Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design

I recall PG saying something a while back about a "rollback" feature that would give you the option to only display those comments and submissions created by users above a certain account-age/karma threshold. So in effect you could turn a knob and the site would roll back to, say, the user base from 300 days ago.

I thought it sounded like a pretty elegant (if potentially divisive) solution, maybe worth serious consideration.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

easy in principle, pretty hard in practice.

It's a recursive problem you'd basically be talking to nobody (and you wouldn't be reading this comment on your writing either).

After all what's to stop those 'above' you from setting the clock back even further.

Eventually only those people not using that feature will be able to communicate, which puts you back at square one.

chandler• 17 years ago

>> It's a recursive problem you'd basically be talking to nobody...

Presuming this was done where each person had fine control over the date, you may be right. However, suppose each person only had a single binary control, essentially "hide everyone newer than me."

Furthermore, rather than "newer than me" being defined by a join date specific to each user, instead it would be defined by the start date specific to a particular generation of users (the news.yc folks do seem to track mass user migrations). Visually (bars are new.yc join floods, time moves to the right):

    time:  |--------|---|------|-----|---...
    group:     1      2    3      4    5

Joining early in group three, you would be able to view comments made by those in groups 1, 2, & 3, which would include people who joined after you in group 3 (your supposed peers).

This would still provide each user with the ability to view the site more-or-less as it was upon first arrival, without actually allowing each user fine granularity in locking everyone out.

(for the record, such a feature isn't as useful as simply applying social & administrative pressure to keep quality up; I just wanted to mention an alternative implementation that doesn't turn into an arms race)

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

audio available?

mattchew• 17 years ago

Heh. Meta discussion that is also on topic.

Note that the article is from 2003. This problem has been around for a long time. As far as I know, no one has ever really solved it.

One thing I've noticed on Reddit and Digg is that discussion stops being a conversation when the number of posts gets too high.

It's still a conversation when you have forty or fifty posts: you can read the whole thing and understand what is being said before you contribute. When every conversation has over 100 posts, you don't have one conversation any more. You have a bunch of parallel conversations, often repetitive. Worse, you start seeing more posts where the author is not trying to talk to another person, but to stand on a soapbox and make points to the crowd.

I don't think this is (necessarily) a failure of etiquette or good manners, just a limitation on how much information people can digest in a casual setting like a web forum.

Of course, as you get more users, you will also get a higher absolute number of people who are intentional troublemakers or who are incapable of understanding the community standards. Unfortunately, these guys have a tendency to completely take over a thread.

One possible solution that I'd like to see someone try is intentional sharding of the community. Costly, but worth it IMO if it kept some enclaves of high quality discussion. You could give everyone read only access to any shard, which would be a decent option for the lurking majority.

Though I don't know of anyone who has solved the problem of community deterioration, my gut feeling is that it is solvable, someday. At least to the extent that a good conversation is about good manners and paying attention, and not about showing up at the place that is currently in fashion.

Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design

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