Comments on Joel Spolsky’s work

I’ve just read Joel Spolsky’s work, Building Communities with Software. Although Spolsky’s piece is a commentary on social evolutions in the states, it is also highly applicable to British society. I for one, never go to pubs, unless with friends. I hate drinking alone. The Work-TV-Sleep-Work-TV-Sleep cycle must be familiar to many of us, regardless of where we live in the world. Spolsky posits that we flock to online communities and chatrooms, discussion forums and open source projects out of desperation for some human contact. He asserts that societal influences are largely responsible for the lack of a place to socialize in. “Make a coffee shop without very many chairs, as Starbucks does, and people will carry their coffee back to their lonely rooms, instead of staying around and socializing like they do in the fantasy TV coffeehouse of “Friends…”. This is something that many of us, if not all of us have already experienced in one way or another. The fragmentation of family bonds, the increasing encapsulation of the individual in swathes of psychic insulation that cannot be easily penetrated, and the devaluation of values that were once held dear in society. We seem to be embracing change recklessly without due regard to the potentially disastrous consequences. Global warming, climate change, large scale deforestation and other man made calamities have all of us walking the brink, a hairsbreadth away from the abyss. Most of Spolsky’s statements strike a chord within me, and I can see myself nodding in agreement as he sets forth one damning argument after another. One might have chance to doubt ones observations, but when they are backed by the keen observations of someone such as Spolsky, it does tend to reinforce those beliefs.

After making these rather telling observations, Spolsky abruptly veers off into analysing the influence of design in the popularity of the software. He states that the variations in the popularity of an online community are mainly due to the software design decisions. This might be so, but why are terribly designed sites such as Ebay and Amazon so popular that they are icons more than services? These assertions are probably not so well supported by fact. The IRC, aussie gay bashers, bots, bot wars and many other digressions later, the reader is cast ashore on Slashdot, fuckedcompany.com, and branching, which is supposedly very logical to a programmer, but lacking in real-world fidelity. In summary, Spolsky got off to a promising start, but then squandered his lead, went off the tracks, and got himself stuck in quicksand.