I know this thing has died down, but I just discovered it last night and it made me love E2 again and I want to node something real soon but need to contribute this now. A little more fuel on the fire. I wrote the following during the summer of 2003, while the Cleveland un-nodermeet was going on and the copyright rules were changing. I may have asked a few noders to read it at the time; I'm not sure. It was on my homenode at one point too. In any case, I think I may have been on to something, so here it is in its permanent resting place.
I've just reread Everything is a community, Everything is a family, and Raising the bar, the three noding about noding nodes that utterly transcend noding about noding, and reading them I feel like we've gotten lost. I came to E2 long after Hermetic left (and even longer after Sensei left; it took me a year to figure out why everyone thought he was so great) but this doesn't mean I can't read old nodes and see patterns, and see where patterns stop. Have a look at Hermetic's daylog from September 6, 2001. See that list of pipelinked names? Many of those people are now in the power structure of Everything2. At the same time, many of them haven't written any nodes in months. Only one has written a non-daylog, non-administrative writeup in the last month. And yet most of them are not “fled noders.” They keep coming back. These people aren't here to have a writing website. If they cared about that they'd be writing. My only guess is that they're still here only because E2 is a community and it contains people that they like and care about.
dem bones wrote that Raising the bar was removed because "it was subjective, noding about noding and not something that would stand the test of time." What about history? Do we not care? Do we need to hide knowledge of our past in an obscure superdoc?
There's a growing antagonism between those who want the bar raised and those who want to be able to write whatever the hell they want. This is a false dichotomy. E2 can be a community. E2 can be an encyclopedia. E2 can be a place for fiction. E2 can be a place for opinion. E2 can even be a place for poetry and lyrics, original and by others. We can manage to be all of these things. There is a middle path between raising the bar so high that only the greatest can jump over it and lowering it to the point that a one sentence writeup on a complex subject is okay. Read Raising the bar again. Half of the things dannye expresses approval for are community-oriented. There is a middle path. If we don't find it, someone else will.
E2 FAQ: Raising the bar, to which I refer repeatedly above, hasn't existed in quite a while, as E2 continues to erase its history. I don't think I really thought that Community2 would succeed in bringing together community and writing, and I certainly don't think they did now, but I'm also pretty sure E2 hasn't, at least in a way that included me, in a long time. I don't think someone else will anymore, either. As kthejoker says, 90% of everything is crap. We're not doing a very good job, but no one else is either.
That's my pessimism. Here's my optimism, part social and part technical. There are many ways to think about Sturgeon's Law and E2. E2 is more than the sum of its parts. We don't just have nodes. We don't even just have users. We have (sometimes, in some ways, especially when it matters most) community. Even if 90% of the database were crap with no innate value, it could still be crap that brings us together, and that's something.
Another perspective on Sturgeon's Law. We have softlinks. They're awesome. Some nodes get softlinked more than others and tied deeply into the nodegel. These are often good nodes. We have C!s. We have votes. We have plenty of democratic mechanisms, not for getting rid of crap, but for spotlighting notcrap. And 10% of everything is gold.