People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.
via Clay Shirky's essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Three things you have to accept:
- You cannot separate technical and social issues.
- Members are different from users. "The group within the group that matters most--" your core users = the gardeners of the community.
- The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
And four things to design for:
- Identity so that people can be identified consistently.
- Give distinction to the inner circle vs members vs noobs.
- Segmentation of capabilities. Hacker News does this well through its karma system -- users can only downvote after X number of karma points.
- Spare users from scale. If there are too many people, the noise goes up. Let people self-select into groups, or make it hard to join because you only want people who really want to be in.
Some really great lessons learned from Communitree and LambdaMOO too -- old online communities from the BBS days.
I feel blessed to get a chance to continue the ongoing experiment of creating great social software. Thanks for a great roadmap, Clay.