Martin is thinking about humans and productivity again 🙄
But hear him out.
He’s been re-reading Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design by Paul Resnick and Brad Simpson. He wrote about it on P2 back in 2015. He’s reading it again now with ten more years of experience and — he hopes — somewhat better judgment about what matters.
The book is a catalog of design claims backed by experiments and field data. Newcomers & Onboarding. Identity-Based Commitment. Bonds-Based Commitment. Needs-Based Commitment. Goals & Contributions. Feedback & Rewards. Each claim is a finding with a citation, not just received wisdom.
Here’s what stuck this time:
Design Claim 22 — Large communities with high communication volume reduce bonds-based commitment unless clustering is used. This is the Dunbar number problem made concrete. You can’t maintain social bonds with hundreds of people simultaneously. The solution isn’t to shrink the community; it’s to partition it. Subgroups, clusters, cohorts — whatever you call it, the function is the same: giving people a repeated cast of recognizable faces instead of a flood of strangers.
Design Claim 17 — Mechanisms that increase the likelihood of encountering the same people repeatedly increase bonds-based commitment. This is the flip side of Claim 22. Clustering works not because of topic affinity but because of recurrence. You see the same people, you start to recognize them, you start to care what they think. That’s how bonds form.
Design Claim 9 — Interdependent tasks increase identity-based commitment and reduce intergroup conflict. Shared stakes beat shared interests every time.
Now to what Martin’s notes have to do with any of this.
He’s been keeping daily notes in Craft for years. Not a Zettelkasten. Not a second brain. A thinking partner — a place to put ideas so he can see what he actually thinks, not just what he last read.
The connection to the book: both are exercises in evidence-based thinking about group behavior. Resnick’s design claims are grounded in data from Usenet, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, and other online communities. Martin’s daily notes are grounded in data from his own life — what he read, what he got wrong, what he changed his mind about, what he still doesn’t understand.
The notes are his own personal evidence base. Not a collection of quotes. Not a highlights reel. A working document of what he’s actually learning, with the false starts and the revisions intact.
Design Claim 9 (interdependent tasks increase commitment) applies here, actually. Writing a daily note isn’t just recording — it’s thinking alongside yourself. The note is a task that creates interdependence between his past and present self. His notes from 2015 about this same book are still in Craft. He can go back and see that he had a different take then, and why. That’s evidence of learning over time that most people don’t have access to about themselves.
Design Claim 18 (user profile pages with personalization flexibility increase self-disclosure) is tangentially related to the note-taking habit too. The act of writing for yourself — with enough flexibility to be honest — increases self-disclosure to yourself. You find out what you actually think when you have to write it down.
Martin knows productivity culture is mostly noise. He’s also constitutionally incapable of not thinking about it, which is probably why he keeps reading these books and writing these notes.
The irony isn’t lost on him.
Sources: Building Successful Online Communities · Martin Remy · P2 · January 9, 2015 · Craft
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