"Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups".
Leopold Kohr thesis (such as "Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size,everything collapses or explodes") are pertinent.
I agree with
411111111111111's answer: GAFAM are are corps, not stable groups. Teams' members are renewed quite frequently, this is an unstable setup, in a way constantly collapsing/exploding.
I also agree with
TheFreim's comment, each corp is a group of groups. Alexander Zinoviev wrote that real (useful, innovative...) work is always done by a single person or a small group. Google, Amazon, Apple and other successful huge companies genius and key-to-success is to maintain small groups, each as autonomous as possible and producing some valuable thing, then to compose their results.
Any productive big institution isn't a perfectly consistent and stable machine built with all-tightly-coupled human components, but an unstable (constantly renewed) patchwork/hodgepodge where a few entities (groups) are productive (most aren't), each small and much more free to act as they want to than it may appear to the casual observer.
Chat services usually rot and go the way of MySpace. Remember cuseeme, aol instant messenger, icq, irc, Skype, Skype for business, Lynq, paltalk, Facebook messenger, tivejo, …
Facebook was originally where cool kids hang out now grandma is on it. Facebook is always buying a competitor or imitating one or aiming a service at really young kids to stay ahead of the rot.
IRC never totally died. It's decentralized, free software, and has better clients than anything newer (XMPP, Matrix). I'm in ~100 channels across a few networks. It's also what Twitch chat uses, and you can connect to Twitch chats from an IRC client.
I think the centralized proprietary stuff is bound to die. It was never really built to last. AIM and MSN are truly dead. Hopefully Discord dies someday as well.
Better UX. You can see real timestamps instead of relative timestamps, you can display the seconds (Gajim lets you do this, but not Dino or Conversations). You can sort the rooms/chats/windows how you want instead of being stuck with ever-changing activity-based that you can't use blindly or the somewhat-better alphabetical sort. Usually way more keybinds and faster ways to jump between rooms. A lot of this stuff works together also. In irssi I know what window #6 is, and it's one of my more-used chats, so I can hit alt-6 or esc-6 to jump straight to it. I can also use the go.pl plugin to jump to stuff by name, which I use for anything beyond the first 11 or so things.
Scriptability in irssi is really nice. I can run shell commands from it and post the output as a message. This lets me do stuff like use a sleep for a specified amount of time and then an echo for my actual message. Combined with a couple variables and an alias, I can type /se (for sleep echo) plus "2h" or similar for the time and then my message to send a message to that window in that amount of time. Great for if my friend just went to sleep and I trust he's more likely to read a message that arrives while he's there than read the whole backlog I left him.
Logs are a big thing. I have nice plaintext logs from irssi. I can grep them, view them in less and jump around, and so on. It's fast, goes back really far, and I always find stuff I'm looking for and trying to reference. Newer stuff tends to have a built-in client search and the logs are hidden away somewhere and often a sql database or some other inaccessible thing. This is a massive downgrade. Especially with how slow in-client searches always are.
It's easy to focus on stuff like URL previews, attachments/inline images, encryption, and so on when talking about XMPP and Matrix and other newer stuff, but these things aren't a straight upgrade. I use them all quite heavily, I'm not avoiding them because they're worse, I'm just very often sad about it. Basically they reinvent the wheel and do it worse, then tack the new stuff on top. It doesn't feel like a better IRC client, it feels like its own thing, and that thing isn't good.
The best Matrix experience I had was using a weechat plugin. It was very buggy and would take several tries to login, occasionally log me out, and these days it's unusable and my whole weechat install is broken... However, when it worked, I had a lot of the stuff I get with irssi "for free" because weechat is an IRC client. I could sort my windows manually and jump around quickly, logs were plaintext and easy to work with. You can even hide buffers for rooms you don't want to see, and you can still jump to them with the go plugin when they're hidden.
There's also the benefit that comes with TUI stuff where I can run it on my server and attach from my PC or phone seamlessly and have the same real client instead of a lesser mobile client that works differently, but this is not the most important feature at all. You could make a graphical program with most of the nice things about irssi in it. You can kinda see this philosophy with how emacs as a gui is like the terminal emacs, except it has support for more colors, multiple fonts, selecting text from adjacent split windows more easily (the separators aren't literal text in a gui), etc. It's definitely rare for GUI stuff to be as good as TUI, but it's not impossible.
I agree a lot of young people don't really use Facebook profiles anymore, but most people I know still use Facebook messenger. It's easy to find people because most people are on there with real name/picture, and the group chats work pretty smoothly. Granted I'm a millennial so maybe the actual kids these days don't use it at all, but I wouldn't lump it in with those dead services.
I actually think for a messenger platform it's probably a good thing that even grandma is on there. The problem with having a bunch of Boomers around is of course the social media posting aspect.
You have to distinguish things that are age dependent (generic about 20 year olds at different times) as opposed to cohort dependent (specific to people born in 2021.)
When people born in 2001 are grand(p|m)as I think they'll have a similar relationship to the cohort of 2061. That is, there will be some things 2061ers will want to share with them and other things 2061ers won't.
There is some cohort ⨯ age interaction, for instance the boomer cohort has been so large that some tv viewing slots are saturated for ads about "you might not be getting all the medicare benefits you deserve" to the point that it drives away other viewers.
What an interesting read. In a way it serves as a warning of all the things that can and will go wrong, and you can see the equivalents to it in action today, some at an amplified level. Not just on the popular social media like FB and IG, but HN and reddit too.
The other interesting aspect is how they've gleaned so much insight from their relative (to now) limited number of groups and communities.
I wonder what they would say in today's online landscape.
Many communities still live on today, ie. MUDs and other such places. Most died when users moved on, especially smaller groups. Every such place deal with this.
Tragedy of the commons is the killer of decentralization since day 1.
Try polluting the shared space around your building (with clutter for example) and see how long it takes for you to be censored. Self-censoring is how we maintain our liberty to pollute but it can go too far though; some deep-pocket people can largely avoid feedback because no one dares to go against them.
There is always some tension between censorship and pollution, our goal is to minimize both so we can give ourselves space to breathe and live. This is why we create law. Law should be created when the cost of censorship is lower than the cost of pollution. Consider nude beach vs downtown big city, pollution and censorship inverts, law is similar and we need more local law and more aggressive refactoring.
Enforcing law is a communal effort and also local. We need better tools to accomplish this. But they are rapidly emerging fwict so hopefully these things become actionable soon.
I now what you mean, but I just wanted to add something to your one example. What do you mean by "nude beach vs downtown big city"? There are parks in some European cities where you can sunbath in the nude. I guess it is still an example of this, because it is getting less common, because of globalization and risk of being recorded for the whole world to see.
I ment that it is likely that you are expected to self-censor nudity (by law) in a city while you are censoring signaling on a nude beach (or in any nudist place).
As you seem to suggest in your last para, Law is useful, but also insufficient. It is often too rigid and cold. It is easily subverted, selectively applied or conveniently re-interpreted by whoever has more power. Two cultures can have the same constitution yet produce greatly divergent results. You can see this in the failed democracy revolutions of the last 20 years. You can see this in comparing the state of American democracy today with the state of America democracy in the 60s. Both were tumultuous times, but the culture is far more selfist now than then.
I'm a socialist, but I'd take a socialist culture (defined by people genuinely giving the common good priority) on top of a free-market capitalist economy and political system over a individualist/selfist culture on top of a socialist economy and political system any day. The former will actively work to justly distribute resources and opportunity despite the dark tendencies of capitalism and free markets, while the latter will quickly devolve into a farce of socialism.
Progress is ultimately about the progress of Culture.
"Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity, and principles of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, they can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment, at each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction."
The biggest thing that seems different to me now is that in Thing To Design For #1, non-portable reputation is basically dead. You now live in a gossip-loving small town whose population is the whole world; if you cheat at the wrong thing, whether it's your wife or poker or whatever, you're at the mercy of the doxxers.
This is such a classic. I feel like talks of this quality and with this much depth of research are sadly pretty rare at the conferences I attend these days.
> I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly.
This was 2003, and Butterfield is still turning side tools from MMOs you never heard of into genre defining brands.
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students [who were only interested in what we now generally call 'shitposting' and 'trolling']. 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."
They didn't want to block anyone, so they deleted it. That's why we can't have nice things.
Rather than block anyone or shut the site down they should have put all of the highschoolers in the Highschool section and then threatened to block them if they posted highschool stuff in the regular areas. Then nobody has to sit out except for people who are specifically motivated by the fact they've been told to not post fart jokes in the group theory folder.
This is a pattern that I have seen happen many times before and what you usually end up with is one area that is The Raging, Unmoderated Shit-Show. Which can end up sprawling outside of the site it lives on and become a base for organizing mass attacks elsewhere. Seem for example, whichever board was decreed the Unmoderated Shit-Show of Something Awful, or whichever one 4channers will tell you was the Unmoderated Shit-Show of that site while insisting the rest of it was perfectly fine and ethical. And since that is the sub-board that mostly interacts with the outside world, this is the one that will come to define your site in the eyes of everyone else: the place that bunch of assholes comes from.
Once you get one of those, if you shut it down, it has a good chance of having someone invested enough in this splinter community to start hosting it somewhere. See for instance LJDrama: kicked off of LJ, it became its own site and kept on being a great place to go if you wanted to join in on piling on top of whoever was today's target.
It's unfortunate they chose to engage in mass self-deplatforming rather than simply engage in vigorous debate or attempt to open a dialog and empathize with the views of those they considered guilty of thoughtcrime. Did no one tell them that free speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to the speech we find most objectionable? That sunlight, not censorship, is the best disinfectant?
Debate is what you do to someone you disagree with over a matter that has a right and wrong answer.
If i want to talk about quantum physics, and someone else wants to talk about cute cat pictures - there is no right or wrong answers; you can't debate it. The two people want different things. Neither is more right, but its best for everyone if they find a group of people who want to do the same activity instead of pissing each other off.
I think where I'd like to draw the line would be on platforms and domain restrictions, and possibly decorum as well.
Essentially, the smaller and more specialised the community, the more leeway they have for moderation /censorship.
Conversely, the larger platforms, especially those that host enormous proportions of the population, should have less control over their users, lest they gain too much control over the speech of their users.
Some might argue that this violates the rights of the corporation, but I weight the rights of millions of users far higher than the rights of a few corporations. This goes double for the publishers masquerading as platforms.
The problem is that the shitposters have one thing a lot of people doing work don't: time.
There's no time to engage all of them in "vigorous debate" or to "open dialogs". Especially people who aren't interested in listening. At some point, you realize that you have more important things to do and you just stop engaging.
Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends. What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name of ageism?
What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science, philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form of human culture that still exists.
Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth, with unassailable power to determine what speech is or isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what people can and cannot say, what right do they have to dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a "troll?"
Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself. Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of sovereign governments can be erased from history for the slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few centralized platforms on which the majority of all human communication now occurs.
We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful ignorance and soulless mediocrity.
Bravo, sir, madam, or other-gendered person. Bravo. You have successfully parodied the slippery slope of free-speech absolutism by equating fifteen year old children running around saying curse words to the Inquisition hassling Galileo for challenging geocentrism at the tender age of fifty-one. I bow to a true master troll; I have not seen effort like this put into a parody argument since the glorious excesses of talk.bizarre.
Voltaire didn't say "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", and in fact I've only ever seen that quote used to make fun of people who naively believe in the "principle of free speech", or by people who believe in centrist talking points about "cancel culture".
That means that your comment, too, must some kind of meta-commentary on trolling, delivered via trolling. Assuming the purpose of "trolling" is to incite other people to waste time by responding, you are brilliant- I wrote a long and involved response to your message before realizing that you are probably just pulling my and anyone else who reads your message's leg.
And for those that don’t speak this particular dialect of social-signalling:
An epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Literally “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”
The read to write ratio on a internet forum is about 100 to one, so if you got 200 people there will be 2 ppl talking to each other. Usually the same two people. The critical mass for an online community is around 1000 ppl.
Ohh and you need moderators. Cant even have a presidential debate without moderators, so good luck having 1000 people together without strict rules. It will eventually attract the worst kind of people.
The rules and mechanics of the thing the ppl gather for will reflect on the group, so its actually possible to indirectly steer the community...
"It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves. Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong...
The user of social software is the group, not the individual."
"Nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy"
Yup.
This is how vote banks work. Seed the idea of an external enemy to a group of loosely cohesive group and suddenly they become like a huge entity difficult to be reasoned with.
My dad teaches a world religion class and does a unit on religious restrictions (kosher, halal, etc.). He says one of the hardest things to get across to people, even non-religious people, is that rule systems like these are not about practical considerations, they are about defining who is "in" and who is "out". In a time where religion is no longer analogous with ethnicity, this is just not something people really understand anymore.
From the conclusion, "Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software... is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.
The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly."
Now in the society we have 2 + 2 might not equal four, a man cannot be "assumed" "he", reverse discrimination, etc.
edit: I total understand why I'm getting down-voted. I think what I'm trying to say is, the US is designed to be free and inclusive. At least that's how I understand it. And there are always opposite voices. But, as I perceive it, the politically correct thing seems to be over-correcting the "wrong".
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 - July 2020 (14 comments)
LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments)
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14634437 - June 2017 (1 comment)
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments)
Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003574 - Sept 2011 (15 comments)
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003547 - Sept 2011 (8 comments)
Ask YC: forums still a viable format (group-enemy problem)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944662 - Nov 2009 (6 comments)
Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624 - Feb 2009 (13 comments)
A group is its own worst enemy... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189 - Feb 2008 (1 comment)
Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992 - May 2007 (1 comment)
A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354 - March 2007 (3 comments)
Others?