Eyes on the Prize

by: Dean Barker

Fri Aug 13, 2010 at 07:27:19 AM EDT

Your influence as a user, on a healthy site, is a function of to what extent your activity supports those group-defined social goods. In other words, to quote Shirky, the user of social software is the group, not the individual. If you are consistently acting in a way that hurts the interests of the group, the group has to defend itself. If it doesn't, the group slowly becomes its own enemy.

That said, co-founder Mike Caulfield's post contains an anecdote very relevant to the news of the past couple of days, and, much more than that, is perhaps the single best expression of what we are about here.