Joshua Schachter, part 2

I went back to Harvard tonight for Joshua's second session at the Berkman Center. What I found most interesting was his philosophy towards users. This shows up in his handling of both user tagging and spam attacks. He said that he is constantly getting demands from the more control oriented users to restrict the use of tags, either by establishing stylistic rules, such as capitalization and the use of special characters, or by constraining the tags that users can create. He refuses to do this, and always strives to give the users as much freedom as possible, even if it breeds confusion and inconsistencies. As a control freak I find this troubling, but I think he is right in this case. Tagging is so new that adding constraints now will cut off the more ineteresting behaviors before they have a chance to emerge.

Another example of this philosophy is the way he handles spam attacks. He has found that the site gets spammed every couple of days, with such common tactics as entering thousands of copies of the same URL, or entering thousands of URLs with the same tag. He seems to have good back-end systems to monitor this, but instead of returning an error message, as most programmers (including me) would do, he just has the system ignore these entries and hide them from the public. He says that eventually the spammer gets the idea and just gives up. He says that if he were to present an active defense, the spammers would just use this to find new methods of attack. So instead of trying to hit back, he just wraps the abuser in cotton and waits until they get bored. Very bright.