Freedom vs. Annoyingness
Clay Shirky’s did a very interesting talk on how architecture of social software drives user behavior. He showed a graph that has “freedom” in one axis meaning the freedom of a person to create group communications vs.. “Annoyingness” of some of those group communication in the other axis. The graph had a steep knee in the curve where the annoyingness level skyrockets when there is too much freedom. He went on describing how slashdots cops with that. I see this in my company where we want to give freedom to employees by not restricting who can email to the all employees mailing list but that drives certain level of annoyingness in some instances when a company wide email is replied (to all the company) by several other employees with the quality of the comments and the relation to the original topic degrading
exponentially as more people reply to it. I still do not want to restrict freedom so perhaps I should make employees aware of Clay’s theory…
CD
