OK, so I was a little hard on the April Fool's stuff, mostly because I was tired of the "Microsoft buys Red Hat"-level jokes on slashdot. One fascinating and explicitly social hack, though, 'MetaFilter HP becomes wiki' was a doozy.
The MetaFilter (MeFi) prank was simple. Matt Haughey, Lord High Potentate of MeFi, switched the home page over to a wiki at midnight, _and people went berserk_. Some (but not all, alas) of the results are on view at
www.metafilter.com/wiki/, but the really interesting part was the process -- I'll quote Matt from email that morning:
Last night around midnight, I grabbed a wiki package and made it the default homepage for metafilter, as a sort of april fools joke, but I had no idea what would happen.
To make it clear, the first page I put up was a modified original wiki page, with info on how to do some wiki text, and I created and formatted about five "posts" with links to sites. I figured it would build from there.
After I made the site live, it only took a couple seconds for the home page to be gone. Every refresh brought an entirely new homepage.
I stayed up until about 2am (and now my cats just woke me up at 6), but it was total unbridled chaos. I've never seen a wiki be so destructive. It wasn't mean though, just child-like, as people "hogged the new microphone" and ran around pasting stuff and wiping out what others had written.
I just awoke to check it out, and *they've come up with rules* now, where you shouldn't delete stuff. Last night, someone was obsessed with posting about "TANIA" while this morning someone's obsessed with "Jon Bonham". In a few hours, who knows who will be linked all over and talked about.
Anyway, I thought it was really interesting to watch it mature (it's like a big bang, basically) and I suspect that by 10pm tonight, they'll have passed the bronze age and appointed a council of elders to approve each page change. Perhaps they'll even figure out a way to turn off new users. :)
And it went on from there -- the home page alone was edited over 2000 times in 10 hours, and many of the posts riffed on MeFi's famously restrictive policies on new users. a policy which meant that when the anarchy of the wiki form was dropped in, it was like a match to dry tinder.
And, as in any iterated social situation, the rules developed even without any enforcement mechanism stronger than communal agreement and the leverage the wiki form provides each user. As they might say on MeFi, I loves me some social software experiments."
1. Marius Coomans on April 6, 2004 3:36 AM writes...
Thanks for that!
Permalink to CommentYou might like to touch up the link to metafilter so it works, though!
2. danny on April 6, 2004 5:30 PM writes...
There's some sort of comparison here with Mark Frauenfelder dropping a single discussion link into Boing Boing yesterday. Ostensibly, the discussion was about ways to stop BB losing money, but there were a *lot* of people who needed the opportunity to complain about the removal of discussions a while back.
Match, fuel, *plumph*.
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