Belady-Lehman says that any software system, given enough changes to it, will eventually and inevitably reach a state in which each attempt to fix something simply causes more problems. It can be argued from the paper that Quu posted in an
accompanying thread that the Belady-Lehman curve also applies to these kinds of low-cost-of-access communities that you see on the internet: as more people join and try to do things that the original designers or organizers didn't intend them to do, things break. Anyone remember that journal crash a few months back where some recently joined members used the journal system as a chat or IM utility and blew up an old bug?
As that paper says, you can't really separate the technical and social. So keeping the .org from undergoing Usenet-style implosion is a technical and social responsibility. We can argue on all we want about art being non-scorable, and eventually some people will listen, but it'd also be possible to kill the top-10-percent hype by allowing users to mark videos as disallowing scores in opinions, and basing the 'top videos' on users' favorites lists, much the way that favorite anime are rated. We can complain to the mods about the forums filling up with offensive or useless posts, but a karma system based on site participation (usefulness in ops, insightful posts, donut contributions, etc) and a user-moderation threshold to send pointless threads to WOT would help enforce those community standards.
Of course, I haven't thoroughly looked ofer the requirements for either of thse changes, and I obviously don't have access to the .org's PHP engine and database structures, so they may very well be unimplementable or break enough stuff to make the Belady-Lehman situation worse. Maybe I will get around to working up a tentative system to send to Phade for comments and possible merge. Maybe someone else with more free time and more PHP experience will do so first. Maybe we collectively will be able to change the .org culture so that such technical changes won't be necessary. But, as Nate said, it's none of it going to happen unless people do *SOMETHING*.
The .org is great because some yobo from nowhere can make three butt-quality LBZ videos, make an ass of him/herself on the forums, and then, a year later, pick up enough info from here to make a masterpiece, win a major contest, and shock the world. The .org sucks because so many people join every day thinking they're already at the second stage and not still at the first. The .org is great because for less than the cost of a homepage that barely allows you to store a moderately sized image gallery, I can host dozens of inconsistently edited videos combining copyright-violating visuals with music nobody wants to listen to, and never worry about bandwidth charges. The .org sucks because too many people also think this is a great idea. The .org rocks because so many interesting/cool/weird/knowledgeable people hang out here. The .org sucks because it's online, and the standards of internet behavior are imposed, not the standards of a con party.
That's it. Forget the karma system, I'm going to work on an Internet Beer Protocol. In addition to the Golden Donut we'll have the Keg of Golden (taps and pumping to be funded by donation). That'll make everything work better.
--K
