I’ve moved this topic over from a comment thread on Handmeon Hints where Phil asked:

Could a thread be toggled to invitation only? “Ask for admittance”? With the sojourn host approving?

The social dynamics of building something more open than a list serv and more closed that a blog seems to be very important. You want the chance encounter, the serendiptious new comer, but you don’t want trolls, lonely hearts, complainers, spammers, or bullies. Asking to be allowed in seems a low barrier to entry. I would not allow just anyone to drop into my home for dinner party. “Tender and acceptance” again. Tender your request to join, explain why, tell us a little about yourself, and we will respectfully reach a decision.” On line bios would help, so established members could “tender” their bio. “Here I am, this is me, may I come over?”

We could have some sort of ‘restricted comment’ capability, I guess, if it seems necessary. On the other hand, you could just throw any unwanted comments away unceremoniously. There is kind of a taboo against that in blogging circles, but handmeon isn’t a blogging site. Handmeon is more of a collaborative accretive content site. In this sense, it is quite different from a blog.

A blog is an ephemeral content publishing site. In a blog, the content scrolls off the bottom of the screen and disappears. The good and the bad are equally ephemeral. It’s like the old joke about the weather: if you don’t like it, wait a minute. A blog, like a newspaper, privileges the recent. It is unusual to go back and peruse last years blog entries. Blog writers are forced to pander to their public’s continuing appetite for the new. There is no lasting product. Or rather, the process is the product. This is also true of many discussion forums, and is true in spades of online ‘chat’, the ripe banana of the internet.

This is very different from, say, Wikipedia. Who goes to Wikipedia and wants to see a list of the most recently added articles? Not me. It doesn’t really matter when a Wikipedia entry was written. And in fact, it wasn’t written at any particular time. Wikipedia is a collaborative accretive content site.

Handmeon is a peculiar hybrid of process and product. The process is important but the time scale on which the process unfolds is one of months or years rather than days or hours. Or at least is intended to be. Currently, the comment to post ratio far exceeds what any of us had imagined. I’m not quite sure why – or whether I think it is a good thing.

One of the design challenges we are struggling with right now is how to address the tradeoff between the natural desire to socialize, and the host’s creative urge to produce a satisfying product. (Which corresponds also to an opposition between the ‘long’ time frame of creativity, and the ‘short’ time frame of socializing.) We don’t want to discourage or hinder either impulse. What we are thinking of doing is to permit the sojourn host to ‘promote’ selected comments to the status of ‘contribution’. (You might say, from the anarchy of conversation to the order of creation.) The standard view of a sojourn might then consist of the posts and the ‘contributions’. The conversation could happily burble along in the comment thread without anyone feeling bad about ‘littering’. But at the same time, commenters with aspirations to immortality might be motivated to put a little extra creative juice into their comments. But it would always be possible to choose to view any lionized ‘contribution’ in the context of the original comment stream – as a way of emphasizing the eternal interdependence of product and process. Order and anarchy are both good things – but they need to be sufficiently insulated from each other so that they both can thrive. (Even though the distinction is, at the bottom, artificial.)

Of course we don’t need to present it quite that way, in consideration of the user who may justly find the philosophical underpinnings tedious and pretentious.