Solving The Scoble Problem In Social Networks
I finally blocked Robert Scoble in Google+. I have absolutely nothing against Scoble. I quite admire him, actually. He's a great asset to the startup scene and he works damn hard. I've met him a few times and I'm sure we'll meet again.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scoble has spent years as social media's stress test: the corpus shows him drawing fire as far back as 2006 rants coverage and enterprise-software criticism in 2007, then formally apologizing in January 2011 for mistakes he made on Quora — where a public reviewer had told him to stay off the platform entirely. After leaving FastCompany TV to build Building 43 with Rackspace, his volume of posting only grew across FriendFeed and beyond.
What changes with this piece is the venue and the mechanism: the complaint moves from third-party platforms onto Google+, whose launch-week Circles feature gives ordinary users a first-class tool for exactly this — walling off a prolific poster without unfriending him. That the author stresses he admires Scoble is the point: this is a noise-management decision, not a personal one.
First-order effects
- Scoble loses direct reach into one early adopter's stream despite the author's stated admiration — a small but symbolic cost for a blogger whose influence model depends on maximum followship across every new network.
Second-order effects
- Google+ gets an unintended marketing case study: Circles lets a user keep a connection while silencing the firehose, making fine-grained curation a differentiator against Twitter and Facebook feeds that offered blunter tools.
Third-order effects
- If launch cohorts keep pruning their loudest follows, networks face a structural tension — power users seed activity but can crowd out the mainstream users who make a social graph durable — pushing feed design toward algorithmic ranking and granular sharing controls as default rather than afterthought.
The trend: Social platforms are competing on feed-curation controls because their most valuable early adopters will otherwise block the power users who made those networks worth joining.