[HN Gopher] A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf]
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf]
Author : froasty
Score : 36 points
Date : 2020-07-03 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gwern.net)
| awinter-py wrote:
| I think fukuyama's book on high + low trust societies is about
| these topics
|
| heard someone claim in an interview that low and mixed-trust
| societies generally turn to surveillance / censorship
|
| 'which attributes of a society enable free speech' is a question
| people we'll ask seriously + continuously about online
| communities
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| 2017 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437
|
| 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574
|
| 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547
|
| 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662
|
| 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624
|
| 2008 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189
|
| 2007 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992
|
| 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354
|
| Also, the LambdaMOO article Shirky goes into was posted here a
| few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965
|
| and the "Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat" essay was discussed a
| bit in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850
| ThomPete wrote:
| The value of a group is based on the quality of its individuals.
| dang wrote:
| Unfortunately it's not that simple. High-quality individuals
| frequently get into low-quality interactions, especially
| online.
| RobertoG wrote:
| There is a good chance that it's exactly the opposite.
|
| Our behavior is determined by the environment, and there is not
| element in the environment more important that our peers.
|
| If you take a Roman and a barbarian an exchange them, you get a
| new barbarian and a new Roman (because how could they survive
| otherwise?). And, I suspect, if you exchange the Romans and the
| barbarians slowly enough you will have the previous Romans
| behaving like barbarians and the previous barbarians like
| Romans.
| dang wrote:
| What's the most important insight in this essay that HN does
| _not_ line up well with [1]? When I look at his key points [2],
| the ones that HN seems to line up well with are:
|
| _The place that was founded on open access had too much
| openness. They had no way of saying, "No, that's not the kind of
| free speech we meant."_
|
| _Technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no
| way to completely separate them. Having good software isn't
| enough._
|
| _Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived,
| heterogeneous groups._
|
| _There is always an informal piece of the Constitution. The
| informal part is the sense of "how we do it around here."_
|
| _Handles the user can invest in. A way for there to be members
| in good standing, some way in which good works get recognized.
| The penalty for switching doesn't have to be total, but if I
| change my handle, I have to lose some kind of reputation or some
| kind of context._
|
| Here are points we line up with, but not as much. Note how the
| first one overlaps with the last one above--that's because HN
| straddles this issue somewhat [3]:
|
| _I need to associate who's saying something to me now with
| previous conversations. Weak pseudonymity doesn't work well._
|
| _You need some barriers to participation, however small. You
| have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at
| the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some
| kind of segmentation of capabilities._
|
| I found only one main point where HN differs significantly:
|
| _You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. The
| dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and
| collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is
| different--small groups of people can engage in kinds of
| interaction that large groups can't._
|
| You might think HN was a good match for this too, because we've
| never tried to juice it for growth, and it's a medium-sized forum
| by current standards. However, when Shirky says small he means
| "larger than a dozen but smaller than a few hundred". He
| recommends finding ways to factor larger groups into smaller ones
| so that richer interactions can happen. This is something we
| explicitly do not do, and since HN has millions of readers and
| tens of thousands of commenters, it's massive by the standard he
| was writing about.
|
| This is the non-siloed property of HN [4]. It's probably the
| single most influential aspects of the site's design, and it has
| many counterintuitive consequences, which I've been writing about
| lately [5].
|
| [1] I asked this in 2016:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208054
|
| [2] Several of these quotes are spliced from multiple passages.
|
| [3]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...
|
| [4]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
| pm215 wrote:
| I feel that HN somewhat does the 'factoring into smaller
| groups' by having each topic's conversation be pretty clearly
| separated from each other one's, and quickly expiring off the
| frontpage. So the group of people who actually have a
| conversation in any given comment page is much smaller than
| tens-of-thousands.
| virtue3 wrote:
| During the onset of COVID there were a lot of people jumping
| to Amazon's defense of their warehouses. With seemingly deep
| information about changes there.
|
| Could have been just amazon employees, might not have been.
|
| I feel similarly about how the discussion goes when people
| slam Apple.
|
| Are these infiltrators? Or do we have a lot of Amazon and
| Apple employees? Do developers usually care that much to
| protect their company online? (I've never been in that
| situation so I can't say).
| cs702 wrote:
| I couldn't identify any other insights in the essay that HN
| does _not_ line up well.
|
| However, I could argue that HN lines up well with one pattern
| mentioned in the essay: _Identification and vilification of
| external enemies._ For example, HNers typically vilify external
| groups and people who act or actually are ignorant about
| encryption and privacy issues -- such as, say, the politicians
| and industry associations who drafted and promoted the EARN IT
| act. I don 't think this particular example is a negative for
| HN (i.e., I think EARN IT is horrendous), but I do think the
| similarity is worth mentioning. I hope HN seeks to minimize
| vilification in general.
|
| Also, I wonder if HN is susceptible to a pattern that (IIRC) is
| not mentioned or discussed at all in the essay: _Influential
| communities with large audiences attract ill-intentioned
| members who infiltrate the community only to influence the
| larger audience._ I hope HN has safeguards against this sort of
| behavior, though.
| [deleted]
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