Clay Shirky

I love DF, and this is a decent piece, but John doesn't cite a lot of much more developed thought on the subject. If you care, start with Jay Rosen (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/ ; http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu ) and Clay Shirky (http://shirky.com ; http://twitter.com/cshirky).

I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line: http://www.shirky.com/ I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky This is yet another example of the history of the early Web disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008. I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html "So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities." Clay Shirky, 15 years ago

This! It reminds me of a great Clay Shirky essay: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-betwe…

Thinking about the things that might need to be in place for a company to function without management: - Self-organizing and Self-directed employees are often the hardest to find. - The HR process, when done correctly, allows individuals to join a group to realize their potential that they may not have elsewhere. - The group's goals would have to be somehow set. I recall Clay Shirky's excellent essay on how a group is it's own worst enemy and can't help but wonder how it might play out in an environment like this. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Other possible factors: Is the monkeysphere is the root cause of the endless bifurcation of communities, culture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number John Dvorak once opined that social networks stop being cool when that coworker you secretly hated tries to connect. Of course, pushing the other way, is the power law distribution of attention. The best explanation I've read for our current winner takes all economy. http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html

Clay Shirky's article "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" explains one reason; we are still in the middle of the greatest social and political disruption and revolution since the invention of the printing press. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthi…

Great reminder for the early lessons on social media, which didn't really changed since: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html

The overall readership size isn't of great concern (the more the merrier), but it breaks down when people start interacting at scale. It breaks down when posts start getting thousands of upvotes or tens of thousands of comments. At that point, why bother? Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where. All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporativ… You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).

I beg to differ, the Wired article is great: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html Nelson did have some visionary ideas, but there is an important lesson to be learned here in how to bring visionary ideas into reality (and how not to). For a deep philosophical lesson, contrast the Xanadu story with Clay Shirky's article on the Web, “In Praise of Evolvable Systems”: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/evolve.html. As Shirky says, "had the Web been a strong and well-designed entity from its inception, it would have gone nowhere”--as Xanadu was and did.

This is interesting to me in that it's a very Clay Shirky response to The Daily's failure. If you read http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthi… or http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-… they seem (at least in hindsight!) to say that things like The Daily, that just stuff a newspaper into electronic form with the least effort possible, are doomed because they haven't changed their cost centers (for bonus points, the latter piece mocks Murdoch, the owner of The Daily, in particular). I can add very little to Shirky's critique, so I will just recommend that people go and read his pieces and compare their predictions to what actually happened to The Daily.

Clay Shirky "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html - the classic of the genre.

Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" is also a very good read on the matter: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Clay Shirky has studied this extensively and is probably the best resource. "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" [0] is perhaps the best single piece on what you're thinking about. He offers several design guidelines toward the end of the piece, which I suspect informed the design of HN (and the posting guidelines therein). Another technique he mentions is that of MetaFilter, which disables their new user page when they feel the effects of scale. [0] - http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" from 2003 is a bit of a classic. http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

As well as danah boyd, Clay Shirky's classic A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy is another good starting place: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

I think your intuition is correct - that user contributions generally follow a power law, so when you randomize 1-to-1 interaction among all members, the likelihood of a person in the long-tail getting feedback from another user in the long-tail is high. A good essay on this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

As I always do when someone starts off on this flight of mythology, allow me to suggest that you read Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy": http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html You may learn some things about these cycles of "I was on Site X and it was great, then went to crap, then I went to Site Y, then it went to crap..." which will surprise you, and which -- at least in my reading and based on my experience of spending the last decade building community-oriented sites -- hint that reddit's doing way, way better than HN.

I think it's a social phenomenon, not a technical one. Clay Shirky wrote the standard work on what happens when you try to fix social problems with technical ones: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html A better solution may be a new form of Erlang flood. Perhaps with some added technical incentive, say, a new list of users most hospitable to "classic" content. That's a shit idea, but I'd much rather see PG work to better the community, than try throwing tech at it and watching the social forces mitigate his efforts.

Complaining about noise and conducting straw polls about noise are also noise. Many of us watched the same thing happen to reddit. Re-read Shirky's classic talk on the topic http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

I assume you're referring to Clay Shirky's excellent essay "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthi…

Yes, an update would be great if you're around Joel? Aside from Joel and Clay Shirky (http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) does anyone have any other must read links on this type of thing?

Clay Shirky wrote about micropayments and free content a while back: http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html Basically, he's saying that micropayments will not work because they introduce a transaction cost into the act of reading: you not only have to decide if you want to read (or skim) the article in question, you have to decide if it's worth x cents as well. And that transaction cost kills the transaction before it happens, never mind the x cents that would have been transferred.

That kind of slicing might not be a good idea. People don't calculate value that well. Clay Shirky has interesting ideas on this: http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html I think he has an overly narrow definition of micropayments though. Mandating $0.25 for an article isn't the only way to make a micropayment. RockBand, iTunes, MapleStory, etc. are all excellent examples of micropayment platforms working today.

One of the reference is actually a good read: http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html I don't actually subscribe to it at all, but it does give an overview of the challenges for ontologies - and by implication the Semantic Web.

Very insightful. This post and this article(1) by Clay Shirky should be required reading for anyone building socially-oriented software. 1) http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Old news to some I guess - but I just found it via a link nostrademons posted in a different thread and it was the most interesting thing I've read all week.

Well, one has to build the technology to maintain clusters of groups, not one big ball of people talking to each other at the same time. Sorry, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but social groups are a hot topic, so: Read http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html :) it's a good read, you'll enjoy it. It perfectly captures all the issues between early adopters vs later adopters vs huge crowds.

The following is a relevant quote from Clay Shirky. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-betwe… Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company. The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.” I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came…

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html Instagram has caused these power law distributions to escape media onto the real world. While there are millions of delightful vacation destinations, most people never hear about most of them. Instead, a tiny minority of the most photogenic one (like Trolltunga, mentioned in the article), consume almost all of the attention and then net a huge, unmanageable number of visitors. For every Everest, there are a hundred mountains that are 90% as beautiful but only get 10% of the visitors. I believe this is one of the fundamental, structural problems of the modern age. Most of the information we consume — literally the knowledge we base our worldview on — is now brought to our attention based on social media sharing and aggregation. The nature of those systems takes a linear range of "relevance" and distorts it into power law that no longer matches reality. But because this is our window into reality, we then take the result of that distortion at face value. I would love to see more systems engineered to try to balance that. Perhaps a…

Thanks for that great example of social dynamics. A related example is where a town is a great place to live because of lots of walkable attractions (grocery stores, YMCA, parks, a variety of little shops, cheap rent for other small businesses, theaters, music halls, etc.). Then lots of people want to live there, driving up prices. The stores, non-profits, small businesses, etc. all get bought out and replaced by expensive housing. And then one day people who have lived there for decades realize that the town is not that great place to live anymore because there is nothing interesting to walk to there, no jobs, rents and taxes are high, and grocery shopping involves a long drive... It can take some active planning and foresight to avoid that. Related: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html " I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." ... So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary.…