“A Group is its Own Worst Enemy”
We’re developing a new set of features at Instructables, with the potential of making it easier for many new users to interact with (and get useful information from) the site. With that lowered bar, however, comes an increase in the many problems of social software and group interactions online. To prepare, I’ve been reading about a lot of similar features on other sites.
While surfing, I came across this entertaining piece by Clay Shirky: a 2003 ETech talk entitled “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.” I’ve included a snippet below; click through to see my outline, which I created simply as a crib sheet to refer back to in the future.
Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.
The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.
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The patterns here, I am suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for, are givens. Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you can start going out and building on top of that the interesting stuff that I think is going to be the real result of this period of experimentation with social software.
