A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design

I read this essay recently in Joel Spolsky's "Best Software Writing". Really a great essay to study what seems to happen to groups on the net. Witness Reddit very recently with the old timers upset about the heavy political content. Fascinating that it seems to happen across decades.

Wow... that was an amazing article, one of the best that I have read in a while. It really gave a lot of insight into social interactions, and not just online ones. Thanks for the link.

Someone mentioned Reddit, and I was thinking exactly the same thing, myself. Of course, Reddit at least does include many of the mechanisms suggested in the article, but there is one glaring omission: established users do not seem to have much more power than non-established ones. Perhaps users with more karma should have more weight when voting certain entries up or down. Just a thought...

This is an interesting in-depth look at what any Reddit or USENET old-timer already knows too well: getting a community to scale up while remaining intelligent and cordial is a really hard problem. If anyone manages to solve it I'll be paying close attention.