
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf] - froasty
https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf
======
awinter-py
I think fukuyama's book on high + low trust societies is about these topics

heard someone claim in an interview that low and mixed-trust societies
generally turn to surveillance / censorship

'which attributes of a society enable free speech' is a question people we'll
ask seriously + continuously about online communities

------
dang
What's the most important insight in this essay that HN does _not_ line up
well with [1]? When I look at his key points [2], the ones that HN seems to
line up well with are:

 _The place that was founded on open access had too much openness. They had no
way of saying, “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”_

 _Technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There’s no way to
completely separate them. Having good software isn’t enough._

 _Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogeneous
groups._

 _There is always an informal piece of the Constitution. The informal part is
the sense of “how we do it around here.”_

 _Handles the user can invest in. A way for there to be members in good
standing, some way in which good works get recognized. The penalty for
switching doesn’t have to be total, but if I change my handle, I have to lose
some kind of reputation or some kind of context._

Here are points we line up with, but not as much. Note how the first one
overlaps with the last one above—that's because HN straddles this issue
somewhat [3]:

 _I need to associate who’s saying something to me now with previous
conversations. Weak pseudonymity doesn’t work well._

 _You need some barriers to participation, however small. You have to have
some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at
higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities._

I found only one main point where HN differs significantly:

 _You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. The dense,
interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t
supportable at any large scale. Less is different—small groups of people can
engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t._

You might think HN was a good match for this too, because we've never tried to
juice it for growth, and it's a medium-sized forum by current standards.
However, when Shirky says small he means "larger than a dozen but smaller than
a few hundred". He recommends finding ways to factor larger groups into
smaller ones so that richer interactions can happen. This is something we
explicitly do not do, and since HN has millions of readers and tens of
thousands of commenters, it's massive by the standard he was writing about.

This is the non-siloed property of HN [4]. It's probably the single most
influential aspects of the site's design, and it has many counterintuitive
consequences, which I've been writing about lately [5].

[1] I asked this in 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208054)

[2] Several of these quotes are spliced from multiple passages.

[3]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

[4]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20silo&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098)

~~~
pm215
I feel that HN somewhat does the 'factoring into smaller groups' by having
each topic's conversation be pretty clearly separated from each other one's,
and quickly expiring off the frontpage. So the group of people who actually
have a conversation in any given comment page is much smaller than tens-of-
thousands.

~~~
virtue3
During the onset of COVID there were a lot of people jumping to Amazon's
defense of their warehouses. With seemingly deep information about changes
there.

Could have been just amazon employees, might not have been.

I feel similarly about how the discussion goes when people slam Apple.

Are these infiltrators? Or do we have a lot of Amazon and Apple employees? Do
developers usually care that much to protect their company online? (I've never
been in that situation so I can't say).

~~~
dang
These perceptions are extremely easy to imagine based on seeming patterns that
usually boil down to nothing when we look at the data. That's why the site
guidelines ask people not to post insinuations of infiltration, astroturfing,
shillage, etc., at least if there's nothing concrete to go on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20astroturf&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20astroturf&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0)

It's natural for people to post about what they know about from work, and
they're naturally biased in favor of their employer, so that's a thing. Even
more of a thing is just that each $bigco has a fanbase and, let's call it, a
foebase, and the two of them go at it in every $bigco-related thread.

------
dang
If curious see also

2017 (1 comment)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437)

2011
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574)

2011
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547)

2009
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662)

2009
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624)

2008 (1 comment)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189)

2007 (1 comment)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992)

2007
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354)

Also, the LambdaMOO article Shirky goes into was posted here a few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965)

and the "Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat" essay was discussed a bit in 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850)

------
ThomPete
The value of a group is based on the quality of its individuals.

~~~
dang
Unfortunately it's not that simple. High-quality individuals frequently get
into low-quality interactions, especially online.

~~~
cousin_it
People with high knowledge about math don't get into low-quality interactions
about math, no matter the medium. They'll find a way to make it informative.
If an interaction is not informative, it's always because one or both
participants don't know their stuff.

Moderation is important, but it solves a different problem: letting people who
don't know their stuff also participate and benefit without destroying
everything.

~~~
Shared404
IANA expert in social interactions but...

To me it seems like people with a high-quality knowledge can definitely still
get into low-quality interactions, even when it's about a subject they know
inside and out.

Lets say we have two hypothetical mathematicians who both know more math than
the average person. They are both _very_ proud about the amount of math they
know. They happen to bump into each other in a discussion about
$INTERESTING_THEORY (I don't know enough math to know what this would be).
They each pick opposing sides in this discussion, and each become more and
more nonplussed with the others opinion, eventually derailing the conversation
and devolving into a flame war.

Maybe the average person is nicer/more focused on maintaining a useful
conversation than I think, but I have observed this pattern to many times to
think it doesn't show up. That being said, I haven't seen it very often on HN,
so there's evidence for your point still.

