A year and a half ago I suggested, in a speech at the Etech conference called A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, that…
It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves [against rogue users].
Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube [of individual and group effects] flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
I think we’ve all been to meetings where everyone had a really good time, we’re all talking to one another and telling jokes and laughing, and it was a great meeting, except we got nothing done. Everyone was amusing themselves so much that the group’s goal was defeated by the individual interventions.
The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user’s point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the “group is its own worst enemy” style attacks from within.
I’ve just put up another piece on this subject — Group As User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software — about what we can learn from the history of flaming in mailing lists and other conversational spaces:
Flaming is one of a class of economic problems known as The Tragedy of the Commons. Briefly stated, the tragedy of the commons occurs when a group holds a resource, but each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. (The original essay used the illustration of shepherds with common pasture. The group as a whole has an incentive to maintain the long-term viability of the commons, but with each individual having an incentive to overgraze, to maximize the value they can extract from the communal resource.)
In the case of mailing lists (and, again, other shared conversational spaces), the commonly held resource is communal attention. The group as a whole has an incentive to keep the signal-to-noise ratio low and the conversation informative, even when contentious. Individual users, though, have an incentive to maximize expression of their point of view, as well as maximizing the amount of communal attention they receive. It is a deep curiosity of the human condition that people often find negative attention more satisfying than inattention, and the larger the group, the likelier someone is to act out to get that sort of attention.
However, proposed responses to flaming have consistently steered away from group-oriented solutions and towards personal ones. The logic of collective action, alluded to above, rendered these personal solutions largely ineffective. Meanwhile attempts at encoding social bargains weren’t attempted because of the twin forces of door culture (a resistance to regarding social features as first-order effects) and a horror of censorship (maximizing individual freedom, even when it conflicts with group goals.)
The piece goes on to contrast wiki and weblogish ways of avoiding flaming, and uses that as input for suggesting a number of possible experiments with social form.
1. Steven Clift on November 5, 2004 11:54 AM writes...
Back in 1994 E-Democracy figured out how to keep a political e-mail list with _dislike_ minds from completely exploding into flame wars.
1. Require people to sign their real names
2. Limit people to no more than two posts a day.
3. Provide a set of rules that can be enforced by a forum manager that avoid the labor intensive need for pre-moderation of posts.
It works. But we've never been able to convince other to use these rules. Why? I think it is because the people who my host something similar think the Internet is about "freedom" for the individual over the value of the online community to the group. We focus on the group.
We've taken our model local and are funding some new open source software completion that will take things the next step while not sacrificing our use of the only truly sticky and low common denominator M2M medium - e-mail. See:
http://e-democracy.org/center/if.html
http://e-democracy.org/uk
Steve
Permalink to Comment2. Nancy White on November 5, 2004 12:19 PM writes...
Great piece and one which resonates with my experience. Finding the place between software and processes designed for groups, but essentially experienced by individuals is a huge issue in my practice.
I'm curious - I think you are speaking here mostly of large, open groups. Do you think the dynamics are similar to closed distributed groups? Are there lessons and paralells from F2F we should pay attention to?
Permalink to Comment3. phil jones on November 6, 2004 10:50 PM writes...
Yep, another Clay classic.
Semi-related : Ever since reading this (http://news.com.com/2008-1082-5065298.html) I've been wondering what Microsoft are up to in this field.
Permalink to Comment4. phil jones on November 6, 2004 10:57 PM writes...
Oh, and Clay, if any of your students want to play with Typed Threaded Discussion, I put the (very, very basic) source-code up :-)
Permalink to Commenthttp://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?TypedThreadedDiscussion
5. Jay Fienberg on November 8, 2004 9:12 PM writes...
"Get a room" is a great example of how, in physical space, we can affect a transition from a common space to a private space, or otherwise stop misuse of a common space.
Part of this affect is predicated on a sense of--and communication of, turf. Mailing lists and online discussion forums, I think, often fail to make clear whose turf it is and what is expected of those who enter it.
By "make clear", I mean the whole interface and context of interactions--with a standard mailing list, I don't think it is possible for the turf to be made clear in this way.
Slashdot and Craigslist have a lot of good turf marking. Blogs let individuals have their own turf. And, I think there is some interesting possibilities in discussion spacecs that share borders with blogs to provide transitions between common+free and individual+free spaces.
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