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.

[...]

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.

Notes, as promised:

1. Social software is software that supports long-lived groups. This a newer and more interesting phenomenon than most other types of software; we’re still working out the design principles
2. Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?
   1. W.R. Bion’s “Experiences in Groups” describes how neurotics in group therapy sessions would act in unconscious concert to thwart the goals of the group.
   2. In a group setting, people have deeply-programmed responses (constructive and pathological) both as individuals and as members of a group.
   3. Group tendencies that remove focus from the purpose of a group (depending on the purpose, of course) include sexual pairing, vilification of external enemies, and religious veneration.
   4. Defending against these tendencies to focus group interaction requires structure. Constitution, charters, or norms of some sort.
   5. Lots of other pathological examples given: CommuniTree, LambdaMOO: The social experiment has gone awry so many times, and we haven’t really learned.
3. Part Two: Why now?
   1. “Because it’s time.” Ha ha.
   2. Trial by error: Blogs, not Geocities. Et cetera.
   3. Small Pieces Loosely joined. The web has made all these parts of social interaction independent, allowing for more experimentation. The example of a conference call with IRC and wiki back-channels is given.
4. Part Three: What can we take for granted?
   1. So a group is its own worst enemy and its social interactions can follow pre-existing tendencies. Technology will both guide those interactions and be at their mercy.
   2. Three Things to Accept
      1. You cannot completely separate technical and social issues (e.g. “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.”)
      2. Members are different than users (e.g. the “Old Hats” list re: alt.folklore.urban.)
      3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations (e.g. soc.culture.tibet voted down by Chinese students.)
   3. Four Things to Design For
      1. Handles users can invest in. Switching identities has to be weird. Don’t worry; communities will naturally take this seriously if you make it apparent. The brain has a great, hard-wired emotional response mechanism that will serve as reputation system if you just provide handles. “If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are.”
      2. Members in good standing (e.g. “Member since”, karma, sponsor-linked handles)
      3. Barriers to participation. “The user of social software is the group, not the individual.”
      4. Spare the group from scale. More than a dozen, less than hundreds. Segment your content, make the medium self-regulating (IRC), or even shut off new member page when huge influxes of n00bs arrive (Metafilter.)

Related Posts:

• Web 2.0 Notes: “Designing Social Websites” (April, 2009)
• Web 2.0 Notes: Social Interface Design Patterns (April, 2009)
• Web2.0 Notes: Surfacing Personal Information (April, 2008)
• iPhone Accessibility (September, 2009)
• Web 2.0 Notes: Aza Raskin (Mozilla Labs) on the Future of the Web (April, 2009)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under instructables, society, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.