#group structure

Multiple animals living together means that the group can draw upon multiple experiences and memories—it’s not just one brain remembering where the best trees are. The group structure also enables those rare fruiting trees to be monopolized and defended against other animals, and of course, there are also many pairs of eyes open to spot possible predators. Living in a group suits the gibbon habitat well. And if you live in a group, you need to communicate to other members of your group where today’s foraging is, in a way that a seed-hiding chickadee doesn’t.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the data, it’s that it takes more than a lot of users to build a viable social network. They need to have strong connections too.

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves. Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.) So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down. Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave... This about the Internet: Anyone can walk in. And anyone can walk out. And so an online community must stay fun to stay alive. Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness—waiting as long as a police officer would wait to open fire—indulging your conscience and the virtues you learned in walled fortresses, waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks—is waiting far too late.

Tomorrow will be the last day that a new Daily Shoot assignment will be posted. After that, the site will be mothballed. It’ll eventually disappear into the depths of the bit-bucket. ... Why are we shutting the Daily Shoot down now? The primary reason is time, or the relative lack of it for a non-commercial site like this. When we started the Daily Shoot, we tried to keep things as lightweight as possible, both in terms of code and the impact on our daily schedules. After all, both Mike and I have businesses that we have to attend to. We leveraged the Twitter and Flickr APIs and had something decent going in no time at all.

I think we've all been to meetings where everyone had a really good time, we're all talking to one another and telling jokes and laughing, and it was a great meeting, except we got nothing done. Everyone was amusing themselves so much that the group's goal was defeated by the individual interventions. The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group.

The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. ... But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in. ... absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority. So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.