The house and the town square
https://dri.es/the-house-and-the-town-square
From Dries Buytaert (Creator of Drupal)
He quotes this from Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of the now defunct Gawker.
> I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face.
Dries adds with his own thoughts.
> In the early days of blogging, responding to someone's post took real work. You had to write something on your own site and hope they noticed. As Spiers puts it, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you'd let them in. If a troll wanted to attack you, they had to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait. Otherwise, no one would see it.
> It's a reminder that friction can be a feature, not a bug. Having to write on your own blog filtered out low-effort and low-quality responses. Social media removed that friction. That has real benefits: more voices, faster conversations, lower barriers to entry. But it also means the town square gets crowded fast, and some people come just to shout.
He concludes with this
> What I like the most about Spiers' blog post is that the early web didn't just enable better conversation. It required it. You had to say something interesting enough that someone would bookmark your URL and come back. Maybe that is the thing worth protecting: not the lack of a comments section, but the kind of friction that rewards effort.
> In that spirit, I'm going to make an effort to link to more blog posts worth visiting. Consider this me knocking on Spiers' door.
I always find it interesting to read how people come to see problems which arise from the lack of a clear understanding of property rights. Property rights are not mentioned at all directly in these posts but this is actually the root of the problem being described.
When you do not control the site you are at the mercy of the one that does. They may just allow things you do not want, or deny things that you do. Back in mid 2000s and 2010s I had come to this conclusion myself. I was managing all the web sites for a private university and I kept getting request to enable comments on the blogs and article features of the sites. As I had been managing web sites and using them for some time at that point I advised against it.
When you open your doors to anyone you are taking on a new responsibility. The house analogy is one I used as well. If you are gonna just let anyone in, you better be prepared to handle whatever comes along. Otherwise you will be at the mercy of those that comment on your site.
There are no free lunches. Even Stacker.news is at the mercy of those with the keys to the kingdom. Making social networking sites or even sites like SN that may not be social media, but are open to anyone isn't that hard. What is hard is managing it and encouraging good behaviors and discouraging bad ones.
