I am currently at SXSW and loving every second of it. There are a bunch of great resources about the event: live blogging, community blogging, and the panel podcasts. So, rather than add to the all the information, I hope that my commentary can be a filter. I’m going to post a couple of ideas/thoughts that I thought were really interesting. That way, I will act as a filter for the event by highlighting very little chunks.

I had not heard of the Ni-Chen Paradox prior to SXSW. In the “When Communities Attack” panel by Chris Tolles of Topix.net introduced me to the concept.

The Ni-Chen Paradox is as follows: a community like a message board thinks that be requiring registrations to order to post they will be filtering out bad content. However, trolls are more likely to register for a service than causal-but-genuinely-interested users. Therefore, requiring registrations in order to post content actually filters out the good content and increases the amount of flames/trolling posts. By allowing anyone to continue to the community without registration you end up with higher quality content.

Topix.net testifies to the validity of the Ni-Chen paradox based on their own experience. Also, they showed a traffic growth graph. There was a clear hockey-stick inflection point in the graph, which occurred when Topix removed the requirement that only registered users could post to their forums.

I hope you found this as interesting as I did. More gems to come!