A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy is a transcript of a talk that was given on the subject of group dynamics and moderation and it touches pretty heavily upon the above subject of how to keep a group from being taken over by bad actors who have way too much free time on their hands. Here's a relevant excerpt from the transcript below the fold:
But it’s not all beautiful; as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that joined Communitree was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah all over the bulletin board.
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, because they were being overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying, “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”
But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and in the end, they simply shut the site down.
Now you could ask whether or not the founders’ inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn’t stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn’t matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There’s no way to completely separate them.
What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they’d set up, to save it from this attack from within, and that context was partly technical and partly social. The lesson of Communitree is that attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn’t shut down by people trying to crash the server or flood it from the outside. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological patterns of normal use and attack were so similar at the machine level, there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn’t happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn’t care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
(emphasis mine)
