| | |
|
NickFlathFirstPaper 3 - 19 Jan 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
|---|
| | | SA's users and staff care deeply about forum governance because good governance leads to a healthy community. SA is an internet incarnation of an old-style social club. Membership in social clubs has always had tangible benefits (use of the clubhouse) as well as social networking benefits (showing the club ring at a job interview). On the internet, the tangible drops away and the social networking benefits increase in significance. Without overt external legal pressure, SA has created the rudiments of procedural due process as well as an effective deterrent on anti-social behavior. People are willing to spend time on SA and submit to the autocracy of the moderators because they have some assurance that the moderators act impartially and transparently.
Right now, in the United States, internet forums are still for gamers and nerds. But this will change. Comments and discussion are inescapable. Google now seeks to turn the entire Internet into a Youtube comment zone with Sidewiki. SA's labor-intensive governance mechanism would be impractical for Google - but they must find some way of keeping the discussion interesting, or else the Sidewiki will degenerate into a haven for spam, botting, malware, and flamewars. I have never in my life read anything interesting in a Youtube comment. For now, I'm happy browsing Something Awful. | |
>
> |
- This seems to me a fairly clear explanation of the rules used in one among the hundreds of thousands of online communities in the world of different sizes, compositions, purposes, degrees of hierarchy, etc. It's a little like describing the rules and customs of one's weekly poker game, or sewing circle, but on a slightly larger scale. Your likeliest comparison, the one you end on, of the social club, is accurate and therefore also a little misleading, because the club's localization in space and limitation of resource is part of what makes it charming rather than dismaying.
- You express neatly, if perhaps at more than necessary length, the difference between building a space and building a community in the net; similar questions arise, with perhaps less elemental clarity, in the "real" world. What you need in order to make the essay more effective is to put clearly the general propositions to which the observations recorded here lead you.
| | | \ No newline at end of file |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |