What does the author mean by "door culture" in this context? First-order effects I take to be a metaphor with economics. However, I don't understand how to translate my understanding of "first-order effects" meaning the first derivative of a formula to "door culture".
"The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons", by Clay Shirky
Flaming is one of a class of economic problems known as The Tragedy of the Commons. Briefly stated, the tragedy of the commons occurs when a group holds a resource, but each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. (The original essay used the illustration of shepherds with common pasture. The group as a whole has an incentive to maintain the long-term viability of the commons, but with each individual having an incentive to overgraze, to maximize the value they can extract from the communal resource.)
In the case of mailing lists (and, again, other shared conversational spaces), the commonly held resource is communal attention. The group as a whole has an incentive to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high and the conversation informative, even when contentious. Individual users, though, have an incentive to maximize expression of their point of view, as well as maximizing the amount of communal attention they receive. It is a deep curiosity of the human condition that people often find negative attention more satisfying than inattention, and the larger the group, the likelier someone is to act out to get that sort of attention.
However, proposed responses to flaming have consistently steered away from group-oriented solutions and towards personal ones. The logic of collective action, alluded to above, rendered these personal solutions largely ineffective. Meanwhile attempts at encoding social bargains weren't attempted because of the twin forces of door culture (a resistance to regarding social features as first-order effects) and a horror of censorship (maximizing individual freedom, even when it conflicts with group goals.)
