Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Enemy

[Patashu]

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

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.