The Organism Will Do What It Pleases

I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of <i>not</i> doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick up steam.<p>I can't be the only person who notices this; pretty much HN post that features SO includes a litany of complaints about them. Even if the original post isn't a complaint, the top thread in the post will probably be a complaint, regardless of how relevant that is to the topic.<p>My point isn't that what SO is doing is wrong. It's that what they're doing seems to go against the wishes of the vast majority of the community. Jeff even links to a post of his that basically says "you shouldn't always listen to the community". So, when do you listen and when do you ignore? Advice that consists of "sometimes you should do X and sometimes you shouldn't" seems trivially true for pretty much any real-world X.

Ironically, I don't think Stackoverflow does this very well.<p>It's a good article, and the point of researching every wheel ever is a good point well made.<p>But as a long-time Stackoverflow user, I've been frustrated time and time again by cases where extremely valuable content <i>emerges</i> on StackOverflow, but then the moderators come along and kill it because "it is not the defined purpose of this site."<p>Now they have the right to define the rules &#38; purpose for their own site. It wouldn't bother me so much if the content they were killing wasn't so <i>fantastic</i>. But I have seen so many deep, excellent, rich blobs of technical content get cut out and cast aside, for the sake of adherence to some superficial guideline.<p>It seems to be exactly the <i>opposite</i> of "seeing what your users are doing, then helping them do it."

Back in the day I spent way too much time keeping up with the MUD-DEV mailing list. There were a lot of discussions that touched on these topics, although not always as constructively as Atwood does here.<p>Here's an old post by Raph Koster that talks about how to deal with kewl d00ds. I was reminded of it because Koster referred to them as genetic algorithms with respect to bug/exploit finding. It's a bit of a tangent but there are some similarities.<p><a href="http://nilgiri.net/MUD-Dev-archive/15729.html" rel="nofollow">http://nilgiri.net/MUD-Dev-archive/15729.html</a>

"We noticed early in the Stack Overflow beta that users desperately wanted to reply to each other, and were cluttering up the system with "answers" that were, well, not answers to the question. Rather than chastize them for doing it wrong – stupid users! – we added the commenting system to give them a method of annotating answers and questions for clarifications, updates, and improvements."<p>This is excellent advice not just for online ventures, but for business in general. Too much time is spent making rules and regulations to prevent customers from taking certain actions, when a lot more can be gained by understanding what your customers are trying to do naturally, and finding a way to support that.

must read about it, for any social site developer: <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a>

Curious, is there any video of expert D&#38;D players playing? I used to be a big DM in my area back in the day (probably around 1981/82), but since the internet wasn't as prevelant there was a lot less communication about how the game was supposed to be played (and I wasn't in a large metro area -- so I pretty much set the rules for the town).<p>To this day, I'm curious as to how the game should actually be played.

Hm? MUD is older than Habitat, right?

Exactly like Mundo