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mmcirvinMany people have already linked to this insightful speech by Clay Shirky about group-interaction software, but it needs to be read by many, so I'll do so too. It's about tragedy-of-the-commons-style problems in anything like a newsgroup or other discussion forum, and the ways that successful fora stave off the rot for a time.
Shirky's speech rings extremely true to me; I've seen these same phenomena in many places, first on BBSes and the William and Mary PRIMOS PARTI system in the 1980s, then on Usenet and elsewhere. PARTI was actually more anarchic than Usenet, because there was no hierarchy of newsgroups, threads and subjects-- just a flat system of "topics" that could be created at any time by anybody, which led to bizarre forms of abuse such as topic-creation wars.
At one point he mentions the lack of a barrier to entry that "killed Usenet." Usenet's death is an exaggeration, but it's certainly suffered from scale problems, and large parts of it have necrotized. Of course there are bits of Usenet that are still functioning to some degree, such as various moderated newsgroups, and a few other oddball places like alt.religion.kibology. But they're all places where there is either some hard barrier to entry (moderation), or at least a core of people who care about maintaining the group and serve a sort of police function, though they'd probably deny this vehemently if asked.
A.r.k is supposed to be an anything-goes kind of place ("You're Allowed"), but the old-timers do try to nudge it a little when it gets way out of control, and there's a ritual of baffling newcomers that serves as a soft barrier to entry. The regulars pick on each other sometimes when they feel the conversation is getting boring, and people like Kibo or I will sometimes just start clowning around and posting long comedy pieces to break the ice when a thread threatens to become a hurtful fight or things are just dull. So there's some small protection from passing morons, but also protection from the kinds of internal group problems that Shirky is talking about.
I used to co-moderate the Usenet group sci.physics.research. Most of the time, the basic purpose of moderation was to keep cranks with crazy "disproofs" of Einstein and perpetual motion machines and the like from simply taking over, like they have most of the unmoderated science groups.
But, having gotten used to that function as our primary one, we moderators were completely blindsided in the summer of 2001 when suddenly the normally legitimate posters, the sober and intelligent scientists and students, divided into two factions (over something that is not important here) and started fighting with each other. It was extremely difficult to deal with, because the subject of the dispute was itself a legitimate topic of discussion, and because posts would often begin with several paragraphs of dense technical jargon and seem to be neutral in tone, then suddenly degenerate into name-calling two-thirds of the way down; you had to read the whole thing extremely carefully. There was no assuming that somebody who seemed to know what he was talking about was all right. And the moment an insulting post slipped through, the target of the insult would demand the public right of reply-- which right we could not allow, because there would be no end to it. Each side in the fight assumed that we sympathized with the other side, of course. It only burned out when everyone in the world's attention was suddenly diverted by the September 11 attacks.
For a long time, people with weblogs congratulated themselves about how much more civil the conversation was in the "blogosphere" than it was on Usenet. But it was really only because blogs were a younger medium. The open comment boards of some popular blogs now resemble the worst of Usenet, and there's been concern voiced about the deterioration of the medium as a whole. One advantage over Usenet is that any given blog can simply go over to a "broadcast" format; just disable comments. Of course, that ends the conversation except in a more distant way, blog-to-blog.
Some blogs have a "trackback" feature that allows them to note commentary on other people's blogs. This is, I think, a clever middle ground, because it allows commentary with a soft but nontrivial barrier to entry-- you have to be committed enough to have your own blog, which J. Random Screaming Idiot typically isn't.
I'm fascinated by the idea of soft barriers to entry: rules that don't limit participation strictly to a vetted in-crowd, but are just restrictive enough to keep out casual nuisance-makers. The MetaFilter disappearing new-user page that Shirky mentions is one such thing. LiveJournal's system of account creation codes is another. But these barriers to entry only save you from outside interlopers and massive new-user scaling problems, not from things arising from the dynamics of the people who already seem to be OK; for that you need this second level of committed core people.
I was extremely leery of getting any sort of blog that had a free comment board, because I had already resigned as a sci.physics.research moderator to get away from the utterly thankless, tedious, often distasteful task of serving as a newsgroup cop in my spare time. By default, LiveJournal lets even unregistered users post anonymously, but it's possible to restrict comments to registered LiveJournal users or to friends without turning off comments entirely. So far, it hasn't been much of a problem, but I'm glad I've got those options.
Shirky's speech rings extremely true to me; I've seen these same phenomena in many places, first on BBSes and the William and Mary PRIMOS PARTI system in the 1980s, then on Usenet and elsewhere. PARTI was actually more anarchic than Usenet, because there was no hierarchy of newsgroups, threads and subjects-- just a flat system of "topics" that could be created at any time by anybody, which led to bizarre forms of abuse such as topic-creation wars.
At one point he mentions the lack of a barrier to entry that "killed Usenet." Usenet's death is an exaggeration, but it's certainly suffered from scale problems, and large parts of it have necrotized. Of course there are bits of Usenet that are still functioning to some degree, such as various moderated newsgroups, and a few other oddball places like alt.religion.kibology. But they're all places where there is either some hard barrier to entry (moderation), or at least a core of people who care about maintaining the group and serve a sort of police function, though they'd probably deny this vehemently if asked.
A.r.k is supposed to be an anything-goes kind of place ("You're Allowed"), but the old-timers do try to nudge it a little when it gets way out of control, and there's a ritual of baffling newcomers that serves as a soft barrier to entry. The regulars pick on each other sometimes when they feel the conversation is getting boring, and people like Kibo or I will sometimes just start clowning around and posting long comedy pieces to break the ice when a thread threatens to become a hurtful fight or things are just dull. So there's some small protection from passing morons, but also protection from the kinds of internal group problems that Shirky is talking about.
I used to co-moderate the Usenet group sci.physics.research. Most of the time, the basic purpose of moderation was to keep cranks with crazy "disproofs" of Einstein and perpetual motion machines and the like from simply taking over, like they have most of the unmoderated science groups.
But, having gotten used to that function as our primary one, we moderators were completely blindsided in the summer of 2001 when suddenly the normally legitimate posters, the sober and intelligent scientists and students, divided into two factions (over something that is not important here) and started fighting with each other. It was extremely difficult to deal with, because the subject of the dispute was itself a legitimate topic of discussion, and because posts would often begin with several paragraphs of dense technical jargon and seem to be neutral in tone, then suddenly degenerate into name-calling two-thirds of the way down; you had to read the whole thing extremely carefully. There was no assuming that somebody who seemed to know what he was talking about was all right. And the moment an insulting post slipped through, the target of the insult would demand the public right of reply-- which right we could not allow, because there would be no end to it. Each side in the fight assumed that we sympathized with the other side, of course. It only burned out when everyone in the world's attention was suddenly diverted by the September 11 attacks.
For a long time, people with weblogs congratulated themselves about how much more civil the conversation was in the "blogosphere" than it was on Usenet. But it was really only because blogs were a younger medium. The open comment boards of some popular blogs now resemble the worst of Usenet, and there's been concern voiced about the deterioration of the medium as a whole. One advantage over Usenet is that any given blog can simply go over to a "broadcast" format; just disable comments. Of course, that ends the conversation except in a more distant way, blog-to-blog.
Some blogs have a "trackback" feature that allows them to note commentary on other people's blogs. This is, I think, a clever middle ground, because it allows commentary with a soft but nontrivial barrier to entry-- you have to be committed enough to have your own blog, which J. Random Screaming Idiot typically isn't.
I'm fascinated by the idea of soft barriers to entry: rules that don't limit participation strictly to a vetted in-crowd, but are just restrictive enough to keep out casual nuisance-makers. The MetaFilter disappearing new-user page that Shirky mentions is one such thing. LiveJournal's system of account creation codes is another. But these barriers to entry only save you from outside interlopers and massive new-user scaling problems, not from things arising from the dynamics of the people who already seem to be OK; for that you need this second level of committed core people.
I was extremely leery of getting any sort of blog that had a free comment board, because I had already resigned as a sci.physics.research moderator to get away from the utterly thankless, tedious, often distasteful task of serving as a newsgroup cop in my spare time. By default, LiveJournal lets even unregistered users post anonymously, but it's possible to restrict comments to registered LiveJournal users or to friends without turning off comments entirely. So far, it hasn't been much of a problem, but I'm glad I've got those options.
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Date: 2003-07-12 06:01 pm (UTC)An excellent point
Date: 2003-07-13 09:07 am (UTC)It's perhaps not as scintillating today as it was around 1996 (probably the newsgroup's creative high point), but that's more because the core people have other interests pulling them away, like writing in stupid LiveJournals. Or maybe I'm just projecting from my own behavior.
I need to update my history page, but I'm not sure how to characterize the current dynamics of a.r.k. It seems to be chugging along all right, especially given the sad state of the rest of Usenet; but general social chat has the upper hand over extreme acts of cleverness, kind of like in '95.