Category vs. Community

Last night, I was thinking about why the 'diggsite' nomenclature (or insert your favorite recently-suggested alternative) resonates with me so much. I think the biggest reason, aside from thematic appropriateness, is that it's actually more *generic*. Bear with me here, because this might be a lil long, but IMO there is something to this… In my view, diggsites come in two general flavors: diggsite-as-category, and diggsite-as-community. With the former, it's just about organization of posts. As a user, you say "I want to see the latest buzz about foo" so you go to /foo. I would argue that most of our pre-existing diggsites fit this. And then with the latter, a diggsite is specifically a social construct – a place to bring together people with a shared interest which is a bit more nuanced. These communities might have their own rules, their own posting cultures, and so on. So why does this matter? We have been having a lot of really good discussion here, spread across myriad posts, about the various concerns people have as the platform grows. How do we preempt a toxic landgrab? How do we incentivize the ‘right’ kind of engagement? How do we give communities agency? How do we approach standardization of moderator ethics? Etc. All really important questions to answer, but opinions are quite varied, and we are already seeing clear evidence of the 'you can't please everyone' conundrum that all product teams face. I think part of what makes this problem feel so daunting is that it seems like we take for granted that Digg needs to find a silver bullet. A perfect one-size-fits-all solution. And it makes sense, right? With everything flatly branded as a "community," a lot of nuance and context collapses. The design of the platform subtly reinforces the notion that they are a monolith, even though that is very much not the reality, and so people naturally gravitate to thinking in monolithic terms about how to solve the problems that they are worried about. But what if we didn't jump to this conclusion? This is all a long-winded (apologies) way of saying that I think Digg should think about how it's system design can support the duality of diggsite-as-category and diggsite-as-community. Embrace both, because both are necessary for a platform like this to thrive. But also recognize that they are fundamentally different animals that might warrant design divergence. They serve different user goals. They call for different constraints and affordances.