Top all-time · #240
Clay Shirky
Personal blog · shirky.comwritingcultureweb
Clay Shirky's personal blog at shirky.com covers writing, culture and web. Since 2007, 193 different Hacker News readers have linked it 289 times, most often “Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”. The last post was in 2013, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Clay Shirky's essays on online communities, group dynamics, micropayments and the power law of attention, most often 'A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Since discovering the net in 1993, the things I’ve spent my time thinking through, working on, and writing about have varied widely. I have been a producer, programmer, professor, designer, author, consultant, sometimes working with people who wanted to create a purely intellectual or aesthetic expe
Most-linked posts?
- Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy38 people · 49 mentions · first linked 2007-05-27
- A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy24 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2007-03-29
- A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy15 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2014-04-26
- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable12 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2009-03-14
- Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-02-10
- The Collapse of Complex Business Models9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2010-04-01
- Fame vs. Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2007-08-14
- Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-02-09
- Here Comes Everybody6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2008-05-28
- Napster, Udacity, and the Academy5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-11-12
What Hacker News says?
> Primary problem with producing movie/TV shows is money. It costs A LOT of money. Even shows you think can be done with a lower budget, it can't... currently. Sure it can. Read: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex... > The ATT guys had correctly understood that the income from $20-a-month customers wouldn’t pay for good web hosting. What they hadn’t understood, were in fact professionally i…
Comment linking /weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/
on “Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.”Submitted The Collapse of Complex Business Models as a story · 278 points
HN discussionNobody said it was better . You need both. Ideally, they complement each other in a bigger-than-the-sum-of-its-parts manner that is better than using either one alone. Tangential example of technology/community interaction: Clay Shirky's "A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy" is a great essay on how self-policing can backfire even without external influences[0]. The overall conclusion being that the technological framewo…
Comment linking /writings/group_enemy.html
on “Reddit just passed Facebook as #3 most popular website in US”Submitted Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005) as a story · 217 points
HN discussionA similar sentiment: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/01/remembering-aaron-by-ta...
Comment linking /weblog/2013/01/remembering-aaron-by-taking-care-of-each-other/
on “What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project”Submitted The Collapse of Complex Business Models (2010) as a story · 122 points
HN discussionMicropayments is simply the wrong model for numerous reasons. I've written on this several times: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=micropayments&... Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Andrew Odlyzko far more ably: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen... (PDF) A vastly more sensible option:…
Comment linking /writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
on “Adblocking: How about Nah?”Submitted Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable as a story · 99 points
HN discussionIt's probably a good time to reread Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... And I'm not making a wry comment on HN moderation, just that this piece never gets old.
Comment linking /writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html
on “Two HN Announcements”Submitted Not enough women are arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks as a story · 87 points
HN discussionMicropayments have been busted down many times, though I find Nick Szabo's arguments the most convincing: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html Clay Shirky's got some good additions. http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht... The solution I'm leaning strongly toward is a large-scale, preferably universal, content syndication / payment sy…
Comment linking /writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
on “Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup”Submitted A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy as a story · 71 points
HN discussionThe article A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... ) gets into that a bit. One of the interesting bits in there is: > The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared a…
Comment linking /writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html
on “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change”Submitted The Failure of #amazonfail as a story · 59 points
HN discussionThis does not come across as very well-informed. You are replying to someone who is talking about the NYT , which, whatever its limitations, is probably the best daily source of the thing we call "news" in the U.S. You say that there is little unique content out there -- but this a false statement if we're talking about the WSJ and NYT. If you are talking about the web as a whole, then you've changed the subject, an…
Comment linking /weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
on “Wait, Google Sent Me”Submitted Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy as a story · 57 points
HN discussionThe following is a relevant quote from Clay Shirky. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-... Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d lear…
Comment linking /weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/
on “Twitter names famed hacker 'Mudge' as head of security”Submitted Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags as a story · 45 points
HN discussionGroups will always enforce group-think especially as they age. Clay Shirky covers this extremely well. http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...
Comment linking /writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html
on “Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study”Submitted Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (2009) as a story · 38 points
HN discussionA hyperlink. I remember, before Wikipedia, there was a big debate on the original C2 Wiki about the usefulness of category pages. There is a fairly widespread opinion that categories are a waste of time, because no ontology can usefully classify the body of information that's out there. While it's natural to want to categorize things, people inevitably use very different systems of categorization (as seen by the doz…
Comment linking /writings/ontology_overrated.html
on “Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia”Submitted Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization as a story · 34 points
HN discussionMeatballWiki ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/MeatballWiki - a fork of the original c2.com dedicated to virtual communities, now in read only mode) had a few pages with insights on trolls, mostly linked from http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WhatIsaTroll This also touches on one of my favorite essays on social software: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html ) In many cases, the co…
Comment linking /writings/group_enemy.html
on ““We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards””Submitted Situated Software – Clay Shirky (2004) as a story · 30 points
HN discussion> So how did we get form "can't talk to your Hangout via an XMPP client" to "Google will disable SMTP"? Really folks, this site used to be better about this stuff... Religion is inevitable. http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Comment linking /writings/group_enemy.html
on “What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?”Submitted A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSomewhat unrelated, but the reason micropayments aren't a thing isn't that transaction fees are too high. The reason is that consumers hate them. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...
Comment linking /weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/
on “Coinbase is launching support for the USDC stablecoin”Submitted A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThis comment sounds very much like the AT&T engineers mentioned in http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex... (a post which appears on HN quite regularly). --- > In the mid-90s, I got a call from some friends at ATT, asking me to help them research the nascent web-hosting business. They thought ATT’s famous “five 9’s” reliability (services that work 99.999% of the time) would be valuable, but th…
Comment linking /weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models
on “'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi”Submitted Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality as a story · 27 points
HN discussion
