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Underground > Policy & Help >

A group is its own worst enemy...

08:07 / 26.07.03

Can I encourage everyone to read this article by Clay Shirky: A Group is its own worst enemy. It's basically, in summary, what I've been shouting at everyone for the last year and a half only written down coherently in a way that some people might actually believe:

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups. Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

That's what we developed our distributed moderation system for - to defend ourselves from ourselves.

Tryphena Absent

12:03 / 26.07.03

I haven't finished it yet but that is an extremely interesting article in light of the mechanics of this board in particular. The structure of the board, the examples used, they fit particularly well and the psychology behind it's fascinating. Perhaps someone could start a headshop thread on it?

I was wondering if there's anything similar on the introduction of newbies and why people gravitate towards certain communities?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

16:28 / 26.07.03

The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion.

If I understand this correctly, then I agree with it completely. In the past attempts to change anything on this board have been a struggle because, I feel, that people have assumed that what's best for the individual will automatically be best for the board. In the case of everyone's favourite little troll the best thing for the board is obviously that he leaves and never returns, and there was a lot of resistance on the grounds of the individual's freedom to say what he or she wants.

It's a terrible thing to think that maybe Warren Ellis's Stalin tactics were perhaps the better idea after all...

But perhaps when these issues come up in future we need to wonder whether our view is what we think best for ourselves and whether the best thing for the board might be something quite different.

I liked what he had to say about handles and user IDs as I've been rather concerned about this, especially in the light of the 'let me give everyone a new name' silliness which, when I came back to it a few days later seemed to have devolved into everyone changing their name to Flux (And Nick finally changed his name, isn't that a sign of the apocalypse or something?!). I'd quite like it if there was some sort of history function on user names so that you have some chance of working out who someone was once. Maybe keeping the last three or five names, although I'm sure that people will then insist on changing their name x+1 times so people have no idea but then they're all Doomlords anyway, so...

Thanks for this Tom, will definitely need to read it again a few times...

17:29 / 26.07.03

I'd quite like it if there was some sort of history function on user names so that you have some chance of working out who someone was once. Maybe keeping the last three or five names ...

I agree with Our Lady's suggestion here; what do others think?

I also read the whole article through once and am interested in the mix of technology and social formation that Shirky explores--I suspect that's what fascinates me about this place. His discussion of how intertwined the two things are is very helpful. Since even a table is technology, it's an important way to think about any group interaction.
Fascinating.

I'm especially interested in What makes for not just a "just" society, a "free" society, but one that nurtures "good things" in people, and helps people bring out the best in others. To me, the best about the 'lith in general, the "good things" that I like to see, are 1) intelligence, 2) creativity, and 3) sharp senses of humor, wit 4) and some delicate balance between strong opinions and a willingness to re-think, re-evaluate, give ground, and even apologize . . .

I am also interested in his comments about protecting the group from scale. (I suspect this has been covered elsewhere, but what is the ideal size, do you folks think, especially you in the 'core group,' for a place like Barbelith?)

Our Lady of The Two Towers

18:45 / 26.07.03

It's hard to say because, for all the super numbers we're up to in terms of people registered, only a fairly small amount of them have posted and only a small amount of them are responsible for most of the discussions that go on here. Getting them involved so as to counter the eternal 'Is Barbelith Dying' is one of the perenial mysteries.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:56 / 27.07.03

Like Anna de L, I haven't read the whole thing yet but, although I'm probably a little biased because this place is the extent of my knowledge of boards, it does seem to be extremely apt.

I particularly like Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.)

19:33 / 28.07.03

This bit:
2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."

I'm on the fence about whether or not this is a design or accepting. Because in a way I think members in good standing will rise. But more and more of the systems I'm seeing launching these days are having some kind of additional accretion so you can tell how much involvement members have with the system.

Might be the most pertinent to 'round here.

It's all very us & them, though.

As well as this:

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. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

Hmm.

Smacks of fascism. I'm not sure it's escapable though. Is it?

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I wonder.. he ends up talking about how scale is the enemy of conversation, which we've already seen here.

I wonder if there was some way to split the big B into its subfora... if that would help fight the Scale demon back... or, if the kind of self-selecting that goes on here (read: freakiness, cliquesque in-jokery or the appearance of same) will take care of Scale for us.

Regrettable Juvenilia

09:30 / 29.07.03

We used to have a tool for showing 'good standing' - the 'stars' system, whereby every body had a number of stars by their name and you could 'rate' any other member. It was hugely controversial and ultimately unpopular - but back then, it was also fairly pointless, as everyone loved each other so much that we were all 5-star generals...

21:45 / 29.07.03

There is a legitimate question around the relationship between the individual and the collective that's been an ongoing tension now for hundreds of years. In my opinion you can reconsider it in these ways - civilisation is the sacrifice of some aspects of individual freedom of agency in return for some kind of greater compensation and security -ie. people are less likely to be killed in a situation where people agree to give up the freedom to murder.

So in my opinion, the rules of the structure and architecture of the message-board are almost exactly the same in principle as the implicit rules and traditions of civilised life. Now here's the kicker - civilisation operates on the principle of gradual accretion of rules and checks and balances, while message boards - at the moment - have their structures imposed from outside - which probably explains our resistance to them.

22:36 / 29.07.03

I'd say instead that the likelihood of a call for regulation would be highest in deferential cultures like that of England. Other cultures see freedom and personal responsibility as markers of civilisation. The US is arguably an example, in part at least. It is also the culture that first populated the internet, providing an alternative explanation as to why we're not so happy with on-line regulation.

22:46 / 29.07.03

Mmmm, there's a Head Shop discussion...

Whisky Priestess

12:56 / 30.07.03

No Freedom Please, We're British?

pointless and uncalled for

18:31 / 31.07.03

This article does seem to support my own opinion that Barbelith may fare well by adopting clear and simple policy. It is already the situation that, in addition to the moderation format, we operate with a set of tacit rules.

20:05 / 31.07.03

Maybe keeping the last three or five names, although I'm sure that people will then insist on changing their name x+1 times so people have no idea

Saving the last X names which have posted Y times fixes that one neatly.