Short version:
* The steps to allow for censorship in the software and diminish the visibility of asshattery is a necessary thing.
* It is unfortunate that it wasn't done before.
* It is a pattern that has repeated itself many times over the decades.
* Read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
* Web 2.0 puts too much work on too few people.
Long version:
One of the talks that was passed around (I think it was Everything2 that introduced me to it, but I could be wrong) is A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html ). This goes to the problems and some necessary designs for social software - reddit is one such example.
The story in that talk that this current episode reminds me of is that of Communitree:
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> Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
> And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.
> And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
> And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."
> But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
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To me, Reddit is facing this exact same problem. It wants to be a place for free speech, but the right type of free speech. It also hasn't designed the necessary infrastructure of code to allow the community of not t_d to defend itself and maintain the type of content that that core community wants.
And thus, backchannel slack channels to try to get people to tone it down a bit - because the software didn't support the necessary structures to prevent it from happening.
That passage quoted above goes on:
> Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
> What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
> Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.
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I believe that the failing of Web 2.0 is that most people don't care. User moderated content is a great thing - when its moderated. Without that moderation (which often falls disproportionately on a very, very, small group) you end up with doing tech support for people who are either asses to the world or intentionally trying to make your job suck in a very hostile way.
Back channels and trying to appeal to individuals doesn't scale. The software needs to support the necessary tools of moderation (which include censorship and banning).