8 ms·

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003)

193 points by NetOpWibby 5y ago

politelemon 5y ago
What an interesting read. In a way it serves as a warning of all the things that can and will go wrong, and you can see the equivalents to it in action today, some at an amplified level. Not just on the popular social media like FB and IG, but HN and reddit too. The other interesting aspect is how they've gleaned so much insight from their relative (to now) limited number of groups and communities. I wonder what they would say in today's online landscape.
- loopz 5y ago
  Many communities still live on today, ie. MUDs and other such places. Most died when users moved on, especially smaller groups. Every such place deal with this.
theartfuldodger 5y ago
This is magnificent.
simonw 5y ago
This is such a classic. I feel like talks of this quality and with this much depth of research are sadly pretty rare at the conferences I attend these days. (Plus I miss O'Reilly ETech)
egypturnash 5y ago
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students [who were only interested in what we now generally call 'shitposting' and 'trolling']. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  And the next paragraph from that: "But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down." They didn't want to block anyone, so they deleted it. That's why we can't have nice things.
  - krapp 5y ago
    It's unfortunate they chose to engage in mass self-deplatforming rather than simply engage in vigorous debate or attempt to open a dialog and empathize with the views of those they considered guilty of thoughtcrime. Did no one tell them that free speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to the speech we find most objectionable? That sunlight, not censorship, is the best disinfectant? First they came for the shitposters...
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      You're complaining that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars weren't spent arguing with 15 year-old trolls on the internet?
      - krapp 5y ago
        Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends. What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name of ageism? What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science, philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form of human culture that still exists. Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth, with unassailable power to determine what speech is or isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what people can and cannot say, what right do they have to dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a "troll?" Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself. Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of sovereign governments can be erased from history for the slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few centralized platforms on which the majority of all human communication now occurs. We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful ignorance and soulless mediocrity.
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 - July 2020 (14 comments) LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments) A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 - June 2017 (1 comment) The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments) Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 - Sept 2011 (15 comments) A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 - Sept 2011 (8 comments) Ask YC: forums still a viable format (group-enemy problem)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 - Nov 2009 (6 comments) Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 - Feb 2009 (13 comments) A group is its own worst enemy... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 - Feb 2008 (1 comment) Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 - May 2007 (1 comment) A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 - March 2007 (3 comments) Others?
- NetOpWibby 5y ago
  Oh wow, thanks for these.
- mehak402 5y ago
  Thanks, this helps!
wombatmobile 5y ago
> And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants And with the demise of independent investigative journalism in the outside world we've seen that relationship devolve into feudalism.
natmaka 5y ago
"Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups". Leopold Kohr thesis (such as "Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size,everything collapses or explodes") are pertinent.
- amelius 5y ago
  > Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size,everything collapses or explodes I suppose that (quasi) monopolists like Google, Amazon, and Apple are still to small for that thesis?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Chat services usually rot and go the way of MySpace. Remember cuseeme, aol instant messenger, icq, irc, Skype, Skype for business, Lynq, paltalk, Facebook messenger, tivejo, … Facebook was originally where cool kids hang out now grandma is on it. Facebook is always buying a competitor or imitating one or aiming a service at really young kids to stay ahead of the rot.
    - caddemon 5y ago
      I agree a lot of young people don't really use Facebook profiles anymore, but most people I know still use Facebook messenger. It's easy to find people because most people are on there with real name/picture, and the group chats work pretty smoothly. Granted I'm a millennial so maybe the actual kids these days don't use it at all, but I wouldn't lump it in with those dead services. I actually think for a messenger platform it's probably a good thing that even grandma is on there. The problem with having a bunch of Boomers around is of course the social media posting aspect.
      - PaulHoule 5y ago
        You have to distinguish things that are age dependent (generic about 20 year olds at different times) as opposed to cohort dependent (specific to people born in 2021.) When people born in 2001 are grand(p|m)as I think they'll have a similar relationship to the cohort of 2061. That is, there will be some things 2061ers will want to share with them and other things 2061ers won't. There is some cohort ⨯ age interaction, for instance the boomer cohort has been so large that some tv viewing slots are saturated for ads about "you might not be getting all the medicare benefits you deserve" to the point that it drives away other viewers.
saul_goodman 5y ago
Ha, nice to see LambdaMOO get a mention. It still exists and still has users.
- dang 5y ago
  A bit of LambdaMOOness on HN over the years: LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments) Lambda Moo Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167 - July 2019 (1 comment) Lambda MOO Programming Resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327975 - Feb 2018 (1 comment) Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439 - April 2017 (15 comments)
mbg721 5y ago
The biggest thing that seems different to me now is that in Thing To Design For #1, non-portable reputation is basically dead. You now live in a gossip-loving small town whose population is the whole world; if you cheat at the wrong thing, whether it's your wife or poker or whatever, you're at the mercy of the doxxers.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I can see plenty of people getting away with bad behavior. You can even become president these days. So it's not just about morality.
kumarvvr 5y ago
"Nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy" Yup. This is how vote banks work. Seed the idea of an external enemy to a group of loosely cohesive group and suddenly they become like a huge entity difficult to be reasoned with.
- teddyh 5y ago
  The outgroup defines the ingroup.
  - stinkytaco 5y ago
    My dad teaches a world religion class and does a unit on religious restrictions (kosher, halal, etc.). He says one of the hardest things to get across to people, even non-religious people, is that rule systems like these are not about practical considerations, they are about defining who is "in" and who is "out". In a time where religion is no longer analogous with ethnicity, this is just not something people really understand anymore.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      The difficult thing about it is that I personally have an aversion to this. Basically makes me always appear difficult because I hate being defined.
mehak402 5y ago
Wow, absolutely brilliant.
baybal2 5y ago
The essence of class warfare. Peasants gang up, and go pogroming their baron. Few month later, they fight for who will be taking his place. Discipline is the only remedy.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Shirky is great. So many of his posts and speeches have become classics.
throwaway_2047 5y ago
Maybe tangential. Now in the society we have 2 + 2 might not equal four, a man cannot be "assumed" "he", reverse discrimination, etc. edit: I total understand why I'm getting down-voted. I think what I'm trying to say is, the US is designed to be free and inclusive. At least that's how I understand it. And there are always opposite voices. But, as I perceive it, the politically correct thing seems to be over-correcting the "wrong".
openfuture 5y ago
Tragedy of the commons is the killer of decentralization since day 1. Try polluting the shared space around your building (with clutter for example) and see how long it takes for you to be censored. Self-censoring is how we maintain our liberty to pollute but it can go too far though; some deep-pocket people can largely avoid feedback because no one dares to go against them. There is always some tension between censorship and pollution, our goal is to minimize both so we can give ourselves space to breathe and live. This is why we create law. Law should be created when the cost of censorship is lower than the cost of pollution. Consider nude beach vs downtown big city, pollution and censorship inverts, law is similar and we need more local law and more aggressive refactoring. Enforcing law is a communal effort and also local. We need better tools to accomplish this. But they are rapidly emerging fwict so hopefully these things become actionable soon.
- hawski 5y ago
  I now what you mean, but I just wanted to add something to your one example. What do you mean by "nude beach vs downtown big city"? There are parks in some European cities where you can sunbath in the nude. I guess it is still an example of this, because it is getting less common, because of globalization and risk of being recorded for the whole world to see.
  - openfuture 5y ago
    I ment that it is likely that you are expected to self-censor nudity (by law) in a city while you are censoring signaling on a nude beach (or in any nudist place).
- eevilspock 5y ago
  As you seem to suggest in your last para, Law is useful, but also insufficient. It is often too rigid and cold. It is easily subverted, selectively applied or conveniently re-interpreted by whoever has more power. Two cultures can have the same constitution yet produce greatly divergent results. You can see this in the failed democracy revolutions of the last 20 years. You can see this in comparing the state of American democracy today with the state of America democracy in the 60s. Both were tumultuous times, but the culture is far more selfist now than then. I'm a socialist, but I'd take a socialist culture (defined by people genuinely giving the common good priority) on top of a free-market capitalist economy and political system over a individualist/selfist culture on top of a socialist economy and political system any day. The former will actively work to justly distribute resources and opportunity despite the dark tendencies of capitalism and free markets, while the latter will quickly devolve into a farce of socialism. Progress is ultimately about the progress of Culture. "Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity, and principles of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, they can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment, at each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction." ~ Cloud Atlas
jaynate 5y ago
Is there a TL;DR?
- ogennadi 5y ago
  From the conclusion, "Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software... is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse. The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly."
  - dennis_jeeves 5y ago
    Thanks for the summary.
ogennadi 5y ago
"It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves. Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong... The user of social software is the group, not the individual."
z3t4 5y ago
The read to write ratio on a internet forum is about 100 to one, so if you got 200 people there will be 2 ppl talking to each other. Usually the same two people. The critical mass for an online community is around 1000 ppl. Ohh and you need moderators. Cant even have a presidential debate without moderators, so good luck having 1000 people together without strict rules. It will eventually attract the worst kind of people. The rules and mechanics of the thing the ppl gather for will reflect on the group, so its actually possible to indirectly steer the community...
Terretta 5y ago
What a great nugget: > I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly. This was 2003, and Butterfield is still turning side tools from MMOs you never heard of into genre defining brands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Ludicorp_and_Flickr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Ludicorp_a...
- zygy 5y ago
  Had to check the year to realize this was referring to Flickr and not Slack :)

193 points by NetOpWibby 5y ago

What an interesting read. In a way it serves as a warning of all the things that can and will go wrong, and you can see the equivalents to it in action today, some at an amplified level. Not just on the popular social media like FB and IG, but HN and reddit too. The other interesting aspect is how they've gleaned so much insight from their relative (to now) limited number of groups and communities. I wonder what they would say in today's online landscape.

loopz 5y ago
Many communities still live on today, ie. MUDs and other such places. Most died when users moved on, especially smaller groups. Every such place deal with this.

theartfuldodger 5y ago

This is magnificent.

simonw 5y ago

This is such a classic. I feel like talks of this quality and with this much depth of research are sadly pretty rare at the conferences I attend these days. (Plus I miss O'Reilly ETech)

egypturnash 5y ago

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students [who were only interested in what we now generally call 'shitposting' and 'trolling']. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

mrspeaker 5y ago
And the next paragraph from that: "But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down." They didn't want to block anyone, so they deleted it. That's why we can't have nice things.
- krapp 5y ago
  It's unfortunate they chose to engage in mass self-deplatforming rather than simply engage in vigorous debate or attempt to open a dialog and empathize with the views of those they considered guilty of thoughtcrime. Did no one tell them that free speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to the speech we find most objectionable? That sunlight, not censorship, is the best disinfectant? First they came for the shitposters...
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    You're complaining that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars weren't spent arguing with 15 year-old trolls on the internet?
    - krapp 5y ago
      Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends. What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name of ageism? What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science, philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form of human culture that still exists. Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth, with unassailable power to determine what speech is or isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what people can and cannot say, what right do they have to dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a "troll?" Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself. Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of sovereign governments can be erased from history for the slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few centralized platforms on which the majority of all human communication now occurs. We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful ignorance and soulless mediocrity.

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 - July 2020 (14 comments) LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments) A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 - June 2017 (1 comment) The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments) Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 - Sept 2011 (15 comments) A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 - Sept 2011 (8 comments) Ask YC: forums still a viable format (group-enemy problem)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 - Nov 2009 (6 comments) Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 - Feb 2009 (13 comments) A group is its own worst enemy... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 - Feb 2008 (1 comment) Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 - May 2007 (1 comment) A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 - March 2007 (3 comments) Others?

NetOpWibby 5y ago
Oh wow, thanks for these.
mehak402 5y ago
Thanks, this helps!

wombatmobile 5y ago

> And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants And with the demise of independent investigative journalism in the outside world we've seen that relationship devolve into feudalism.

natmaka 5y ago

"Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups". Leopold Kohr thesis (such as "Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size,everything collapses or explodes") are pertinent.

amelius 5y ago
> Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size,everything collapses or explodes I suppose that (quasi) monopolists like Google, Amazon, and Apple are still to small for that thesis?
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Chat services usually rot and go the way of MySpace. Remember cuseeme, aol instant messenger, icq, irc, Skype, Skype for business, Lynq, paltalk, Facebook messenger, tivejo, … Facebook was originally where cool kids hang out now grandma is on it. Facebook is always buying a competitor or imitating one or aiming a service at really young kids to stay ahead of the rot.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    I agree a lot of young people don't really use Facebook profiles anymore, but most people I know still use Facebook messenger. It's easy to find people because most people are on there with real name/picture, and the group chats work pretty smoothly. Granted I'm a millennial so maybe the actual kids these days don't use it at all, but I wouldn't lump it in with those dead services. I actually think for a messenger platform it's probably a good thing that even grandma is on there. The problem with having a bunch of Boomers around is of course the social media posting aspect.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      You have to distinguish things that are age dependent (generic about 20 year olds at different times) as opposed to cohort dependent (specific to people born in 2021.) When people born in 2001 are grand(p|m)as I think they'll have a similar relationship to the cohort of 2061. That is, there will be some things 2061ers will want to share with them and other things 2061ers won't. There is some cohort ⨯ age interaction, for instance the boomer cohort has been so large that some tv viewing slots are saturated for ads about "you might not be getting all the medicare benefits you deserve" to the point that it drives away other viewers.

saul_goodman 5y ago

Ha, nice to see LambdaMOO get a mention. It still exists and still has users.

dang 5y ago
A bit of LambdaMOOness on HN over the years: LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments) Lambda Moo Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167 - July 2019 (1 comment) Lambda MOO Programming Resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327975 - Feb 2018 (1 comment) Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439 - April 2017 (15 comments)

mbg721 5y ago

The biggest thing that seems different to me now is that in Thing To Design For #1, non-portable reputation is basically dead. You now live in a gossip-loving small town whose population is the whole world; if you cheat at the wrong thing, whether it's your wife or poker or whatever, you're at the mercy of the doxxers.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I can see plenty of people getting away with bad behavior. You can even become president these days. So it's not just about morality.

kumarvvr 5y ago

"Nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy" Yup. This is how vote banks work. Seed the idea of an external enemy to a group of loosely cohesive group and suddenly they become like a huge entity difficult to be reasoned with.

teddyh 5y ago
The outgroup defines the ingroup.
- stinkytaco 5y ago
  My dad teaches a world religion class and does a unit on religious restrictions (kosher, halal, etc.). He says one of the hardest things to get across to people, even non-religious people, is that rule systems like these are not about practical considerations, they are about defining who is "in" and who is "out". In a time where religion is no longer analogous with ethnicity, this is just not something people really understand anymore.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    The difficult thing about it is that I personally have an aversion to this. Basically makes me always appear difficult because I hate being defined.

mehak402 5y ago

Wow, absolutely brilliant.

baybal2 5y ago

The essence of class warfare. Peasants gang up, and go pogroming their baron. Few month later, they fight for who will be taking his place. Discipline is the only remedy.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Shirky is great. So many of his posts and speeches have become classics.

throwaway_2047 5y ago

Maybe tangential. Now in the society we have 2 + 2 might not equal four, a man cannot be "assumed" "he", reverse discrimination, etc. edit: I total understand why I'm getting down-voted. I think what I'm trying to say is, the US is designed to be free and inclusive. At least that's how I understand it. And there are always opposite voices. But, as I perceive it, the politically correct thing seems to be over-correcting the "wrong".

openfuture 5y ago

Tragedy of the commons is the killer of decentralization since day 1. Try polluting the shared space around your building (with clutter for example) and see how long it takes for you to be censored. Self-censoring is how we maintain our liberty to pollute but it can go too far though; some deep-pocket people can largely avoid feedback because no one dares to go against them. There is always some tension between censorship and pollution, our goal is to minimize both so we can give ourselves space to breathe and live. This is why we create law. Law should be created when the cost of censorship is lower than the cost of pollution. Consider nude beach vs downtown big city, pollution and censorship inverts, law is similar and we need more local law and more aggressive refactoring. Enforcing law is a communal effort and also local. We need better tools to accomplish this. But they are rapidly emerging fwict so hopefully these things become actionable soon.

hawski 5y ago
I now what you mean, but I just wanted to add something to your one example. What do you mean by "nude beach vs downtown big city"? There are parks in some European cities where you can sunbath in the nude. I guess it is still an example of this, because it is getting less common, because of globalization and risk of being recorded for the whole world to see.
- openfuture 5y ago
  I ment that it is likely that you are expected to self-censor nudity (by law) in a city while you are censoring signaling on a nude beach (or in any nudist place).
eevilspock 5y ago
As you seem to suggest in your last para, Law is useful, but also insufficient. It is often too rigid and cold. It is easily subverted, selectively applied or conveniently re-interpreted by whoever has more power. Two cultures can have the same constitution yet produce greatly divergent results. You can see this in the failed democracy revolutions of the last 20 years. You can see this in comparing the state of American democracy today with the state of America democracy in the 60s. Both were tumultuous times, but the culture is far more selfist now than then. I'm a socialist, but I'd take a socialist culture (defined by people genuinely giving the common good priority) on top of a free-market capitalist economy and political system over a individualist/selfist culture on top of a socialist economy and political system any day. The former will actively work to justly distribute resources and opportunity despite the dark tendencies of capitalism and free markets, while the latter will quickly devolve into a farce of socialism. Progress is ultimately about the progress of Culture. "Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity, and principles of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, they can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment, at each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction." ~ Cloud Atlas

jaynate 5y ago

Is there a TL;DR?

ogennadi 5y ago
From the conclusion, "Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software... is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse. The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly."
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  Thanks for the summary.

ogennadi 5y ago

"It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves. Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong... The user of social software is the group, not the individual."

z3t4 5y ago

The read to write ratio on a internet forum is about 100 to one, so if you got 200 people there will be 2 ppl talking to each other. Usually the same two people. The critical mass for an online community is around 1000 ppl. Ohh and you need moderators. Cant even have a presidential debate without moderators, so good luck having 1000 people together without strict rules. It will eventually attract the worst kind of people. The rules and mechanics of the thing the ppl gather for will reflect on the group, so its actually possible to indirectly steer the community...

Terretta 5y ago

What a great nugget: > I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly. This was 2003, and Butterfield is still turning side tools from MMOs you never heard of into genre defining brands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Ludicorp_and_Flickr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Ludicorp_a...

zygy 5y ago
Had to check the year to realize this was referring to Flickr and not Slack :)