The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
codinghorror.com
The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#2must read about it, for any social site developer: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#3I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of not doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick up steam.
I can't be the only person who notices this; pretty much HN post that features SO includes a litany of complaints about them. Even if the original post isn't a complaint, the top thread in the post will probably be a complaint, regardless of how relevant that is to the topic.
My point isn't that what SO is doing is wrong. It's that what they're doing seems to go against the wishes of the vast majority of the community. Jeff even links to a post of his that basically says "you shouldn't always listen to the community". So, when do you listen and when do you ignore? Advice that consists of "sometimes you should do X and sometimes you shouldn't" seems trivially true for pretty much any real-world X.
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#4I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of not doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick u…
I don't think Mr. Atwood is suggesting that you bow to what the community wants, but rather that you implement systems to facilitate what they're already doing anyway.
That aside, and regardless of if SO is going about topic policing in the right way, I think this bit from a guest post[1] by Randy Farmer might hint at why they're doing what they do.
"As user-generated content grows, content moderation of some sort is always required: typically, either employees scan every submission or the site’s operators deploy a reputation system to identify bad content. Simply removing the bad content isn’t usually good enough-most sites depend on search engine traffic, on advertising revenue, or both. To get search traffic, external sites must link to the content, and that means the quality of the content has to be high enough to earn those links."
[1] http://www.communityguy.com/2010/04/01/guest-post-theres-a-w...
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#5Back in the day I spent way too much time keeping up with the MUD-DEV mailing list. There were a lot of discussions that touched on these topics, although not always as constructively as Atwood does here.
Here's an old post by Raph Koster that talks about how to deal with kewl d00ds. I was reminded of it because Koster referred to them as genetic algorithms with respect to bug/exploit finding. It's a bit of a tangent but there are some similarities.
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#6"We noticed early in the Stack Overflow beta that users desperately wanted to reply to each other, and were cluttering up the system with "answers" that were, well, not answers to the question. Rather than chastize them for doing it wrong – stupid users! – we added the commenting system to give them a method of annotating answers and questions for clarifications, updates, and improvements."
This is excellent advice not just for online ventures, but for business in general. Too much time is spent making rules and regulations to prevent customers from taking certain actions, when a lot more can be gained by understanding what your customers are trying to do naturally, and finding a way to support that.
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#7I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of not doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick u…
[deleted]
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#8I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of not doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick u…
It's the most virally popular off-topic content that you need to moderate. Off-topic content that doesn't get attention doesn't do much damage, and popular content that is in line with what you want the site to be is good. But popular questions that threaten to absorb huge amounts of attention at your site, promote unproductive threads of conversation, and attract karma whores and trolls, those need to be closed.
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#9Curious, is there any video of expert D&D players playing? I used to be a big DM in my area back in the day (probably around 1981/82), but since the internet wasn't as prevelant there was a lot less communication about how the game was supposed to be played (and I wasn't in a large metro area -- so I pretty much set the rules for the town).
To this day, I'm curious as to how the game should actually be played.
Re: The Organism Will Do What It Pleases
#10must read about it, for any social site developer: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Good link, very interesting.