garry’s posthaven

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:

1. You cannot separate technical and social issues.
2. Members are different from users. "The group within the group that matters most--" your core users = the gardeners of the community.
3. The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

And four things to design for:

1. Identity so that people can be identified consistently.
2. Give distinction to the inner circle vs members vs noobs.
3. Segmentation of capabilities. Hacker News does this well through its karma system -- users can only downvote after X number of karma points.
4. 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.

This financial and trade embrace between the United States and China grew so tight that Niall Ferguson, a financial historian, has dubbed the two countries Chimerica.

--Chinese Savings Helped Inflate American Bubble in the NY Times

A privateer or corsair used similar methods to a pirate, but acted while in possession of a commission or letter of marque from a government or monarch authorizing the capture of merchant ships belonging to an enemy nation. For example, the United States Constitution of 1787 specifically authorized Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal.

--Piracy (via Wikipedia)

UPDATE: Check it out on Gary's posterous, it's now online.

I'm a sucker for armchair economics and sociology. Here are some passages from a recent article about the widening inequality gap that I found really fascinating:

A trend is underway in America for marriage to be increasingly “assortative.” That means children of well-educated parents tend to marry one another and the children of less educated parents tend to marry one another... Today, the husband and wife are both likely to work in the market, and they choose one another because they have similar tastes in consumption.

When it comes to dating, increasingly it's not who you are, but what you like. Shallow? Yes. But researchers are linking that to a broader trend that society is getting more polarized than ever. We are self-selecting our future mates based on the kind of stuff we like to spend money on. Wild.

An accountant or a nurse is not going to become extremely rich or extremely poor; they could be called “billers,” because they bill for their time. On the other hand, a professional singer or a software entrepreneur is playing in a winners-take-most tournament. The difference in talent between an international pop star and an unknown lounge singer may actually be quite small. However, the nature of these fields is that the difference in rewards can be enormous. People who choose these sorts of occupations could be called “players.”

...

Several factors have made it a lot easier to quit as a biller in order to take a fling at being a player. The Internet is one. As writer Daniel Pink has noted, the low cost of creating a business on the Web has fulfilled Karl Marx’s dream—an ordinary worker can now own the means of production. (emphasis mine)

So what are you waiting for? Go own the means of production. It's the only way you'll get true freedom... just make sure you win. It's a winner-take-most world out there.