“I want to be glad and happy with my eyes fully open, without fooling myself in the belief that we live in a pink world: to be happy to be alive in the full knowledge of all misery.

“Spare the group from scale. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.

Sometimes you can do soft forking. LiveJournal does the best soft forking of any software I’ve ever seen. The median size of a LiveJournal group is around five people.

My favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page.

“The overload principle: set moderately difficult but potentially achievable goals. In weight lifting, for example, strength cannot be increased by tasks that can be performed easily or that cannot be performed without injury to the organism. Strength can be increased by lifting weights that are realistic but difficult enough to stretch the muscles.

“Kernel developers at large haven’t the faintest idea just how big the problems in userspace are. lkml is about as scary a communication forum as they come. Most people are absolutely terrified of mailing the list (e.g. saying ‘my Firefox tabs open slowly since the last CPU scheduler upgrade’) lest they get flamed for their inexperience, an inappropriate bug report, being stupid or whatever. Whereas enterprise users are the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some $bullshit_benchmark degraded by 0.1% with patch $Y gets reported, and how quickly it gets attended to.

“Analytical software is necessary but not sufficient. Narrated animation is the secret sauce. The stories that people will understand, and remember, are the ones that have been performed well.

“[When remixing websites,] the dynamic script tag’s main advantages are that it is not bound by the web browser’s cross-domain security restrictions and that it runs identically on more web browsers than XMLHttpRequest. Feature-wise, the XMLHttpRequest object is still a more reliable, flexible, and secure request mechanism.

“Village games are a distinct service-based offering that is separate from other forms of games. They certainly aren’t retail titles. They aren’t ‘indie’ or ‘casual games’ either. They are quirky, isolated communities much like a traditional village or small town. The communities tend to be a bit more friendly and insular then their larger city-sized brethren such as Everquest or World of Warcraft. The game design tends to be a bit more unique and able to take risks. Such game companies usually started with a small community numbering in the thousands. Many customers have been with them for years. Each operates either a micropayment or a subscription model that doesn’t cap the amount of money the customer wishes to spend. They focus on a niche experience that is not provided by larger retail titles.

“Ajax is quite overused. I don’t think a lot of people have thought through the scalability implications of increasing the number of concurrent server connections by an order of magnitude.

“If you want to build a community, or to be in the business of letting your readers talk to each other about what you write, enable comments in your blog. If not, move along. There’s lots of others building communities where they can chat about you.