"Traditional methods for protecting community from..scale..are now manifestly unfeasible"

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000

by Jebdm • 17 years ago

68 22 17 years ago

vtaeed• 17 years ago

Counter intuitive principles and highly thought provoking ideas make it a great, although long, read. The application of the conclusions in this article would be interesting to behold and analyze.

Author, rightly or wrongly, holds some strong opinions against Clay Shirky's ideas.

Alex3917• 17 years ago

I love how K5 articles have their own writing style. It's a shame the community is dead, because I genuinely miss the writing that came out of there, with its own unique rhythm and set of tropes.

alecco2• 17 years ago

Indeed. It was like a writer's creativity oracle:

  * The masterful series: Tales of the Hive.
  * The insightful whistleblower: How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions.
  * And even the (insane) writer's self-inflicting goatse-style: An Introduction to Anal Masturbation.

Hive series: Birth of a Package http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/18/203511/484 Blood, Sweat, and Honey http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/9/13/212244/867 Lions at the Gate http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/7/16/222933/069 (More at http://www.voiceofthehive.com/)

IBM http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/27/95759/4240 (Can't find the link to the article about the writer's struggle to survive the legal attack from IBM.)

The goatse http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/7/23/204244/127

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Yeah same - at one stage they were an anti-thesis (or counterpoint at least) to the seemingly unstoppable slashdot.

nwinter• 17 years ago

Meta-discussion blending with topical discussion here, I'd be interested to know what the moderation burden on HN is. HN has maintained quality up to this scale and may be able to prevent additional growth, but what's the cost?

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

PG gives a lot of credit to the editors for keeping HN clean. But let's be honest, people behave here because they don't want to burn their bridge with PG. He's said himself that he created HN in part to get a taste of what YCombinator applicants are like before they apply. This whole site is one big, ongoing public job interview. That's a big part of what keeps people in line.

alecco2• 17 years ago

I think it's growing past that. :)

buss• 17 years ago

I've always felt the same about HN. I've behaved a particular way on HN, though not much different than I behave elsewhere. My suspicion is that most people on HN also severely limit what and how much they say because they're worried about pg getting a negative image of them. This does help keep the community on topic and very civil, so maybe that's ok.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

I don't think that that is quite accurate. I doubt that the majority of people here are here for the ycombinator seed money. I come here because it is the best aggregation of topics that are interesting to my tastes. Will I apply for ycombinator seed money? Probably not.

trezor• 17 years ago

people behave here because they don't want to burn their bridge with PG. ... This whole site is one big, ongoing public job interview.

This is probably not true for the majority of people posting here. I suspect quite a lot of users came here from reddit when that site went the way of digg and 4chan and to them pg is just another handle on the site.

Also: Believe it or not, but I had never heard of Paul Graham before coming to this site.

jibiki• 17 years ago

There's a lot to be said for this theory if you look at the real world, where anonymous interactions play out well 90+% of the time (selon anecdotal experience.)

teej• 17 years ago

I disagree. The anchoring point of this article is rooted in the multiple-identity problem in online communities. Shirky's idea is to limit scale and embrace identities, while this article's counter is to deemphasize identities and disincentivize secondary accounts.

In other words, this whole article is about tackling the ONE issue that real-world interactions don't have.

fbailey• 17 years ago

on a practical side what's happening at the moment with facebook and twitter is destroying the classical online communities and replacing them with your personal social recommendation network. That works quite well for people who already have a wide network and a lot of people to follow, but I think it's a bit sad for the kid who wants to learn and just starts...

"Traditional methods for protecting community from..scale..are now manifestly unfeasible"

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