Slashdot Mirror
Riding the Failure Cascade
An anonymous reader writes "The Escapist has up an article looking at a curve that represents the dissolution of large social groups, like online guilds. Called the Failure Cascade, it's essentially a way of examining the dissociation of members of an organization predicated on a culture of success. They primarily explore this phenomenon using descriptions of EVE corporate alliances. 'These are the two forces at work in [an] alliance's failure cascade: the individual and the guild ... This happens because the failure cascade is the inverse of a network effect. Websites like MySpace define their value by the people that use the service just as guilds define their quality by their members. As bad events cause players to leave or become inactive, the quality drop leads others to do the same in a spiral that rarely stabilizes, until no one is left.'"
The article could be summarised as so:
People leave guilds.
More people leave guilds.
No one is left in guild.
Guild dies.
I feel so topical and current! I just wrote the same thing about Microsoft, detailing the spiral pattern affecting the company's entire consumer product lineup, from Zune to Windows to Office to Xbox to WinCE/Windows Mobile. Will the last person left please turn off the lights?
Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower
Somewhat ironically, one of the most financially successful capitalist companies of the 90s has positioned itself as a modern counterpart to the old communist Soviet Union. Microsoft's ideological contempt for and resistance to free markets and the open expression and propagation of fresh ideas and technologies is not only a close parallel of the old USSR, but also a clear reflection of why Microsoft is currently failing and why its troubles have only just begun. Here's a comprehensive look at why this is the case.
What happens when Republicans lose the White House in 2008? As a brand, Democrats didn't decline in popularity after their 2004 defeat (or after 2000). But Republicans did decline after their 2006 losses - though they'd started after their 2004 victories, and regained some shortly after the 2006 upsets. Maybe political parties act different.
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make install -not war
The mathematical study of this process could be potentially quite interesting, analogous to the study of critical points and phase transitions in statistical physics. By systematically studying the rise and decline of stable structures in online communities like guilds it could give some insight into a real life version of psychohistory. Indeed, these online groups are microcosms for the real world, but where certain parameters could be controlled and studied. Unfortunately, this article has nothing to do with that and simply seems to be a personal lament about how sometimes online guilds fall apart. It is a bummer for many-a-gamer, but not exactly groundbreaking stuff here.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I think Wikipedia is a prominent example of this. Assholes(deletionists) are driving away the people who made it great in the first place(content creators) with their elitism and petty power grabs. And now, Wikimedia is only able to achieve 1/4 of their fundraising goal because a lot of the content creators were probably money contributors as well.
Congratulations asshole deletionists. You may finally achieve the ultimate deletion-the entire encyclopedia.
How does fewer people buying CDs lead to still fewer people buying CDs? No fan of the RIAA, I just think maybe you reached a little on this one.