[HN Gopher] A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003)
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003)
Author : NetOpWibby
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-07-02 00:00 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| politelemon wrote:
| What an interesting read. In a way it serves as a warning of all
| the things that can and will go wrong, and you can see the
| equivalents to it in action today, some at an amplified level.
| Not just on the popular social media like FB and IG, but HN and
| reddit too.
|
| The other interesting aspect is how they've gleaned so much
| insight from their relative (to now) limited number of groups and
| communities.
|
| I wonder what they would say in today's online landscape.
| loopz wrote:
| Many communities still live on today, ie. MUDs and other such
| places. Most died when users moved on, especially smaller
| groups. Every such place deal with this.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and
| overrun by these students [who were only interested in what we
| now generally call 'shitposting' and 'trolling']. The place that
| was founded on open access had too much open access, too much
| openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own
| users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much
| freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of
| free speech we meant."_
|
| Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| The more that things change, the more they stay the same!
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| And for those that don't speak this particular dialect of
| social-signalling:
|
| An epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849
| issue of his journal Les Guepes ("The Wasps"). Literally "The
| more it changes, the more it's the same thing."
| mrspeaker wrote:
| And the next paragraph from that:
|
| "But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves
| against being overrun, that was something that they needed to
| have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut
| the site down."
|
| They didn't want to block anyone, so they deleted it. That's
| why we can't have nice things.
| krapp wrote:
| It's unfortunate they chose to engage in mass self-
| deplatforming rather than simply engage in vigorous debate or
| attempt to open a dialog and empathize with the views of
| those they considered guilty of thoughtcrime. Did no one tell
| them that free speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to
| the speech we find most objectionable? That sunlight, not
| censorship, is the best disinfectant?
|
| First they came for the shitposters...
| loopz wrote:
| idiot nya-nya-nya-nya
| bawolff wrote:
| I look forward to hearing Krapp debate this point.
| function_seven wrote:
| Perfect reply to parent comment. Seriously.
| bena wrote:
| The problem is that the shitposters have one thing a lot of
| people doing work don't: time.
|
| There's no time to engage all of them in "vigorous debate"
| or to "open dialogs". Especially people who aren't
| interested in listening. At some point, you realize that
| you have more important things to do and you just stop
| engaging.
| bawolff wrote:
| Debate is what you do to someone you disagree with over a
| matter that has a right and wrong answer.
|
| If i want to talk about quantum physics, and someone else
| wants to talk about cute cat pictures - there is no right
| or wrong answers; you can't debate it. The two people want
| different things. Neither is more right, but its best for
| everyone if they find a group of people who want to do the
| same activity instead of pissing each other off.
| esyir wrote:
| I think where I'd like to draw the line would be on
| platforms and domain restrictions, and possibly decorum
| as well.
|
| Essentially, the smaller and more specialised the
| community, the more leeway they have for moderation
| /censorship.
|
| Conversely, the larger platforms, especially those that
| host enormous proportions of the population, should have
| less control over their users, lest they gain too much
| control over the speech of their users.
|
| Some might argue that this violates the rights of the
| corporation, but I weight the rights of millions of users
| far higher than the rights of a few corporations. This
| goes double for the publishers masquerading as platforms.
| scollet wrote:
| > quantum physics
|
| > cute cat
|
| > neither is more right
|
| There's an awesome joke in here but I can't see it.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| You're complaining that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer
| dollars weren't spent arguing with 15 year-old trolls on
| the internet?
| krapp wrote:
| Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all
| other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends.
| What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech
| simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if
| the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being
| silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name
| of ageism?
|
| What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what
| basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was
| Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus
| Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status
| quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science,
| philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the
| status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon
| whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened
| mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In
| today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured
| by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling
| algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form
| of human culture that still exists.
|
| Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth,
| with unassailable power to determine what speech is or
| isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what
| people can and cannot say, what right do they have to
| dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a
| "troll?"
|
| Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain
| the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself.
| Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as
| Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you
| say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
| - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the
| iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of
| sovereign governments can be erased from history for the
| slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet
| mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few
| centralized platforms on which the majority of all human
| communication now occurs.
|
| We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be
| making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees
| thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the
| Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful
| ignorance and soulless mediocrity.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Bravo, sir, madam, or other-gendered person. Bravo. You
| have successfully parodied the slippery slope of free-
| speech absolutism by equating fifteen year old children
| running around saying curse words to the Inquisition
| hassling Galileo for challenging geocentrism at the
| tender age of fifty-one. I bow to a true master troll; I
| have not seen effort like this put into a parody argument
| since the glorious excesses of talk.bizarre.
| quacked wrote:
| Voltaire didn't say "I disapprove of what you say, but I
| will defend to the death your right to say it", and in
| fact I've only ever seen that quote used to make fun of
| people who naively believe in the "principle of free
| speech", or by people who believe in centrist talking
| points about "cancel culture".
|
| That means that your comment, too, must some kind of
| meta-commentary on trolling, delivered via trolling.
| Assuming the purpose of "trolling" is to incite other
| people to waste time by responding, you are brilliant- I
| wrote a long and involved response to your message before
| realizing that you are probably just pulling my and
| anyone else who reads your message's leg.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Go suck dick you braindamaged retard.
| [deleted]
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Hang yourself, idiot!
| whatshisface wrote:
| Rather than block anyone or shut the site down they should
| have put all of the highschoolers in the Highschool section
| and then _threatened_ to block them if they posted highschool
| stuff in the regular areas. Then nobody has to sit out except
| for people who are specifically motivated by the fact they
| 've been told to not post fart jokes in the group theory
| folder.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This is a pattern that I have seen happen many times before
| and what you usually end up with is one area that is The
| Raging, Unmoderated Shit-Show. Which can end up sprawling
| outside of the site it lives on and become a base for
| organizing mass attacks elsewhere. Seem for example,
| whichever board was decreed the Unmoderated Shit-Show of
| Something Awful, or whichever one 4channers will tell you
| was the Unmoderated Shit-Show of that site while insisting
| the rest of it was perfectly fine and ethical. And since
| that is the sub-board that mostly interacts with the
| outside world, this is the one that will come to define
| your site in the eyes of everyone else: the place that
| bunch of assholes comes from.
|
| Once you get one of those, if you shut it down, it has a
| good chance of having someone invested enough in this
| splinter community to start hosting it somewhere. See for
| instance LJDrama: kicked off of LJ, it became its own site
| and kept on being a great place to go if you wanted to join
| in on piling on top of whoever was today's target.
| saul_goodman wrote:
| Ha, nice to see LambdaMOO get a mention. It still exists and
| still has users.
| [deleted]
| mbg721 wrote:
| The biggest thing that seems different to me now is that in Thing
| To Design For #1, non-portable reputation is basically dead. You
| now live in a gossip-loving small town whose population is the
| whole world; if you cheat at the wrong thing, whether it's your
| wife or poker or whatever, you're at the mercy of the doxxers.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I can see plenty of people getting away with bad behavior. You
| can even become president these days. So it's not just about
| morality.
| z3t4 wrote:
| The read to write ratio on a internet forum is about 100 to one,
| so if you got 200 people there will be 2 ppl talking to each
| other. Usually the same two people. The critical mass for an
| online community is around 1000 ppl.
|
| Ohh and you need moderators. Cant even have a presidential debate
| without moderators, so good luck having 1000 people together
| without strict rules. It will eventually attract the worst kind
| of people.
|
| The rules and mechanics of the thing the ppl gather for will
| reflect on the group, so its actually possible to indirectly
| steer the community...
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 - July 2020 (14
| comments)
|
| _LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29
| comments)
|
| _A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 - June 2017 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Lessons of Lucasfilm 's Habitat (1990)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10
| comments)
|
| _Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 - Sept 2011 (15
| comments)
|
| _A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 - Sept 2011 (8
| comments)
|
| _Ask YC: forums still a viable format (group-enemy problem)?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 - Nov 2009 (6
| comments)
|
| _Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software
| Design_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 - Feb 2009
| (13 comments)
|
| _A group is its own worst enemy..._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 - Feb 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 - May 2007 (1 comment)
|
| _A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 - March 2007 (3
| comments)
|
| Others?
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks for these.
| mehak402 wrote:
| Thanks, this helps!
| kumarvvr wrote:
| "Nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy"
|
| Yup.
|
| This is how vote banks work. Seed the idea of an external enemy
| to a group of loosely cohesive group and suddenly they become
| like a huge entity difficult to be reasoned with.
| teddyh wrote:
| The outgroup defines the ingroup.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| My dad teaches a world religion class and does a unit on
| religious restrictions (kosher, halal, etc.). He says one of
| the hardest things to get across to people, even non-
| religious people, is that rule systems like these are not
| about practical considerations, they are about defining who
| is "in" and who is "out". In a time where religion is no
| longer analogous with ethnicity, this is just not something
| people really understand anymore.
| baybal2 wrote:
| The essence of class warfare.
|
| Peasants gang up, and go pogroming their baron. Few month later,
| they fight for who will be taking his place.
|
| Discipline is the only remedy.
| openfuture wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons is the killer of decentralization since
| day 1.
|
| Try polluting the shared space around your building (with clutter
| for example) and see how long it takes for you to be censored.
| Self-censoring is how we maintain our liberty to pollute but it
| can go too far though; some deep-pocket people can largely avoid
| feedback because no one dares to go against them.
|
| There is always some tension between censorship and pollution,
| our goal is to minimize both so we can give ourselves space to
| breathe and live. This is why we create law. Law should be
| created when the cost of censorship is lower than the cost of
| pollution. Consider nude beach vs downtown big city, pollution
| and censorship inverts, law is similar and we need more local law
| and more aggressive refactoring.
|
| Enforcing law is a communal effort and also local. We need better
| tools to accomplish this. But they are rapidly emerging fwict so
| hopefully these things become actionable soon.
| hawski wrote:
| I now what you mean, but I just wanted to add something to your
| one example. What do you mean by "nude beach vs downtown big
| city"? There are parks in some European cities where you can
| sunbath in the nude. I guess it is still an example of this,
| because it is getting less common, because of globalization and
| risk of being recorded for the whole world to see.
| openfuture wrote:
| I ment that it is likely that you are expected to self-censor
| nudity (by law) in a city while you are censoring signaling
| on a nude beach (or in any nudist place).
| eevilspock wrote:
| As you seem to suggest in your last para, Law is useful, but
| also insufficient. It is often too rigid and cold. It is easily
| subverted, selectively applied or conveniently re-interpreted
| by whoever has more power. Two cultures can have the same
| constitution yet produce greatly divergent results. You can see
| this in the failed democracy revolutions of the last 20 years.
| You can see this in comparing the state of American democracy
| today with the state of America democracy in the 60s. Both were
| tumultuous times, but the culture is far more selfist now than
| then.
|
| I'm a socialist, but I'd take a socialist culture (defined by
| people genuinely giving the common good priority) on top of a
| free-market capitalist economy and political system over a
| individualist/selfist culture on top of a socialist economy and
| political system any day. The former will actively work to
| justly distribute resources and opportunity _despite_ the dark
| tendencies of capitalism and free markets, while the latter
| will quickly devolve into a farce of socialism.
|
| Progress is ultimately about the progress of Culture.
|
| _" Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as
| we understand the theory of relativity, and principles of
| uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives.
| Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is
| headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done
| what I did today. These forces that often remake time and
| space, they can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be,
| begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish.
| Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are
| understood moment to moment, at each point of intersection,
| each encounter, suggest a new potential direction."_
|
| ~ Cloud Atlas
| ogennadi wrote:
| "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. Now, this pulls against the cardinal
| virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong...
|
| The user of social software is the group, not the individual."
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of
| someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to
| tenants
|
| And with the demise of independent investigative journalism in
| the outside world we've seen that relationship devolve into
| feudalism.
| theartfuldodger wrote:
| This is magnificent.
| throwaway_2047 wrote:
| Maybe tangential.
|
| Now in the society we have 2 + 2 might not equal four, a man
| cannot be "assumed" "he", reverse discrimination, etc.
|
| edit: I total understand why I'm getting down-voted. I think what
| I'm trying to say is, the US is designed to be free and
| inclusive. At least that's how I understand it. And there are
| always opposite voices. But, as I perceive it, the politically
| correct thing seems to be over-correcting the "wrong".
| natmaka wrote:
| "Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds
| of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that
| interesting scale of small groups".
|
| Leopold Kohr thesis (such as "Below a certain size, everything
| fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain
| size,everything collapses or explodes") are pertinent.
| amelius wrote:
| > Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or
| accumulates. But beyond a certain size,everything collapses or
| explodes
|
| I suppose that (quasi) monopolists like Google, Amazon, and
| Apple are still to small for that thesis?
| natmaka wrote:
| I agree with 411111111111111's answer: GAFAM are are corps,
| not stable groups. Teams' members are renewed quite
| frequently, this is an unstable setup, in a way constantly
| collapsing/exploding.
|
| I also agree with TheFreim's comment, each corp is a group of
| groups. Alexander Zinoviev wrote that real (useful,
| innovative...) work is always done by a single person or a
| small group. Google, Amazon, Apple and other successful huge
| companies genius and key-to-success is to maintain small
| groups, each as autonomous as possible and producing some
| valuable thing, then to compose their results.
|
| Any productive big institution isn't a perfectly consistent
| and stable machine built with all-tightly-coupled human
| components, but an unstable (constantly renewed)
| patchwork/hodgepodge where a few entities (groups) are
| productive (most aren't), each small and much more free to
| act as they want to than it may appear to the casual
| observer.
|
| In Apple's case S. Jobs was pretty clear about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg , see also
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5enAGG51PQ
| [deleted]
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| These are corporations, not groups of people.
|
| The rule can be observed if you look at groups in that
| corporation.
| ryder9 wrote:
| corporations aren't run and managed by groups of people?
| TheFreim wrote:
| Isn't a corporation just a group of groups?
| twaway wrote:
| "I like Money"
|
| I think it's different
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Chat services usually rot and go the way of MySpace. Remember
| cuseeme, aol instant messenger, icq, irc, Skype, Skype for
| business, Lynq, paltalk, Facebook messenger, tivejo, ...
|
| Facebook was originally where cool kids hang out now grandma
| is on it. Facebook is always buying a competitor or imitating
| one or aiming a service at really young kids to stay ahead of
| the rot.
| opan wrote:
| IRC never totally died. It's decentralized, free software,
| and has better clients than anything newer (XMPP, Matrix).
| I'm in ~100 channels across a few networks. It's also what
| Twitch chat uses, and you can connect to Twitch chats from
| an IRC client.
|
| I think the centralized proprietary stuff is bound to die.
| It was never really built to last. AIM and MSN are truly
| dead. Hopefully Discord dies someday as well.
| tffgg wrote:
| May you define what you mean by "better"
| caddemon wrote:
| I agree a lot of young people don't really use Facebook
| profiles anymore, but most people I know still use Facebook
| messenger. It's easy to find people because most people are
| on there with real name/picture, and the group chats work
| pretty smoothly. Granted I'm a millennial so maybe the
| actual kids these days don't use it at all, but I wouldn't
| lump it in with those dead services.
|
| I actually think for a messenger platform it's probably a
| good thing that even grandma is on there. The problem with
| having a bunch of Boomers around is of course the social
| media posting aspect.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You have to distinguish things that are age dependent
| (generic about 20 year olds at different times) as
| opposed to cohort dependent (specific to people born in
| 2021.)
|
| When people born in 2001 are grand(p|m)as I think they'll
| have a similar relationship to the cohort of 2061. That
| is, there will be some things 2061ers will want to share
| with them and other things 2061ers won't.
|
| There is some cohort age interaction, for instance the
| boomer cohort has been so large that some tv viewing
| slots are saturated for ads about "you might not be
| getting all the medicare benefits you deserve" to the
| point that it drives away other viewers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Shirky is great.
|
| So many of his posts and speeches have become classics.
| mehak402 wrote:
| Wow, absolutely brilliant.
| jaynate wrote:
| Is there a TL;DR?
| ogennadi wrote:
| From the conclusion, "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... 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."
| simonw wrote:
| This is such a classic. I feel like talks of this quality and
| with this much depth of research are sadly pretty rare at the
| conferences I attend these days.
|
| (Plus I miss O'Reilly ETech)
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