Thread by @JoohnChoe

I think you could regard recent attention on the #NAFOWorks list and #vatnikSoup threads as recognition of the threat that NAFO poses to industrialized disinfo.

It's about data; it's an important differentiator between NAFO and other leaderless movements.

This is how it works -

So, Robert & Romero '17 studied "retention and performance of 4,317 articles in the WikiProject Film community".

In organizations, size correlates inversely with performance past a certain point; at N number of people, N+1 starts to diminish performance, not increase it.

Classic example of this? LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has 15,800 employees running what is nigh-unto the spammiest social network ever created (Parler & Gab give it a run for its money, to be fair).

It's like an annoying recruiter who lines up crappy temp jobs, except in app form.

Even updating my LinkedIn annoys me, it's pretentious and I get bombarded with spam every time I log in.

I have never, ever heard of someone refer to LinkedIn the way they talk about Twitter, or Facebook.

Because it is fucking annoying.

LinkedIn probably has too many employees.

At some point, someone at LinkedIn added a feature that just sucked, which someone thought was a really good idea because of research inside their smart little team at LinkedIn.

And then it turned out that feature sucked much, much more than LinkedIn was awesome, and then they just kept stacking on the suck.

It's called the "Good Idea Fairy", and LinkedIn is drenched in it as if the Good Idea Fairy went and took a massive cropdusting pass over it.

So Robert & Romero ask, is there a similar phenomenon in, say, loosely organized digital communities?

Why isn't NAFO full of good-idea-fairies all running around in 50 different directions at once?

It isn't, this is for a reason, and this is where we get to why NAFO works.

Think of it like a video game subreddit.

Essentially, when you're just starting to dork out on something... if it's a small community, let's say 50 people who are not really into a video game, then, you don't really have much of a community.

The quality of that discussion - people's impressions of it, how positively they rate it, how it scores in NLP measures of text complexity - will tend to increase, the more people you add, but only up to a point.

Up to a certain number of people as more and more new people flood in, the average level of discussion quality tends to go down; you have more randos, more dumb questions, this is natural.

It *should be* similar to what happened to LinkedIn.

Robert & Romero found, instead, that in projects that people actually cared about, there would be a core crowd that would establish resources and bring new people in. Someone writes an FAQ; someone steps and starts moderating, let's say.

These small little actions by themselves aren't much.

Like, hey, maybe 3k people, 20k people on a good day, read an informational thread I do.

Across a movement, though, it keeps the average quality of the group up, and also results in an aggregate higher-quality product.

So you start getting, for instance, subReddit FAQs and sticky posts, in Reddit; in the Wiki community, you'd have core editors and stickied notes on core articles that everyone worked on.

When people care about something, and a core group steps up to establish a reference for other people to model on, the diminishing returns effect becomes mitigated.

This is what you're seeing with NAFO.

Real simple, it's just a matter of having enough people care to do that first little nudge that gets things moving.

And the question of getting people to care about something ends up being diversity of interest. This is counter-intuitive at first but makes sense.

The more diverse the crowd is... the more likely that someone is interested enough to establish that core reference.

It maps, statistically.

There are breakeven points in this data, but... I don't even see evidence of significant diminishing returns in it.

There's actually multiple breakeven points, which makes you wonder if it extends all the way up to the millions scale.

This type of activity, I'd argue, is unique to NAFO.

Anonymous was, well, anonymous, so it was hard to establish resources or have central figures for anything

Occupy was leaderless, like NAFO, and had similar FAQ-maker/moderator/helper roles take up in the movement, but it never had the unity of purpose that NAFO does.

There simply wasn't meaningful data to record - what, how many banks they got to change (0) or how many laws (0)?

What you're seeing with NAFO as a digital movement is a recognition that activism is able to change the information space, even radically, sure; but movements before NAFO knew that; the anti-Trump resistance, for instance.

And NAFO, uniquely, *actually has data to prove it*.

This is what Sacks is really pissed about; this is what... Vowels or Owen in Irish or w/e, I don't care... is really threatened by in his little thread that mentions me as a 'thought leader', which is really quite secondary to what's going on.

This game is about erasing reality for disinformers like Sacks and Vowels and right-wing trashpundits in general, so that we move on from all the shitty, provably wrong, immensely bad things they have said and done.

And the presence of data on NAFO efficacy stops that cold.

That data isn't just the #NAFOworks lists; it's the sheer numbers of people who retweet & like Vatnik Soup threads and refer back to them, it's the discipline and rigor of the lists.

It's the (withering) talking-back that you can engage in when you have the facts at your grasp.

And it's also why even the people who write laudatory articles about it are dead-wrong about NAFO, .

It's not a "group" or an "organization".

People define it by what they give and get from it; it's a vehicle for their activism and expressing their values.

It's a movement.

I've said before, 'data is power', but this is really more of a simplification and a catchphrase.

To be precise, data is leverage in a competitive/adversarial context; it's a means by which a smaller force can be multiplied into a larger one.

For NAFO's grassroots data-generation and -keeping, it lets us leverage the richest man in the world through his advisors.

It lets about 100k people on a dying social network affect the foreign policy of not one, but two entire-ass nation-states actively engaged in a war.

Crucially, and this is the real point of mentioning this thread...

That data is what you need for people to take you seriously - for people to care.

So, go pitch NAFO to Wall Street Journal, see what they say right now. Or the Post.

They'll probably say, "people don't care".

I've tried, this is how I know.

Now, go to those same people in six months, and offer an exclusive, also mention you're going to ProPublica and MMFA, and say

"I have six months of data on NAFO movement efficacy that shows we've changed the course of history through birdapp"

I think you're going to get a different answer then.

It's going to be from recognition of that leverage.

That's what #NAFOdata is doing.