Why split the community?

[On2Vegas]

I'm not sure why you keep putting angry face and thumbs down icons in your posts. What are you trying to accomplish? What answers are you looking for? As stated this is a Nexus One site. It's also a community (Forum) where people with like-interests share tips, new found information and in some cases just plain general conversation. But perhaps that's just not what you're looking for.

[dandv]

Originally Posted by alphawave7

How is it a 'disservice', and whose 'community'?

As I explained in the first post, there are number of major disadvantages with splitting information across different locations, in general. I've been working in IT companies large and small since 2003, and always, when documentation was split among some .doc files, some e-mail threads, more PDFs, and some page on the intranet, it was chaos. The solution sought in all these cases was to have only one source of truth (see the Wikipedia entry for

Single Source of Truth

Single_Source_of_Truth

). That's one of the reasons why Google Wave is so cool.

Originally Posted by alphawave7

Since when was choice, and multiple options a bad thing?

Choice is fine; the problem is with too much choice. Here's a surprising fact:

The three studies described in this report demonstrate for the first time the possibility, that while having more choices might appear desirable, it may sometimes have detrimental consequences for human motivation. Studies 1, 2, and 3 provide compelling empirical evidence that the provision of extensive choices, while initially appealing to choice-makers, may nonetheless undermine choosers’ subsequent satisfaction and motivation. Study 1 showed that while more consumers were attracted to a tasting booth when the display included 24 flavors of jam rather than 6, consumers were subsequently much more likely to purchase jam if they had encountered the display involving only 6 jams. Study 2 revealed that students in an introductory college level course were much more likely to write an essay for extra credit when they were provided a list of only 6, rather than 30, potential essay topics. Moreover, even after having chosen to write an essay, students wrote higher quality essays if their essay topic had been picked from a smaller than from a larger choice set. Finally, Study 3 demonstrated that people reported enjoying the process of choosing a chocolate more from a display of 30 than from a display of 6. However, despite their greater initial reported enjoyment in the extensive-display condition, participants proved more dissatisfied and regretful of the choices they made and were subsequently considerably less likely to opt for chocolates rather than money as compensation for their participation.

-- When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?,
Sheena S. Iyengar, Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper, Stanford university

In his book

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less

, social theory professor Barry Schwartz mentions another study, done on 1,000,000 employees in 2,000 different workplaces on choosing mutual funds for their retirement plan. For every 10 extra mutual funds that employees were offered, 2% more did not choose anything. These employees lost in the process up to $5,000, the matching money from their employer. In effect, because of excessive choice, these people gave away free money.