I like Jeff Atwood’s blog Coding Horror and while he mainly centers on developer type stuff he does write some very interesting and thought provoking posts. His post on the 20th was one of these and I think should be required reading for every single Web 2.0 developer out there.
In one simple paragraph he sums up one of the major failings of web development; well actually all development really:
And please, if you’re designing social software, try to avoid repeating the many mistakes of our forefathers. Again. Design from day one with the assumption that a few of your users will be evil. If you don’t, like Six Apart, your naïvite will make the entire community suffer sooner or later.
The interesting reading continued as I breezed through the comments posted to his very understandable look at the problem of trackbacks and how they are broken; and the one thing that I came away with from reading them is that on a certain level developers live in a rarified world of purity.
On one hand they can acknowledge that bad things can be done with software; web based social software or thick client applications, but on the other hand it is confined to a small segment of users. This maybe true but what is seemingly being missed here is the even if this “evil user” segment is small; which is questionable, their effects are magnified a hundred fold due to the very technology being used.
To develop anything; regardless of the technology, without taking into account the “evil quotient” that is a part of our society is only proving how much you live in a dream world; and thinking that your software would be of no interest to all those evil doers out there will come back to bite you on the ass.
Anything created by man can just as easily be corrupted by man and software is no different – just easier.
