Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Enemy

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  • Patashu
    FFR Simfile Author
    FFR Simfile Author
    • Apr 2006
    • 8609
    #1

    Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Enemy

    A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Clay Shirky
    http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
    Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.


    Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I mean you have to accept them. Because if you don't accept them upfront, they'll happen to you anyway. And then you'll end up writing one of those documents that says "Oh, we launched this and we tried it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things. And now we're documenting it so future ages won't make this mistake." Even though you didn't read the thing that was written in 1978.
    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.
    Once a forum, mailing list, etc. grows beyond a critical size, the naive libertarian approach of 'Everyone is equally important' starts to break down. Because joining a group is as easy as signing up you run into problems where 'members' with disproportionately low effort invested in the group have undue nfluence over how its 'productive energy' is spent. If those who speak the loudest get the most attention then you are using the wrong metric.

    Shirky argues that every group needs to empower a 'core' to keep the group well run and that this is inescapably a blend of social and technical issues to be solved - not something that can be solved just by adding features, but by empowering the right people and rules.
    Last edited by Patashu; 09-16-2012, 08:26 PM.
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    • Tarlis
      FFR Player
      • Dec 2004
      • 25
      #2
      Re: Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Enemy

      I agree with this entirety, which is why I make a group with certain numbers but still focus on groups that are small so I can feel like an individual without this collective 'group think'.

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        • Cavernio
          sunshine and rainbows
          • Feb 2006
          • 1987
          #3
          Re: Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Enemy

          I found that a hard read like there was no thesis, or the thesis was poorly defined. A lot of stuff that somehow didn't say much.
          I guess I'm thinking about it a lot though, even though I'm not sure I liked the article.

          -That groups need self-moderation has become standard
          -There are standard forms of forums and groups now. FFR follows it. It's kinda neat that some people have gotten upset about the structure of FFR just recently, (the only time I've ever heard about people getting upset about the form of the forums at all, really.) Like iironiic who is upset about AMAs, the move of the birthday threads too.
          -Early on in the article it says that what it's talking about are essentially tennets of any group. It's never mentioned explicitly that we're only looking at groups that are 100% voluntary.
          -Author said that when a group begins there might be those few moments of unexpectedness. I think I could make that comparison to ANY relationship, probably most notably in romantic relationships. Novel things create novel experiences.
          -Not completely on-board that technical issues must be tied into the social ones.
          -The idea that handles or identity is crucial, aren't there massively popular social websites that exist right now that are specifically still anonymous? It seems to me that the examples he's pulled his tennets from weren't representative of all the possibilities for websites, probably because he assumed we were farther along in the evolution of the internet than we actually were.
          -Twitter seems to defy the size limit he mentions. Probably due to the mandatory short nature of the amount of information passed.

          Overall, his ideas make sense for the majority of groups. However, it is obvious that now, only 10 years later, there are exceptions to his rules.

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