

The Organism Will Do What It Pleases - stalled
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/the-organism-will-do-what-it-damn-well-pleases.html

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luu
I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this.
It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community
wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of _not_ doing
that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content,
and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would
now be closed before they could pick up steam.

I can't be the only person who notices this; pretty much HN post that features
SO includes a litany of complaints about them. Even if the original post isn't
a complaint, the top thread in the post will probably be a complaint,
regardless of how relevant that is to the topic.

My point isn't that what SO is doing is wrong. It's that what they're doing
seems to go against the wishes of the vast majority of the community. Jeff
even links to a post of his that basically says "you shouldn't always listen
to the community". So, when do you listen and when do you ignore? Advice that
consists of "sometimes you should do X and sometimes you shouldn't" seems
trivially true for pretty much any real-world X.

~~~
nelsonweiss
I don't think Mr. Atwood is suggesting that you bow to what the community
wants, but rather that you implement systems to facilitate what they're
already doing anyway.

That aside, and regardless of if SO is going about topic policing in the right
way, I think this bit from a guest post[1] by Randy Farmer might hint at why
they're doing what they do.

"As user-generated content grows, content moderation of some sort is always
required: typically, either employees scan every submission or the site’s
operators deploy a reputation system to identify bad content. Simply removing
the bad content isn’t usually good enough-most sites depend on search engine
traffic, on advertising revenue, or both. To get search traffic, external
sites must link to the content, and that means the quality of the content has
to be high enough to earn those links."

[1] [http://www.communityguy.com/2010/04/01/guest-post-theres-
a-w...](http://www.communityguy.com/2010/04/01/guest-post-theres-a-whole-
lotta-crap-out-there/)

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charlieflowers
Ironically, I don't think Stackoverflow does this very well.

It's a good article, and the point of researching every wheel ever is a good
point well made.

But as a long-time Stackoverflow user, I've been frustrated time and time
again by cases where extremely valuable content _emerges_ on StackOverflow,
but then the moderators come along and kill it because "it is not the defined
purpose of this site."

Now they have the right to define the rules & purpose for their own site. It
wouldn't bother me so much if the content they were killing wasn't so
_fantastic_. But I have seen so many deep, excellent, rich blobs of technical
content get cut out and cast aside, for the sake of adherence to some
superficial guideline.

It seems to be exactly the _opposite_ of "seeing what your users are doing,
then helping them do it."

~~~
codinghorror
Well, as an extreme, and just for the purposes of setting boundaries, consider
the case of pornography. Wildly popular.

It's sort of an open secret just how much traffic on Reddit comes from their
NSFW subreddits: see
<https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/154144207383171072>

Should popular things always be encouraged?

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-
popul...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/)

~~~
kemayo
The post you link to in that tweet only mentions one NSFW subreddit in the top
25, though. It's not a very good example of your point.

~~~
codinghorror
True. In the original tweet I said literal or figurative porn, where
figurative porn would be stuff that's overtly Digg-style entertainment junk
food.

Maybe this is a better list:

<http://redditlist.com/index.php>

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aptwebapps
Back in the day I spent way too much time keeping up with the MUD-DEV mailing
list. There were a lot of discussions that touched on these topics, although
not always as constructively as Atwood does here.

Here's an old post by Raph Koster that talks about how to deal with kewl
d00ds. I was reminded of it because Koster referred to them as genetic
algorithms with respect to bug/exploit finding. It's a bit of a tangent but
there are some similarities.

<http://nilgiri.net/MUD-Dev-archive/15729.html>

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valuegram
"We noticed early in the Stack Overflow beta that users desperately wanted to
reply to each other, and were cluttering up the system with "answers" that
were, well, not answers to the question. Rather than chastize them for doing
it wrong – stupid users! – we added the commenting system to give them a
method of annotating answers and questions for clarifications, updates, and
improvements."

This is excellent advice not just for online ventures, but for business in
general. Too much time is spent making rules and regulations to prevent
customers from taking certain actions, when a lot more can be gained by
understanding what your customers are trying to do naturally, and finding a
way to support that.

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DodgyEggplant
must read about it, for any social site developer:
<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

~~~
Tyr42
Good link, very interesting.

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kenjackson
Curious, is there any video of expert D&D players playing? I used to be a big
DM in my area back in the day (probably around 1981/82), but since the
internet wasn't as prevelant there was a lot less communication about how the
game was supposed to be played (and I wasn't in a large metro area -- so I
pretty much set the rules for the town).

To this day, I'm curious as to how the game should actually be played.

~~~
thurn
Wizards of the Coast often puts up videos of celebrity D&D games:
<http://www.youtube.com/user/DNDWizards>. There's a televised game at PAX
every year, for example.

~~~
kenjackson
Thanks. That was perfect. I actually feel really good about the campaigns I
ran now. :-)

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Sniffnoy
Hm? MUD is older than Habitat, right?

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Heliosmaster
Exactly like Mundo

