3 ms·

[cue rambling] So you want to see what interesting people do. How do you do that? You go to the places interesting people go to and stand around them, looking

by m_eiman 17y ago

[cue rambling] So you want to see what interesting people do. How do you do that? You go to the places interesting people go to and stand around them, looking over their shoulders to see what they're up to. All is nice and well, except others are also interested in what the interesting people do, so more and more people are starting to look over their shoulders, and the place gets too crowded. Now the interesting people tire of all the people staring at them all the time, so they find a new place to hang out - who wants to be where everyone else is, after all? They find a nice little place where they're just about alone, but soon a few of their hangarounds start finding their way to the new place, and it all repeats. After a few rounds of this, the interesting people start going to private clubs with strict guest list policies, and the problem of hangarounds disappears. Now they can be interesting without distractions, but nobody will actually know any of the interesting stuff they're doing, since it's all in private, and they cease to be interesting. So... What what I trying to say? I guess it's a variation of the curse of being a public person: people take interest in what you're doing and want to interact with you, but they do it all the time and not just when it suits you. In the end you either go Britney Spears or you go Howard Hughes.

jerf 17y ago
You're not addressing the other half of Scoble's point, which is not just lamenting that forums inevitably break down, but that blogs and Twitter and other such explicit lists offer a way out. I've been making this point for about eight years now, and while I (obviously) will still participate in forums such as this, I do it with the certain knowledge that it is only a matter of time before it falls apart and there is nothing I can do to prevent that, only delay it sometimes. Meanwhile, my Google Reader remains as high quality now as it was when I first started using RSS nearly ten years ago. Not a whiff of degradation, because when a blog goes south, that blog gets evicted. If anything it's better. It's a different type of community, and it isn't perfect in every way, but it scales radically better. A forum falls apart sometimes in the mere tens of active users, certainly by the thousands, but an RSS feed is just sitting there, serenely serving out. (This is part of the reason I'm so against things like SideWiki, which threaten to bring forum user economics to every part of the web. Yes, to some extent you can just "not use it", but even the overflow of crap from the forumification of everything can reduce the value of a blog to you. This is also why I don't think it is necessary for a blog to have a comment section; why forcibly attach a forum to something that is superior in its own way?)
- m_eiman 17y ago
  I'll try to make a point that I had in my head while I was writing my ramble. In the forum case, the method of finding interesting persons is to go where they are. It's the same mechanism that drives the crowds to popular clubs and pubs - people want to be where it's cool to be. That will lower the percentage of cool people there in that place, and the cool people will move on to the next place. The clubs try to counter this by having guest lists and bouncers that only let you in if you're cool enough (that's not an easy thing to do online). In the RSS case, you're not trying to find cool people by going to their favourite place, instead you go to their homes. Which is all nice and well, except you have another problem: how do you find out where the cool people live? Especially if you get all your input from the world through the RSS feeds, you're well on your way to getting a very limited view of the world (sort of like only watching Fox News, or one of the other more or less biased news outlets). Your RSS sources will act as gate keepers by only linking to what they find interesting, which can lead to a narrowing spiral. In short: RSS is very useful, but make sure you're not only listening to a single subset of opinions. To prevent this I do what I suspect what most people here do: I keep track of my favourites using RSS and look for new stuff on HN, Reddit, etc.
  - jerf 17y ago
    While true (and that last bit is indeed exactly what I do), I would observe that viewpoint narrowing is not an RSS or forum thing. You can choose to read a wide array of viewpoints and visit diverse forums, or you can read a narrow array of RSS feeds and visit forums that basically consist of people who all agree and occasionally fend off forays from someone who disagrees. It's not an RSS or forum issue, it's a personal choice issue. Monolithic forums exist everywhere, not least of which is comment sections on some blogs.
  - alan-crowe 17y ago
    I'm trying to develop http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html around the idea of shared hierarchical white lists. this avoids narrowness because you can set the tree depth deep enough to put lots of people on your whitelist. Scobleizer complains about the other people inviting other people into your life. Outer Circle suffers from this problem, but you do get to control who gets to invite other people into your life.
hernan7 17y ago
I don't thinks it's a matter of the superior people vs the rabble. I'm sure a forum of 100 random YouTube commenters would be infinitely better than the YouTube comments section. It's a broken windows problem -- you see a forum where it's all lolcatting and meme-dropping then you either ignore them or join in -- at some point, there's no fixing a broken forum.

by m_eiman 17y ago

jerf 17y ago

You're not addressing the other half of Scoble's point, which is not just lamenting that forums inevitably break down, but that blogs and Twitter and other such explicit lists offer a way out. I've been making this point for about eight years now, and while I (obviously) will still participate in forums such as this, I do it with the certain knowledge that it is only a matter of time before it falls apart and there is nothing I can do to prevent that, only delay it sometimes. Meanwhile, my Google Reader remains as high quality now as it was when I first started using RSS nearly ten years ago. Not a whiff of degradation, because when a blog goes south, that blog gets evicted. If anything it's better. It's a different type of community, and it isn't perfect in every way, but it scales radically better. A forum falls apart sometimes in the mere tens of active users, certainly by the thousands, but an RSS feed is just sitting there, serenely serving out. (This is part of the reason I'm so against things like SideWiki, which threaten to bring forum user economics to every part of the web. Yes, to some extent you can just "not use it", but even the overflow of crap from the forumification of everything can reduce the value of a blog to you. This is also why I don't think it is necessary for a blog to have a comment section; why forcibly attach a forum to something that is superior in its own way?)

m_eiman 17y ago
I'll try to make a point that I had in my head while I was writing my ramble. In the forum case, the method of finding interesting persons is to go where they are. It's the same mechanism that drives the crowds to popular clubs and pubs - people want to be where it's cool to be. That will lower the percentage of cool people there in that place, and the cool people will move on to the next place. The clubs try to counter this by having guest lists and bouncers that only let you in if you're cool enough (that's not an easy thing to do online). In the RSS case, you're not trying to find cool people by going to their favourite place, instead you go to their homes. Which is all nice and well, except you have another problem: how do you find out where the cool people live? Especially if you get all your input from the world through the RSS feeds, you're well on your way to getting a very limited view of the world (sort of like only watching Fox News, or one of the other more or less biased news outlets). Your RSS sources will act as gate keepers by only linking to what they find interesting, which can lead to a narrowing spiral. In short: RSS is very useful, but make sure you're not only listening to a single subset of opinions. To prevent this I do what I suspect what most people here do: I keep track of my favourites using RSS and look for new stuff on HN, Reddit, etc.
- jerf 17y ago
  While true (and that last bit is indeed exactly what I do), I would observe that viewpoint narrowing is not an RSS or forum thing. You can choose to read a wide array of viewpoints and visit diverse forums, or you can read a narrow array of RSS feeds and visit forums that basically consist of people who all agree and occasionally fend off forays from someone who disagrees. It's not an RSS or forum issue, it's a personal choice issue. Monolithic forums exist everywhere, not least of which is comment sections on some blogs.
- alan-crowe 17y ago
  I'm trying to develop http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html around the idea of shared hierarchical white lists. this avoids narrowness because you can set the tree depth deep enough to put lots of people on your whitelist. Scobleizer complains about the other people inviting other people into your life. Outer Circle suffers from this problem, but you do get to control who gets to invite other people into your life.

hernan7 17y ago

I don't thinks it's a matter of the superior people vs the rabble. I'm sure a forum of 100 random YouTube commenters would be infinitely better than the YouTube comments section. It's a broken windows problem -- you see a forum where it's all lolcatting and meme-dropping then you either ignore them or join in -- at some point, there's no fixing a broken forum.