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David_Gerard comments on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough - Less Wrong
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Um, after I read the sequences I ploughed through every LW post from the start of LW to late 2010 (when I started reading regularly). What I saw was that the sequences were revered, but most of the new and interesting stuff from that intervening couple of years was ignored. (Though it's probably just me.)
At this point A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy is apposite. Note the description of the fundamentalist smackdown as a stage communities go through. Note it also usually fails when it turns out the oldtimers have differing and incompatible ideas on what the implicit constitution actually was in the good old days.
tl;dr declarations of fundamentalism heuristically strike me as inherently problematic.
edit: So what about this comment rated a downvote?
edit 2: ah - the link to the Shirky essay appears to be giving the essay in the UK, but Viagra spam in the US o_0 I've put a copy up here.
I suspect that's because it's poorly indexed. This should be fixed.
This is very much why I have only read some of it.
If the more recent LW stuff was better indexed, that would be sweet.
Exchanges the look two people give each other when they each hope that the other will do something that they both want done but which neither of them wants to do.
Hey, I think "Dominions" should be played but do want to play it and did purchase the particular object at the end of the link. I don't understand why you linked to it though.
The link text is a quote from the game description.
Ahh, now I see it. Clever description all around!
Yeah, I didn't read it from the wiki index, I read it by going to the end of the chronological list and working forward.
Am I in some kind of internet black-hole? That link took me to some viagra spam site.
It's a talk by Clay Shirky, called "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy".
I get the essay ... looking in Google, it appears someone's done some scurvy DNS tricks with shirky.com and the Google cache is corrupted too. Eegh.
I've put up a copy here and changed the link in my comment..
shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
???
I thought it was great. Very good link.
It's a revelatory document. I've seen so many online communities, of varying sizes, go through precisely what's described there.
(Mark Dery's Flame Wars (1994) - which I've lost my copy of, annoyingly - has a fair bit of material on similar matters, including one chapter that's a blow-by-blow description of such a crisis on a BBS in the late '80s. This was back when people could still seriously call this stuff "cyberspace." This leads me to suspect the progression is some sort of basic fact of online subcultures. This must have had serious attention from sociologists, considering how rabidly they chase subcultures ...)
LW is an online subcultural group and its problems are those of online subcultural groups; these have been faced by many, many groups in the past, and if you think they're reminiscent of things you've seen happen elsewhere, you're likely right.
Maybe if you reference Evaporative Cooling, which is the converse of the phenomena you describe, you'd get a better reception?
I'm thinking it's because someone appears to have corrupted DNS for Shirky's site for US readers ... I've put up a copy myself here.
I'm not sure it's the same thing as evaporative cooling. At this point I want a clueful sociologist on hand.
Evaporative cooling is change to average belief from old members leaving.
Your article is about change to average belief from new members joining.
Sounds plausibly related, and well spotted ... but it's not obvious to me how they're functionally converses in practice to the degree that you could talk about one in place of talking about the other. This is why I want someone on hand who's thought about it harder than I have.
(And, more appositely, the problem here is specifically a complaint about newbies.)
I wasn't suggesting that one replaced the other, but that one was conceptually useful in thinking about the other.
Definitely useful, yes. I wonder if anyone's sent Shirky the evaporative cooling essay.