Before we jump into the dangers of openness and the link to spam let’s look at Dunbar’s Number -
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.
Dunbar’s number is supposed to be around 150. Which should make you a bit wary of people with over 200 friends on Facebook 
.
Loss of Social Accountability beyond Dunbar’s Number
Basically Dunbar’s number is saying that beyond a certain number we begin to lose social ties and social responsibility.
It does make sense to say that if you keep adding relationships, at some point, perhaps 150 to 200, the quality of relationships will suffer.
It’s not just quality that suffers – the more the people, the tougher it is to police and keep tabs of favors.
In this situation we are left with an environment where there are no penalties for abusing the system. At the same time there are still benefits, often more so than in a smaller group.
Beyond Dunbar’s number Mutual Reciprocation fails
Most of the arguments around openness and removing DRM and having an open format are based on this belief -
In a system with no accountability people will still be accountable and pay for the value they receive.
We know that as humans we have this concept of Reciprocation ingrained in us i.e. we tend to return favours and help people who help us, and also help people just for the helping.
This only works when there is a social consequence to not reciprocating – in an environment where we know there are punishments for not reciprocating i.e. people will label us as selfish, unhelpful, etc. and stop helping us.
When there are no negative consequences, a significant percentage of people will abuse the system.It might not be as high as 50% – however, it’s definitely higher than 25%.
Spam as the perfect example
Found a great example of how lack of social accountability turns normal people into abusers and spammers.
Spent 1.5 hrs cleaning spam profiles from book summit today – what was shocking was that a lot of the spamming profiles were every day people .
- Chiropractors from Sydney.
- Marketing companies from London.
- Hired ‘SEO experts’ from all over the world.
- Web Marketing Companies.
- Alternative Health practitioners.
These are people who feel that they are entitled to come in and abuse the site.
Would they do the same if the social network was restricted to their friends and family.
No. They feel they can come in and spam and exploit this site because there are no social punishments, and few, if any, consequences.
An Open System is Vulnerable to Exploitation
An eco-system that is too open does its members a disservice, just like an eco-system that is too closed.
This is true even with ebooks - a totally open system would be abused much more than anti-DRM proponents realize.
The only possibility of books becoming zero DRM, open format is if we morph reading so that -
- Readers (not books) are your new product.
- Authors and the Platform are the facilitators.
- Advertising Companies are the customers.
Who knows what system is better. It’s already happened with search (will try to find the link – perhaps it was on Blog Maverick). It might happen with books.
Its beginning to seem more and more that books turning into a hook for advertisers is inevitable.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | hope, lack thereof
