A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

I just read a nice article called "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" about group psycology and social software. It has an abundance of nice quotes:

Humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social

So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected.

The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers.

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules."

The tyranny of the majority.

The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user's point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the "group is its own worst enemy" style attacks from within.

Go on and read it!