[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[Jon Lambert]

Par Winzell wrote:
>
>That's for a smaller community, though, that's precisely how I ran
>my Mud for a long time. The question is what you do when you have to
>write up guidelines for your customer support people when somebody
>calls up, irate, demanding that some content they find offensive is
>immediately removed... or... wether perhaps communities should simply
>be kept separate, at a manageable size.
>
>I guess scaling of peer pressure is one of the key issues in this
>debate.
>


I've always thought that diversity is antithetical to community building.
Strong communities form because of commonly held values.  The more 
diverse a community is the less commonly held values it has.  The less 
commonly held values a community has, the less value individuals place 
in being a member of that community.  The less value individuals place 
in a community, the less productive that community becomes.  
'Productive' being defined as the rate a community produces anything 
of value.  As diversity increases and commonly held values decrease a 
community will reach a point where the only commonly held value is 
diversity.  At that point it ceases to function as a tool of production, 
it just exists.

Peer pressure does scale with size, it does not scale with diversity.
So the issue is one of managing diversity, not necessarily size.

--
--*     Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD Email: jlsysinc at nospam.ix.netcom.com     *--
--*     Mud Server Developer's Page <http://jlsysinc.home.netcom.com>      *--
--* "No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." Thomas Jefferson *--





_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev