I'd be interested in an analysis of what it is about communities that makes them more or less attractive to men vs. women. There must be some moment in the creation or burgeoning of a community when it could really go either way - predominantly female, predominantly male, mostly equal - and then afterwards, it seems self-perpetuating (e.g. reddit and pinterest). But what is it that tips it one way or another? It seems stereotypical, but are sharing/socializing, versus debate-oriented, communities more likely to be welcoming to women versus men? Is it a female preference? Along that same line of thought, is the issue instead that men shy away from communities that are predominantly about positive reinforcement, sharing and socializing?
The debate about why certain online communities attract a majority of men while others attract a majority of women often seems to focus on the following: * Debate/discussion versus chat/socialisation sites
* Whether the "major topics" (think: top 10 subreddits, etc.) are male-focussed or female-focussed
* Critical mass of users of a particular gender (early adopters)
* Whether or not anonymity is allowed or encouraged
* What controls are in place to report inappropriate content I'd like to suggest an alternative (partial) explanation. It's not an opinion that I hold, but it's a possibility that perhaps should be considered: Perhaps men and women are naturally inclined towards single-sex communities. This is linked to the "critical mass" idea, above, but with the additional conclusion that it is even harder to reverse the trend. If we treat services like Foursquare as outliers, we could quickly find evidence for the hypothesis that, in choosing a "space" online, men look for places where men are, and women look for places where women are. Of course, there are exceptions: there always are. But if only 50% of men and 50% of women worked by this criteria, we'd expect to see communties with about a 75%/25% split (and, in fact, we'd probably see a variance from that because of the number and size of those communities, of course). Is one of the things that attracts men, more than women, to Hubski, the fact that it is predominantly male, and not female? I'm sure that a sociologist or an anthropologist can throw some weight at this, but isn't it the case that for a large amount of human history, societies have biased men to spend social time with men, and women to spend social time with women. We're getting better at it, in Western society, I think, but the historical bias is still there. Think back to your school days and whether you had more same-sex friends or opposite-sex friends: there'll be outliers, of course, but most people will say that they had more same-sex friends. Why? It's possible that the root of the gender divide in our online communities shares the same root as that in our offline communities. Perhaps we shouldn't be asking "Why are there no women on Reddit?" and "Why are there no women on Pinterest?", and instead ask "Why are men generally inclined to socialise with other men and women with other women?" Perhaps the answer's sociological or psychological: perhaps we're conditioned this way by millennia of historical sexism. Or perhaps it's biological? In the same way as other species have clear gender-based roles (male lions either live with many females, or completely alone, for example), maybe we humans have our own similar tendencies? But whatever the cause, it's possible that to answer the question we need to cast our nets wider than "online communities".
More simply, perhaps men are drawn towards content that appeals to men and women are drawn towards content that appeals to women. Obviously there's lots of content that appeals to both sexes but you do reach tipping points. Two years ago /r/twoxchromosomes was an interesting and thriving community of "women on the Internet" but they lost visibility when the bitchy catfights of the Reddit LGBT and SRS stole the spotlight. "women on Reddit" are now far more on a war footing, with the end result that the broader website is substantially less friendly towards women.Perhaps men and women are naturally inclined towards single-sex communities.
(Disclaimer: I'm a reddit 5-year user who's interacted with you through a different account) From my own perspective, SRS became what it is for a reason. It is very difficult maintaining a woman-focused community without SRS-style moderation tactics (although the jerk is a bit much). Go into any /r/TwoX, /r/TrollX, /r/feminism, /r/feminisms, or /r/askfeminists post, particularly one that is only a few hours old, and note the extent to which conversations and entire posts are derailed by men who want to instead discuss men's issues. The only solution I see is to remove such comments and ban repeat offenders. I would say the "war footing" is not the fault of SRS, but of those who are deliberately trying to provoke women wherever and whenever possible, many of whom seem to come from /r/mensrights judging by the overlap of users and rate at which arguments are reposted there. I would love to be able to discuss gender issues without being constantly attacked by people who are not open to conversation in any way. That's simply not possible without SRS-style moderation policies.
How mysterious! ;-) Had you said "TwoX" I would have agreed with you. SRS, on the other hand, started out that way. It is not, never was, and never has been about women or feminism in any way - it's a bunch of (male) SomethingAwful goons off on a foreign adventure. They're following the Geno playbook to a T. Reddit is nothing more than this year's Second Life. As a gentle reminder, TrollX, the feminism/feminisms bifurcation, askfeminists and the rest of the women's studies bifurcations are all post SRS, which pretty much makes my point - militarization led to radicalization, led to a total drop in discourse in favor of bomb-throwing. I say that as someone who almost brokered a tripartite non-aggression pact between TwoX, Seduction and Mensrights only to have it annihilated by the advent of SRS. And yeah - there are people in SRS who have never been to SA. But 90/9/1: the direction, the culture, the behavior is pure false-flag SA tomfoolery. I've had that discussion in PMs with a couple of the Archangelles - maybe even you! ;-)(Disclaimer: I'm a reddit 5-year user who's interacted with you through a different account)
From my own perspective, SRS became what it is for a reason.
Heh, I'm much more innocuous than that. I agree with the origins of SRSPrime, and I'm familiar with the bifurcations. However, there are several reasons why I believe SRS isn't to blame for the anti-feminist backlash on reddit. 1. Although there is some overlap between /r/mensrights and /r/SRSsucks and /r/antiSRS, the two communities are very different and I perceive the issues that are brought up in MR to be gripes against real-life, specific events (or patterns) rather than against feminism as an idea or a strawman. Mind you, many comments in MR tend to assign blame for these injustices to feminism, but the main topics of conversation are about custody rights, false rape accusations, childhood education, or other real issues that affect men. I don't think - and this is just my idea - that most posters in MR are involved in the meta-reddit communities, nor do they necessarily think that feminism is reflected by SRS. This is in comparison to SRSsucks and AntiSRS, which are obviously created in opposition to SRS and SRS-style "feminism." My point is that the people who comment in /r/feminism and /r/TwoX and derail discussions cross-post to MR (I check the posting history of folks who seem to be commenting in bad faith), not SRSsucks or AntiSRS. This makes me feel like it's anti-feminists, not "anti-feminist because I don't like SRS"ers that derail conversations. When I see derailing or opposing comments in those women-centric subs, they rarely say "feminism is dumb and you're all bitches," they say, most of the time, "but what about men who are also oppressed?" or questioning the veracity of viewpoints/statistics. If SRS never existed, they would still be going into women-centric subs and arguing for men's rights. MR is a big subreddit with a lot of clout. And their thought leaders - Paul Elam et al - don't give a shit about SRS. They focus on real-life issues, as do the majority of their supporters. 2. I know you insinuated a counterargument in your 90/9/1 comment, but there are 32k subscribers to SRS, not all of whom are goons, and the non-prime subs (SRSwomen, SRSmicroagressions, etc) are so innocuous that I don't think SRSers as a whole (as a userbase, not the mods) honestly believe half the shit they say. And truth be told, there's a reason people keep subscribing to SRS, and it's not because they're all from SomethingAwful.. it's because reddit has real race/gender/GSM/ableism/etc problems. 3. This is entirely anecdotal, but my partner (whom I met on reddit more than two years ago, we live together now) is vocally very anti-SRS, but he says he has never associated SRS with feminism. He's more likely to read MR than /r/feminism. And yet he sees SRS for what it is: an outlier community of angry people. Yes, it's one case, but there are people who are anti-feminists who can nonetheless distinguish the two. 4. I rarely saw SRS mentioned outside meta communities until about half a year ago. Most of reddit had no idea it existed. It's only recently (within the past 6-12 months) that people have begun referencing SRS in popular posts and comments - and even then, the vast majority of redditors have no idea that it exists or what it is. The point of all this is that you said SRS and LGBT stole the spotlight. I think it's easy to think so when you're involved heavily in meta communities - SRD, SRDB, SRDD, SRS, SRSS, ASRS, SRDX3, SRSB, etcetc - but the ripple effect is negligible outside a core of meta-users, and the people who derail conversations in women-centric spaces would do so even if SRS had never existed, because most of them are not meta-reddit users, and their "leaders" exist in meatspace with real-life concerns. Yes, I acknowledge that the way SRS is run now is ultimately harmful to the perception of feminism on reddit (although I understand why it is done that way). However, I think the effect it has on the other fem subs is very small, and the invasion of women's spaces would happen without it.I've had that discussion in PMs with a couple of the Archangelles - maybe even you! ;-)
And my point is that they've militarized substantially since SRS came about. The isolated shaming that dominates SRS/SRD downvote squads is a new phenomenon; prior to SRS' insistence that the only appropriate way to deal with things you don't like is to mock them in a forum where nobody but you is allowed to talk, there was debate. It was rarely civil but it was, at least, a form of communication. SRS exists solely for derision. Again, as I said - I don't believe they stand behind a single word they say. It's kabuki to them. Kabuki that has succeeded in substantially degrading the discourse of a website where they're ex-pats. That's because they focused their wrath on the mods and top commenters, driving many of them away and subduing the rest. You're not someone until you can google "site:somethingawful.com yourusername". Really, our disagreement is whether Reddit sucks because SRS poisoned it or whether a poisoned Reddit led to SRS. To lay the decline of Reddit at SRS' feet is not my intention; I'm simply pointing out that they're accelerating its decline, and they're doing it by design.My point is that the people who comment in /r/feminism and /r/TwoX and derail discussions cross-post to MR (I check the posting history of folks who seem to be commenting in bad faith), not SRSsucks or AntiSRS.
I don't think SRSers as a whole (as a userbase, not the mods) honestly believe half the shit they say.
I rarely saw SRS mentioned outside meta communities until about half a year ago. Most of reddit had no idea it existed.
I was wondering that myself, and I saw three options: 1. Designed and marketed towards women; 2. A core group of early female users influenced the direction of the site and made women more likely to join, seeing relevant content; 3. Something about the format of the site itself made women more likely to want to use it. I don't think it's #1. From CNN: It sounds like it was created in a rather gender-neutral way. (how do you make inline quotes?)A Yale grad with no engineering background, Silbermann worked for Google before launching Pinterest with some friends in late 2009. Real-time text feeds were the rage at the time, and some observers felt that an image-based pinboard was doomed to fail. Nine months later, the site still had less than 10,000 users.
Okay: so let's look at the other options: #2 is a critical mass problem - "if a site has a critical mass of women, it will be used by women". Looking at the way that some social networks and other websites' communities work, I can see why this might be the case. Sexism against women on the web is endemic, and this makes many online communities unappealing to women (men, on the other hand, will sometimes overlook it; so men continue to join and women don't). If you look at the online communities where this is not the case, they are either communities in which a critical mass of women already joined (e.g. Pinterest), and thus are self-regulating, or where community membership is "opt-in", rather than "opt-out": Facebook and Twitter, for example, lean towards a model whereby you socialise first and foremost with people you already know (or, at least, people you select) - compare to Reddit, for example, where your very first experience is to be bombarded with the most popular stream of the firehose. How about #3: there's something about the format itself that makes women more-likely to use it? Maybe, and I've certainly had female friends say this to me (of Pinterest), but I'm not certain that there isn't some confusion between this and the previous point: a society is built by its members, and - again - the first thing you see on the front page of Pinterest is the popular shares, which as we all know are dominated by women. This isn't a reflection on the format of the site, but of its makeup: i.e. option #2. Sure, there are aspects of Pinterest's design that meet aspects of stereotypical "girly" design (the floral logo, for example), but I don't think that these are significant in themselves. In short: I suspect that your second suggestion, that a core critical mass of women is the fundamental force that shifts a website to having an ongoing female presence.
I guess the next question is.. is that a problem that needs fixing? The recent hubski numbers led to several questions of "how do we get more women on the site?" which implies that at least one site believes equality is important. Actually, it seems like two questions:
1. Is a 50-50 male/female distribution (apologies for the gender binary, assume the numbers are fuzzed a bit to account for non-males or non-females) a positive thing?
2. Does that go both ways? That is, do most predominantly male communities want more women participants, and/or do most predominantly female communities want more men?
hubski increases normally by physical word of mouth, which is one of its best qualities in my opinion. 1. I see it as a nonissue. That is, neither positive nor negative. 2. No, I don't think so. Why does it have to be a gender issue? hubski wants more people who will share intelligent things and be interesting. End of story, right?
Diversity is a positive thing for academic and workplace environments. Arguably, an area like hubski where you want people to share intelligent things and be interesting will not fully achieve those goals without diversity of thought, as it will limit your exposure to different ideas and perspectives. E.g.: http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/Benefits_Challenges.pdf
Possibly. Good point. But I feel like we're all sharing things from the internet, and all the content of the internet is available to all of us. So diversity is less strong of an argument than it would be in the workplace or something. That said, there's certainly content that is more likely to be shared by women that we might be missing out on. My point was rather that we shouldn't sacrifice quality to try to bring the gender proportion to 50/50. Don't invite women you know to hubski; invite smart interesting people to hubski. Let it find equilibrium on its own.
I agree that we should aim for smart and interesting; my concern is that the perception of what is "smart and interesting" (which is entirely subjective) may simply validate an already-predominant male perspective on interesting content, making people who bring alternate viewpoints feel excluded. For example, content creators on the internet resemble overall demographics, whereby only 9% or so self-identify as black. A population that is not used to considering racial issues, or which does not perceive them as salient, may approach these issues differently than a more racially-sensitive bunch of people and may exclude those with divergent views. Eventually, each website develops its own ways by which it measures value. There is no objective way to measure interesting and intelligent content, and it will inherently skew towards the ideas and demographics of the majority user group.
This is completely possible. The ten or so women that I interact with on this site certainly tend to post "out there" content relatively often. I will say that as far as sensitivity goes, we're about as sensitive as it gets, and I don't think we exclude anyone. So hubski has that going for it.my concern is that the perception of what is "smart and interesting" (which is entirely subjective) may simply validate an already-predominant male perspective on interesting content, making people who bring alternate viewpoints feel excluded.