Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about topic based communities[1].
An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.
With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.
Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.
So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.
I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.
An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.
With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.
Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.
So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.
I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625