
Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - d0mine
http://clifford.webservepro.com/pipermail/nec/2003-July/000022.html
======
d0mine
It was submitted before (~600 days ago):

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

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189)

I find it to be relevant to the recent discussions on HN.

Here's a summary of the essay by Jon Stahl
[http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2003/10/21/a-group-is-
it...](http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2003/10/21/a-group-is-its-own-
worst-enemy/)

------
mattchew
Heh. Meta discussion that is also on topic.

Note that the article is from 2003. This problem has been around for a long
time. As far as I know, no one has ever really solved it.

One thing I've noticed on Reddit and Digg is that discussion stops being a
conversation when the number of posts gets too high.

It's still a conversation when you have forty or fifty posts: you can read the
whole thing and understand what is being said before you contribute. When
every conversation has over 100 posts, you don't have one conversation any
more. You have a bunch of parallel conversations, often repetitive. Worse, you
start seeing more posts where the author is not trying to talk to another
person, but to stand on a soapbox and make points to the crowd.

I don't think this is (necessarily) a failure of etiquette or good manners,
just a limitation on how much information people can digest in a casual
setting like a web forum.

Of course, as you get more users, you will also get a higher absolute number
of people who are intentional troublemakers or who are incapable of
understanding the community standards. Unfortunately, these guys have a
tendency to completely take over a thread.

One possible solution that I'd like to see someone try is intentional sharding
of the community. Costly, but worth it IMO if it kept some enclaves of high
quality discussion. You could give everyone read only access to any shard,
which would be a decent option for the lurking majority.

Though I don't know of anyone who has solved the problem of community
deterioration, my gut feeling is that it is solvable, someday. At least to the
extent that a good conversation is about good manners and paying attention,
and not about showing up at the place that is currently in fashion.

------
jsomers
I recall PG saying something a while back about a "rollback" feature that
would give you the option to only display those comments and submissions
created by users above a certain account-age/karma threshold. So in effect you
could turn a knob and the site would roll back to, say, the user base from 300
days ago.

I thought it sounded like a pretty elegant (if potentially divisive) solution,
maybe worth serious consideration.

~~~
jacquesm
easy in principle, pretty hard in practice.

It's a recursive problem you'd basically be talking to nobody (and you
wouldn't be reading this comment on your writing either).

After all what's to stop those 'above' you from setting the clock back even
further.

Eventually only those people not using that feature will be able to
communicate, which puts you back at square one.

~~~
chandler
>> It's a recursive problem you'd basically be talking to nobody...

Presuming this was done where each person had fine control over the date, you
may be right. However, suppose each person only had a single binary control,
essentially "hide everyone newer than me."

Furthermore, rather than "newer than me" being defined by a join date specific
to each user, instead it would be defined by the start date specific to a
particular generation of users (the news.yc folks do seem to track mass user
migrations). Visually (bars are new.yc join floods, time moves to the right):

    
    
        time:  |--------|---|------|-----|---...
        group:     1      2    3      4    5
    

Joining early in group three, you would be able to view comments made by those
in groups 1, 2, & 3, which _would_ include people who joined after you in
group 3 (your supposed peers).

This would still provide each user with the ability to view the site more-or-
less as it was upon first arrival, without actually allowing each user fine
granularity in locking everyone out.

(for the record, such a feature isn't as useful as simply applying social &
administrative pressure to keep quality up; I just wanted to mention an
alternative implementation that doesn't turn into an arms race)

~~~
jerf
I've been pondering how to solve this problem for years, and I'm no closer to
solving the problem than anyone else.

Your approach involves freezing the user base so that nobody new can join.
Granted, it's an innovative take on it I've never seen before, but that's
still what it is. The problem with all such approaches is that a certain
percentage of the user base wanders off over time, so your frozen userbase
constantly shrinks. Eventually it gets below the point you care. (Or, in most
cases, below the critical mass of the community.) It only works correctly in
the static case where nobody ever leaves.

In your case you could raise the threshold, but all that does is expose you to
the very things you were trying to get away from. If there was a correlation
between "the people who stuck around" and "quality posters" that _might_ work,
but I _doubt_ such correlations exist. (Then again, I don't know, as my words
imply.)

About two years ago, I scraped a single article with over a thousand comments
on Slashdot and looked at all the UIDs. I theorized that all the old folk
would be gone. Instead what I found is that the UIDs were fairly uniformly
distributed across the entire base, which, if you think about the temporal
distribution of people joining, is actually a moderately interesting result. I
just eyeballed the list of unique UIDs, I didn't actually plot it out, but it
wasn't what I was expecting. Some small core stick around and keep posting,
but over time the vast bulk of the early group leave.

~~~
jacquesm
Over time the vast bulk of _any_ group leave, not just the early adopters.

They'd have to, there are just too many reasons to leave and only a very
limited few to stick around indefinitely.

Eventually everybody dies, gets a life or lands in some sort of crisis in
their lives that changes it to the point where spending time on social sites
is just too expensive.

------
shalmanese
This is the article that inspired me to do my PhD thesis.

~~~
arjunb
nice, what are you researching?

~~~
shalmanese
Design guidelines for social software. How do we best think and reason about
the issues around trying to achieve social goals in software design.

------
dpeq
Everyone involved in community projects should read this (doesn't matter
whether online or offline)

------
kwamenum86
audio available?

