A. Our goal is quality over quantity. We found that
limiting uploads to one song per day makes people really
think about the music they are uploading and only post the
best songs that they can think of. However, you can upload
up to six songs for the next six days and they will be
published automatically.
"
Constraints can be good. The article reminded me of the tales of 'oldschool' hackers saying that lacking resources of early computers forced them to write good and compact code. The scarcity of a resource obviously leads to this resource being valued higher than if it would be available in abundance.
What I find noteworthy, however, are his examples: the resources described are constrained artificially, yet are still valued higher than if not constrained (and competing services not constraining the resource (Flickr or normal Blogs in his example) couldn't destroy this mechanism).
When, however, does this mechanism take place? When email accounts where strongly constrained in storage space, GMail with its then 1Gig storage was seen as liberation (the opposite effect).
There are some constraints that consistently encourage creativity, and others that do not. Someone should come up with a list of examples of constraints and look for patterns. I briefly mentioned this on my blog a while back:
"The rich and variegated use of Twitter seems to be a case of technological constraints forcing creativity. One can't help but wonder, "At one point does less become more?" When adding new features we worry about increased cognitive load and reduced usability; should we worry about damping creativity as well? And is it possible to purposely restrict functionality to encourage ingenuity?"
