community leaders turn from inspired contributors to caretakers. They spend a lot of effort managing rough community members while getting less pleasure from participation. After some time, the community leaders leave, and the community collapses.2
Usually, when this happens, parts of the community form new groups, while other parts go looking for new contexts to be in. The new groups are formed by people that like each other; smooth people are over-represented here. The rough people tend to not be included in the successor communities, and hence go looking for new groups to join.3
Community sustainability
One way to handle this situation is to shrug and change communities once your current one starts to degrade. This shifts the burden to other communities, who’ll be bombarded by the rough members emitted by your community collapse.
If you want to prevent your community from degrading into a collapse, you have 3 categories of strategies:
You can filter new people.
You trim the community, removing rough people.
You can polish your community members, improving smoothness over time.
Filtering
Filtering new people is very common. Some groups are invite-only. Other groups have expectations of competence/experience, requiring new members to meet certain criteria. Other groups simply require people to pay, hoping that access to cash means that potential members have their shit together.4
Other groups have “trial events” or “trial periods” that are more open, upgrading smooth trial-members into full community members.
Events inspired by burning man have strong social norms related to self-sufficiency and value-creation, expecting new participants to handle their shit and contribute to gatherings. These norms act as a filter and as an inspiration for newcomers to step up their game.5
Trimming
Explicitly asking people to leave is seldom done. This is frowned upon, and with good cause: telling people that they are annoying and should leave is likely to lead to hurt feelings and lowered self-esteem. This might increase the rejected persons’ neurotic behaviour, awkwardness and similar, making them rougher.
Implicit exclusion involves giving some people less validation, including them less, “forgetting” to invite them to events and similar. This also carries a psychological cost for many people and isn’t a very effective way of getting them to leave. Rough people have a hard time moving to new communities and require a lot of pressure to move on. Implicitly excluding people is also pretty mean, and likely to create bad vibes all around.
Another common strategy is letting your community collapse and creating community 2.0 without the rough people. This is a kind of implicit trimming that carries a lower psychological cost. Not being included in community 2.0 is psychologically different from being excluded, even though there’s no practical difference.
In general, it’s better to filter than to trim. If a person is already included in a social setting there's a higher risk of exclusion-triggered psychological damage.
Lack of inclusion following a trial event might also lead to hurt feelings; psychologically, trial events fall somewhere between filtering and trimming.6
Some thoughts on Filtering & Trimming
Your community is usually located within some larger context. Your neighbourhood is part of a city. A local board game club is part of a larger local nerd community. Your sex party crowd is part of a bigger tantric/hippie crowd.
Filtering & trimming improves your community while making the context slightly worse. By grabbing all the smooth people, you increase the average roughness outside of your community.7 Excluded people might develop psychological issues and even more roughness, further lowering the general smoothness.
Note that this doesn’t mean that you should never reject people. If you never trim, one bad apple might destroy all effort you’ve put into a community. If you never filter, you will be stuck doing basic-level shit forever. This in turn saps the world of skilled practitioners, lowering future potential. If you have a high-level community, people are likely to increase their skills beyond what’s possible in open spaces; allowing them to contribute more to future communities.
Skill increases can be boosted by having an active up-skilling intention for your community. Let’s talk about member polishing.8
Polishing your community members
The third option, polishing your community members, is far more appealing than both filtering and trimming. It requires a fair bit of effort and strategic action, but I’m getting more and more convinced it’s worth it.
To feel into this approach, let’s introduce two archetypical communities:
The Tea Club, and The Football Team.
The Tea Club
The tea club is an excuse to hang out. In Sweden, you might use it as a way to secure funding from the state. There’s no intention to impact the lives of the community members.9 The tea club is likely to be short-lived, involve some kind of religious practice, or be highly exclusive (high levels of filtering & trimming).
The Football Team
A football team have a purpose: to get better at football. A majority of the time spent together is filled with goal-oriented practice. People that suck at football either don’t join, improve, or leave once they realize they can't keep up.10 The leaders of a football team work to make the members get better at football as efficiently as possible while keeping the practice fun. Football teams at a higher level need to do filtering & trimming. Low-level teams can (for the most part) rely on unskilled players improving or self-rejecting.11
Turn your Tea Club into a Football Team
And here’s my advice: turn your tea club into a football team. Introduce a goal for your community, besides hanging out. Work to improve your community members. Introduce practices to help people get over unskillful behaviour. Help your already-skilled community members get even better.
You know your community best, but I want to include some examples to give you ideas for how to go about it. Here’s a (very incomplete) list:
If you have a discussion club, try to improve the discussion capacity of your members. Practice communication, rationality, emotional intelligence, social contextual awareness, and empathic listening.
If you run a board game club, try to get a better gaming atmosphere. Practice how to lose/win gracefully, how to onboard newcomers to your favourite games, how to encourage each other, and make people feel included.
If you run sex parties, try to increase pleasure and help heal emotional wounds. Practice consent and embodiment/sensory awareness. Create a safe container optimized for inner work and getting over issues. Run workshops designed to try out new things/push comfort zones. Include tantric elements.
Imagine a world where all communities were about helping their members grow as people. A world where adult human development is premiered and widely held as a common goal.
Now go make it happen.
A potential critique of the smooth/rough spectrum is that roughness/smoothness isn’t a general thing; and that it’s more about a good social fit. I think this critique can be somewhat circumvented by supposing a shared cultural context; within a certain context/subculture there's usually a set of traits that are desirable, which creates a rough alignment as to what's considered smooth/rough.
The scale is also relative to the skill level of your community. A slightly rough person in one community might be very rough by the standards of another. The general idea of ease-of-transition correlating with the level of smoothness still holds. As does the idea that community improvement leads to nicer communities.
You can think of this a bit like boiling salt water. The salt content is the total level of roughness. You pour salt water with a certain salt content into your boiler. The water evaporates while the salt remains, increasing the salt content over time.
Given enough time, your boiler turns into the dead sea.
I wonder if there are any studies on whether communities tend to collapse in sync: if one collapsing community puts more rough people “into the market”, then cascades akin to nuclear chain reactions should be the result. Big if true.
There should be some kind of correlation here, but I’m not sure how strong. But hey, you get money using this system.
Persistent sparkle ponies are immune to peer pressure and sometimes get excluded.
I’ve handled this poorly in the past and hurt someone’s feelings a lot. Not sure if it was the right thing to do in retrospect.
I’m not sure about this claim. It might be the case that “smoothness-gerrymandering” might increase the net niceness (given that roughness starts hitting diminishing returns on its destructive potential.) I’m not sure about how to model this exactly though, and when I started I noticed that it was distracting from the point I wanted to make while sounding slightly psychopathic (similar to a lot of econ arguments). Here’s a sketch of smoothness gerrymandering, with each community colour coded according to their comfort level. Also, look at the sad person at the bottom of the image.
not that kind of member ;)
Except maybe teaching them not to boil the green tea. It’s not supposed to taste bitter. Same with cacao, keep them at 75° or so, and you’ll have a much better time.
This is a kind of trimming that naturally occurs once you set targets for behaviour. People will trim themselves instead of you having to do it “synthetically”
Not that football training might not improve emotional skills that much, but at least you’ll get better at football and that’s what counts in this domain. Note that I don’t know shit about amateur football, some teams might be good communication practice at the very least, conflict management etc. Please don’t get mad.