A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003)
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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?
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.
I suppose that (quasi) monopolists like Google, Amazon, and Apple are still to small for that thesis?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scriptability in irssi is really nice. I can run shell commands from it and post the output as a message. This lets me do stuff like use a sleep for a specified amount of time and then an echo for my actual message. Combined with a couple variables and an alias, I can type /se (for sleep echo) plus "2h" or similar for the time and then my message to send a message to that window in that amount of time. Great for if my friend just went to sleep and I trust he's more likely to read a message that arrives while he's there than read the whole backlog I left him.
Logs are a big thing. I have nice plaintext logs from irssi. I can grep them, view them in less and jump around, and so on. It's fast, goes back really far, and I always find stuff I'm looking for and trying to reference. Newer stuff tends to have a built-in client search and the logs are hidden away somewhere and often a sql database or some other inaccessible thing. This is a massive downgrade. Especially with how slow in-client searches always are.
It's easy to focus on stuff like URL previews, attachments/inline images, encryption, and so on when talking about XMPP and Matrix and other newer stuff, but these things aren't a straight upgrade. I use them all quite heavily, I'm not avoiding them because they're worse, I'm just very often sad about it. Basically they reinvent the wheel and do it worse, then tack the new stuff on top. It doesn't feel like a better IRC client, it feels like its own thing, and that thing isn't good.
The best Matrix experience I had was using a weechat plugin. It was very buggy and would take several tries to login, occasionally log me out, and these days it's unusable and my whole weechat install is broken... However, when it worked, I had a lot of the stuff I get with irssi "for free" because weechat is an IRC client. I could sort my windows manually and jump around quickly, logs were plaintext and easy to work with. You can even hide buffers for rooms you don't want to see, and you can still jump to them with the go plugin when they're hidden.
There's also the benefit that comes with TUI stuff where I can run it on my server and attach from my PC or phone seamlessly and have the same real client instead of a lesser mobile client that works differently, but this is not the most important feature at all. You could make a graphical program with most of the nice things about irssi in it. You can kinda see this philosophy with how emacs as a gui is like the terminal emacs, except it has support for more colors, multiple fonts, selecting text from adjacent split windows more easily (the separators aren't literal text in a gui), etc. It's definitely rare for GUI stuff to be as good as TUI, but it's not impossible.
If they had embraced their popularity and found a different way to monetize, that thing might still be with us today.
The rule can be observed if you look at groups in that corporation.
I think it's different
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
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.
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.
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
(Plus I miss O'Reilly ETech)
> I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly.
This was 2003, and Butterfield is still turning side tools from MMOs you never heard of into genre defining brands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Ludicorp_a...
LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments)
Lambda Moo Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167 - July 2019 (1 comment)
Lambda MOO Programming Resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327975 - Feb 2018 (1 comment)
Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439 - April 2017 (15 comments)
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
"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.
First they came for the shitposters...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> cute cat
> neither is more right
There's an awesome joke in here but I can't see it.
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.
An epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Literally “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”
And with the demise of independent investigative journalism in the outside world we've seen that relationship devolve into feudalism.
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...
The user of social software is the group, not the individual."
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.
So many of his posts and speeches have become classics.
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."
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".