Here comes everybody
by Clay Shirky · first published 2008
50% recommend45% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Explains how online communities and group coordination work, especially how scale changes social dynamics. Recommended for anyone thinking about web communities or how technology changes collective action.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
A look at the wide-reaching effects of the internet.
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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…works OK as he builds it up over a book. I suppose anyone applying to a position is pretty familiar with his works. Oh, and Tribes needed way more than one sentence in the acknowledgements mentioning Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I'd just reread HCE before I picked up Tribes and I kept waiting to see something like "So, every example in the last three chapters and next two chapters came from this excellent book...…
on “My Seth Godin decline letter. Thoughts?” ↗My favourite books read lately are Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and Perrotta's Metaprogramming Ruby. If you haven't read Free by Chris Anderson, it's also highly recommended. It's just an article, but Anarconomy by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures…
on “Ask HN: Summer Reading Recommendations?” ↗Hey PG, have you read Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody? It has lots in there about the problems inherent in big communities, especially in how they function on the internet. The later parts of the book (chapter 8 and beyond) seem applicable to the problems…
on “Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?” ↗…only because you are working from close friends to more distant stakeholders (e.g. members of your community, members of your profession, potential customers, ...). Clay Shirky makes a great point in "Here Comes Everybody" that once you can rely on everyone having access to a technology (e.g. telephone, e-mail, web browser) it is a quantum change from "everyone you currently know." I think Metcalfe's Law has actually held…
on “Andrew Chen: Why every Web 2.0 startup needs to think about Metcalfe's Law” ↗Author Jeff Howe has recently published a book that extends his classic essay on "Crowdsourcing". Clay Shirky has written a great book called "Here Comes Everybody". What do you all think about crowdsourcing as a trend? Is it another "buzz word"? Is it Web 3.0? Is just Web 2.0 now having its social impact?
on “What do you think about crowdsourcing as a trend?” ↗I recommend reading Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody before drawing any more conjectures.
on “Clay Shirky — Doing work, or Doing Work?” ↗…hard in the paper and photocopier era; it's trivial in the Internet era. * Great point. If you're interested in 'how the internet/computers change things that were impossible/hard', then I recommend Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey.
on “Schneier on Security: WikiLeaks” ↗…a blog post? A HN/Reddit/whatever comment? I don't think the old stereotype of "consumers" as some sort of purely passive livestock is especially useful any more. Clay Shirky's old but very readable "Here Comes Everybody" makes a similar case at much greater and more articulate length.
on “Windows 10 will come with a command-line package manager” ↗…written the most essays about web communities and scaling problems: http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/herecomese... https://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organ...
on “Reverse Network Effects: Why Todays Social Networks Can Fail as They Grow Larger” ↗…Stoic (Seneca) - Decent musings on living life and mastering oneself. As relevant today as 2 thousand years ago. Will make you consider how you can master your self and what you will let affect you. Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky) - The best book on online community I've read. Shirky makes you want to make a difference and communicates his enthusiasm for the power of the masses with ease. Will make you consider how…
on “Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?” ↗…another one pops up. The real solution is that people have to police themselves when interacting with technology - being judicious. I wish there was a good way to make that part of our culture. Reading "Here Comes Everybody" is what inspired this line of though in me. Edit: Especially since reading through the rest of the article: what's happening on NextDoor was happening on other sites: email groups and yahoo groups.…
on “Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com” ↗…is the one being leeched is exactly what's wrong in the culture. Consider this: You post your project. I'm not in the target demographic. But because I come from the culture epitomized in Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and not the fucked up culture of the GitHub generation, where 999 times out of 10 you only reach out to someone because you're trying to get something from them, I decide take the time and give it a…
on “The open source paradox” ↗…for an "employer" (e.g. landowner) for rent, and then subsist on the time left, yes, they worked hard, but that is not unlike what we have today (just much more extreme). As Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, and you'll find in many other books as well, many skilled people would choose only to work as much as they had to get by, and spend the rest of their time in leisure or drunk.
on “Wage slave? Or slave to the wage?” ↗<sidebar> I just finished reading the book "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky (circa 2008). In the book he mentions this very "announcement." What's fascinating, per the book, is Linux was one of the first significant byproducts (if you will) of (internet) connectivity…
on “Linus Torvalds announces Linux (1991)” ↗Agreed. Clay Shirky made a similar point in Here Comes Everybody. Or maybe it was Cognitive Surplus. (Crap, sorry, it's been a while.) His analogy, IIRC: teens treat social media as hanging out at the food court with friends, not as public speech. To them, adults…
on “Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)” ↗