Tag: Community Governance

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Community governance weakened after a change of ownership

Community governance does not require giving users the keys to the server.

Sometimes it means something much smaller: a defined route through which people outside the company can regularly influence policy, raise problems, and force uncomfortable subjects onto the agenda.

Twitter had one of those structures before its 2022 ownership change.

The Trust & Safety Council was advisory, but it was real

Twitter created its Trust & Safety Council in 2016. By 2019, the company described it as a group of more than 40 organizations and experts advising Twitter on products, programs, and rules. Twitter later expanded the structure into issue-specific advisory groups dealing with areas such as online safety, digital rights, child exploitation, dehumanization, and suicide prevention.

See Twitter’s archived description of strengthening the Trust & Safety Council.

The council did not run Twitter.

Its members could not veto a product launch, reverse an account suspension, or order the company to adopt a policy. Twitter retained final authority.

That limitation matters because calling the council “community governance” should not be confused with democratic control.

What the council did provide was institutionalized outside input. The company had named organizations, scheduled meetings, defined subject areas, and an ongoing mechanism for specialists to challenge or advise the people writing platform rules.

The ownership changed, then the structure disappeared

Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022.

On December 12, 2022, Twitter dissolved the Trust & Safety Council. Reuters reported that members received an email announcing the dissolution shortly before a scheduled meeting. The company said it was reevaluating how to bring external insights into its product and policy work. See the Reuters report carried by Euronews.

The important part is what happened afterward.

In a transparency response later summarized by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, X Corp. confirmed that the council had been disbanded in December 2022 and said no replacement external advisory body was in place. The regulator published that information as part of its examination of X’s systems for dealing with online hate. See eSafety’s 2024 transparency report on X.

That is a concrete governance change.

Before the acquisition, outside organizations had a recurring formal advisory structure.

After the acquisition, that structure was gone.

Other community systems are not the same thing

X has emphasized a different kind of community participation through Community Notes, where contributors can add context to posts and ratings determine whether notes are shown. X has described that system as central to its community-led approach to misleading information. See X’s description of Community Notes.

That is genuine user participation, but it performs a different job.

Community Notes evaluates context around individual posts. The former Trust & Safety Council advised the company about policy, product design, rights, safety systems, and broader governance questions.

Replacing one with the other would be like replacing a building inspector with a suggestion box. Both collect outside input. They do not exercise the same function.

The lesson is not that Twitter users once controlled the company. They did not.

It is that platform governance can weaken without any dramatic shutdown. The website remains online. The accounts remain. The feed still moves.

What disappears is the formal channel through which outsiders previously had a recognized seat near the people making the rules.

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Freenode: an IRC community split and the relocation of project channels

The free-software world did much of its everyday talking on IRC. Kernel maintainers, packagers, and documentation people kept channels on Freenode, the network that had hosted open-source development in one form or another since 1995. A project’s official IRC presence usually meant a registered channel there, and at its peak Freenode held something like 80,000 users across 40,000 channels. The address irc.freenode.net was trusted infrastructure, as routine as a mailing list.

That trust rested on a small volunteer staff, and behind the staff, ownership. In 2017, head of staff Christel Dahlskjaer moved the network into a company, Freenode Limited, and transferred it to Andrew Lee, founder of VPN provider Private Internet Access. Volunteers say they were assured the buyer would stay out of operations.

A change of ownership

In early 2021 that assurance frayed. A dispute over control of the network and its assets ended with most of Freenode’s volunteer staff resigning. On May 19 they launched Libera.Chat, explaining that the Freenode domain and other assets had been sold to Andrew Lee and that operational control was moving away from the volunteer staff. Libera was organized as a Swedish nonprofit association intended to prevent the same kind of single-owner control.

Channels followed their people

The projects did not wait for the dispute to settle. Arch announced its move on May 24, and many other free-software projects shifted their official channels to Libera over the following weeks. The important unit of migration was not the IRC protocol or even the channel name; it was which network the project’s own maintainers told users to trust.

What actually moved was trust. The channel names were re-registered on Libera.Chat — the same #python, #ubuntu, and #gnu — because the people who ran them followed the staff and maintainers they knew. Documentation links, webchat widgets, and IRC scripts all had to point somewhere new. Documentation links, webchat widgets, aliases, and IRC client configurations all had to be updated so that newcomers followed the project rather than the old network address.

Freenode still runs, but at a much smaller scale than before the split, while Libera became one of IRC’s largest networks. A current IRC network tracker shows Libera with tens of thousands of simultaneous users and Freenode with only a fraction of its old population. That is the strange part of the story: the famous name survived, but much of the community investment went where the people went. A network’s value was never the URL. It was the accumulated conversations and trust that traveled with the crowd.

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Digg: community rupture around a major product redesign

Digg launched in 2004 on a promise that made the community itself the product. Anyone could submit a link, and the crowd decided what was worth seeing by voting: a story that collected enough “diggs” climbed toward the front page, while a “bury” vote pushed it back down. No one at Digg had to curate the homepage, because tens of thousands of users did it for free. “Give the power back to the people” was part of the founding pitch, and for a while the mechanics lived up to it.

The crowd ran the front page

Members submitted web pages, voted them up or down, and the results fed a public ranking. The most-dugg stories reached the front page, where even more people could click through to the original source. That made the site a shaping force: a story could blow up because Digg users put it there. Power users, people who submitted early and often and appeared able to move the front page on their own, accumulated real influence, and the site both relied on and worried about them. Bury buttons let ordinary members police quality too, until organized “bury brigades” — coordinated vote-downs of particular stories — became part of Digg’s folklore.

A redesign that changed the deal

In late August 2010, Digg replaced the whole machine at once. Version 4 dropped the bury button in favor of a “hide” button, temporarily killed the upcoming stories page, and made the default view a following-based feed called “My News” that encouraged connecting Facebook and Twitter accounts. Submissions were joined by newsroom pages and the prominence of a handful of large publishers, and some users found their histories mangled. To members who had shaped the site for years, the contract had changed: their votes still mattered for individual stories, but the essential levers were gone.

The reaction was immediate. Users flooded the front page with links to rival aggregators and demanded the old Digg back, as the Guardian reported within days of the launch. Founder Kevin Rose responded with a blog post promising to “release, iterate, repeat,” but the damage was financial as well as emotional. Hitwise measured United States visits down 26 percent and United Kingdom visits down 34 percent within a month of the redesign. Digg restored the bury button and other favorites soon after, but polls and comment threads showed the trust was not coming back with them.

Who owned the community

The episode was a lesson in the limits of user power. Digg had built its value on the idea that the audience decided what appeared, then discovered that deciding what appears is not the same as deciding how the site is governed. When the company changed the underlying rules without a say from the people who wrote them into existence, the users’ only real vote was their feet. They left in large numbers, most of them to Reddit, where links, votes, and a front page still worked the way Digg’s used to. Reddit overtook Digg in traffic late in 2011, and in July 2012 Betaworks bought the brand and technology for about $500,000.

That might look like the end of a ghost town, but the communities became more complicated than the headline. The site passed through several owners over the next decade, and in March 2025 founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought Digg back and began another relaunch. The original voters are scattered, yet the arrangement they built — submission, discussion, and community-determined ranking — turned out to be portable and durable. What died in 2010 was not community-driven aggregation but a specific product in which the people supplied the content while the company reserved the right to change the deal.