"Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software"

[pynchonoid]

[...] Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of
the most reliable features of mailing list practice.
If you assume a piece of software is for what it does,
rather than what its designer's stated goals were,
then mailing list software is, among other things, a
tool for creating and sustaining heated argument.
(This is true of other conversational software as well
-- the WELL, usenet, Web BBSes, and so on.)

This tension in outlook, between 'flame war as
unexpected side-effect' and 'flame war as historical
inevitability,' has two main causes. The first is that
although the environment in which a mailing list runs
is computers, the environment in which a flame war
runs is people. You couldn't go through the code of
the Mailman mailing list tool, say, and find the
comment that reads "The next subroutine ensures that
misunderstandings between users will be amplified,
leading to name-calling and vitriol." Yet the
software, when adopted, will frequently produce just
that outcome.

 [...] The first general response to flaming was
netiquette. Netiquette was a proposed set of behaviors
that assumed that flaming was caused by (who else?)
individual users. If you could explain to each user
what was wrong with flaming, all users would stop.

This mostly didn't work. The problem was simple -- the
people who didn't know netiquette needed it most. They
were also the people least likely to care about the
opinion of others, and thus couldn't be easily
convinced to adhere to its tenets.

Interestingly, netiquette came tantalizingly close to
addressing group phenomena. Most versions advised,
among other techniques, contacting flamers directly,
rather than replying to them on the list. Anyone who
has tried this technique knows it can be surprisingly
effective. Even here, though, the collective drafters
of netiquette misinterpreted this technique.
Addressing the flamer directly works not because he
realizes the error of his ways, but because it
deprives him of an audience. Flaming is not just
personal expression, it is a kind of performance,
brought on in a social context.

This is where the 'direct contact' strategy falls
down. Netiquette docs typically regarded direct
contact as a way to engage the flamer's rational self,
and convince him to forgo further flaming. In
practice, though, the recidivism rate for flamers is
high. People behave differently in groups, and while
momentarily engaging them one-on-one can have a
calming effect, that is a change in social context,
rather than some kind of personal conversion. Once the
conversation returns to a group setting, the
temptation to return to performative outbursts also
returns.

Another standard answer to flaming has been the kill
file, sometimes called a bozo filter, which is a list
of posters whose comments you want filtered by the
software before you see them. (In the lore of usenet,
there is even a sound effect -- *plonk* -- that the
kill-file-ee is said to make when dropped in the kill
file.)

Kill files are also generally ineffective, because
merely removing one voice from a flame war doesn't do
much to improve the signal to noise ratio -- if the
flamer in question succeeds in exciting a response,
removing his posts alone won't stem the tide of
pointless replies. And although people have
continually observed (for thirty years now) that "if
everyone just ignores user X, he will go away," the
logic of collective action makes that outcome almost
impossible to orchestrate -- it only takes a couple of
people rising to bait to trigger a flame war, and the
larger the group, the more difficult it is to enforce
the discipline required of all members.

[...] When considering social engineering for
flame-proofed-ness, it's useful to contemplate both
weblogs and wikis, neither of which suffer from
flaming in anything like the degree mailing lists and
other conversational spaces do. Weblogs are relatively
flame-free because they provide little communal space.
In economic parlance, weblogs solve the tragedy of the
commons through enclosure, the subdividing and
privatizing of common space.

[...] Weblogs and wikis are proof that you can have
broadly open discourse without suffering from
hijacking by flamers, by creating a social structure
that encourages or deflects certain behaviors. Indeed,
the basic operation of both weblogs and wiki -- write
something locally, then share it -- is the pattern of
mailing lists and BBSes as well. Seen in this light,
the assumptions made by mailing list software looks
less like The One True Way to design a social contract
between users, and more like one strategy among many.

[...] Rating, karma, meta-moderation -- each of these
systems is relatively simple in technological terms.
The effect of the whole, though, has been to allow
Slashdot to support an enormous user base, while
rewarding posters who produce broadly valuable
material and quarantining offensive or off-topic
posts. [...]

...read it all:  
Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social
Software
http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html

=====
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"everything connects"


		
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