Section 23.8. Conclusion

23.8. Conclusion

In his influential essay, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar," published in the original Open Sources, Eric Raymond offered an arresting metaphor to contrast the top-down approach of traditional software development with the more grass-roots nature of open source software development. Cathedral-style development happens in isolation from users and with rigid authority from the top. Bazaar-style development is more community driven, without a clear line between developer and user, and follows a more evolutionary design process.

People often mistake Raymond's metaphor, however. Too often the assumption is made that the open source development community is a legion of programmers with hundreds or thousands of contributions coming in to each project, as if somehow by sheer numbers open source will triumph against its proprietary competitors. The mistake in this view is to look at the open source community as a flat, homogeneous organization.

Organizations seldom have so simple a structure. Online communities are not accidental organizations, thrown together by geography or family ties. Online communities are a subset of intentional communities, groups formed by those with common interests seeking out like-minded peers and exploiting the low communication cost of the Internet to make those connections. These communities indeed have a structure and a hierarchy. They are not so much a bazaar as they are a tribe.

Slashdot today serves more than 3.5 million page views a day. It is tempting to think of its viewers as an audience, not a community. It is easy to think of its viewers as a bazaar-style, unorganized mass. However, facilitating successful many-to-many communication requires a more sophisticated view. Fundamentally, Slashdot is a community, with the complex hierarchy all online communities have.

Rob Malda and Jeff Bates have commented that they see themselves not as staff versus audience, but as one group with a continuum of privileges. At the base of this hierarchy are the "anonymous cowards," who can read stories, submit stories, and comment on stories, though their comments start from a lower ranking. Registered users start from a higher position, with comments initially moderated higher, and with their activity tracked and evaluated within the system. Moderators are selected from among registered users, as are metamoderators. The paid staff have access to the actual submissions bin, as well as access to activity data about users. Finally, the staff member currently wearing Daddy Pants has ultimate authority over what submissions are actually posted to the front page. Parallel to all of this is the Slashnet IRC network. Some channels are moderated. Some are private. Some are public and open. Some moderated channels are moderated by Slashdot staff. Others are moderated and cover topics that have nothing to do with Slashdot itself. Some participants on IRC see Slashnet as an important way to connect to the larger Slashdot community. Others think of themselves as part of the Slashdot community, but never participate on IRC. Yet as September 11 revealed, even those uninvolved in or unaware of the IRC part of the community nonetheless benefit from it.

The system is authoritarian. So too is a tribe. Every position in this community has its unique privileges, however. Staff members do not have the right to moderate or metamoderate. Only registered users can do that. Furthermore, the system, though authoritarian, relies essentially on a practice of "term limits." A moderator receives a small number of moderation points, and once these are used, moderation rotates to someone else. Metamoderators get about 20 or so moderations to evaluate, and then metamoderation rotates to someone else. Even among the paid staff, no one has absolute editorial authority; Daddy Pants rotates among all of them.

Slashdot and other online communities, like many traditional tribes, bestow authority and privilege based on actions and reputations. This form of many-to-many communication works because these communities are egalitarian, but not democratic: everyone gets a voice, but not everyone gets a vote.