Evaporative cooling of group beliefs

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs:


Over on Overcoming Bias there was a great post called “Evaporative cooling of group beliefs” where the author talks about how ejecting outliers moves the group’s average position towards the other extreme.

[...]

My own theory of Internet moderation is that you have to be willing to exclude trolls and spam to get a conversation going. You must even be willing to exclude kindly but technically uninformed folks from technical mailing lists if you want to get any work done. A genuinely open conversation on the Internet degenerates fast.

[...]

It’s interesting to compare this to the techniques Theresa Nielsen Hayden uses on her “Making Light” blog and on Boing Boing comments. There’s an art to building online communities that nobody has yet well documented.

Does it move it towards the other extreme, or merely back away from the far edges of the bell curve? A move towards the other extreme can also be a move towards the middle, depending on where the starting point is.

To me, the reality of community management is that early on in the process, a moderator’s policies, style and attitude shapes the community, because it’ll attract certain people and attitudes and discourage (or ban) others. Once a community is established, it really needs to dictate policy and the administrator’s job is to steer the group in the direction it wants to be steered, and where necessary protect it from those who put personal interests above the needs and wants of the group (trolls are, ultimately, people who are more interested in garnering attention than contributing to the group, or in some cases, simply people who insist on “winning”, which excludes others from the option of “winning”, however the community defines that)

I admit to not being a big fan of how Teresa manages her communities, but I’ll be the first to say that it works for her and her groups. On the other hand, I find those groups very “echo chamber”-ish and narrow in viewpoint and not terribly tolerant of views that don’t fit the common worldview. Well, most communities are like that, but those are even more so. But they’re happy with it, and that’s what matters. What I think doesn’t, since I’m not involved in them.

At one point I thought it might be fun to write “the book” on community management, whatever that is. Later on, I thought maybe building a wiki or some kind of community for community managers to write an online guide might work — then I realize what it would take to be community manager for a community of community managers, and I went and put a washcloth over my eyes on the couch until the thought passed…

I still don’t think I’ve seen “the book” on all of this, or even if we’re at the point where it can be rationally written. There are so many right answers — each depending on a situation and the personalities involved; and for every situation where a community policy works — it’ll fail miserably in a dozen other situations with different people and different needs. So maybe it’s best not to put all this in stone. Or paper. Or whatever…

You might also want to read:

  1. Doug Wilson: “We believe in this group and we believe in this staff” Doug Wilson: “We believe in this group and we believe in this staff” | Working the Corners: And GM Doug Wilson, who never comments directly...
  2. A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy Clay Shirky is at it again. Go read the whole thing, it’s awesome. Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: n the Seventies —...
  3. SF Bay Area Birders Flickr group Steller’s Jay, originally uploaded by Bill Walker. I’ve just joined this, and I wanted to give it a bit of publicity. The photo shown is...
  4. Thoughts on ‘A group is it’s own worst enemy’ If you haven’t yet read Clay Shirky’s A Group is its own Worst Enemy, please do so. It’s a wonderful examination of the social aspects...
  5. Group-forming Sébastien Paquet is part of a group that’s creating a group to discuss group-forming, or how to develop and foster online (or virtual) communities. Looks...