Here Comes Everybody Chapter 8

Page 198: Reduced transaction costs strike again!  "Because they are both internally organized and externally supported, Presbyterians suffer less than Pagans from transactino costs, who have no cuturally normal place and time to meet and no ready way to broadcast their interests without censure."  Basically, small, odd groups like Pagans benefit more from social media because it was more difficult for them to get together in the analog world.

Something on page 200 strikes me as very profound:  "...It's easier to like people who are odd in the same ways you are odd."

On the next page, I was pleasantly surprised to find the web can be used to fight the isolating effect or suburban sprawl, by bringing together stay at home moms on Meetup.com.

On page 204, I wonder how many of the "Pro-Ana" girls were really girls at all, or if they were really in favor of anorexia.  Some of them might have been examples of rather nasty troll behavior.  A similarly evil example cropped up in the Jasper Howard homicide investigation, when police said a UConn student with no real connection to the case posted empty threats against people who talked to the police.  The police did not say this, but presumably, he was a troll.

I'm not comfortable with page 211:

When it is hard to form groups, both potentially good and bad groups are prevented from forming; when it becomes simple to forum groups, we get both good and bad ones.  This is going to force society to shift from simply preventing groups from forming, to actively deciding which existing ones to try to oppose, a shift that parallels the publish-then-filter pattern generally.

In most cases, don't think this is society's job.  The operators of digital services that host bad groups may have the legal right to censor or discourage them, but people do have a first amendment right to peaceably assemble, and I think that protection extends to the online world.  I think we should be reluctant to limit that right.