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Content Tagged with User:alex + social-software

There are an unprecedented number of new online ventures seeking to create user based software, but among these hundreds of offerings there is a split in the core design: Should users run the show?

The design of Second Life highlights this model. The creators of Second Life, Linden Labs, seek to be nothing more than platform developers who rent servers to people who want to play on their platform. This means that all content in the second life world is created by users, in a largely unregulated way. Because there is no rules or purpose to using Second Life, Second Life has become a chaotic and risqué collection of people interacting in what is essentially a giant avatar based chat room.

The other side of this model is World of Warcraft. In WoW, everything in the world is created by Blizzard developers and artists. The experience is scripted and polished, to a perfection that has been the signature of Blizzard products since the first Warcraft was released in 1994. These is not an ounce of content in WoW that wasn’t created by Blizzard, user interface mods aside. Because Warcraft sticks so closely to focusing on a great game experience, Warcraft is an experience much like Disneyland – thoughtfully crafted rides, fun for the whole family, carefully tended and managed to help avoid the chaos people usually bring along with them.

Other services pretty much fall into one of these two models.

This model might suggest that the two models are different segments, but looking closely at the development of all of these successful sites suggests reverse entropy: embracing chaos is not a sustainable way to run a site: the future model for mature social software seems to be Disneyland / World of Warcraft.

As usual, Clay Shirky wrote a great paper on this and way before I even thought about it, in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

The problem is that in unmanaged communities, there’s a power vacuum and eventually someone ends up directing it, typically either spammers or high schoolers with the time and inclination to take over, it’s often a combination of the two. Clay is not the first person to write about this issue.

For a while chaos works quite well. Digg has rode the wave of “user controlled” to the top, all the while introducing algorithmic limits to individual power as well as managing things editorially for quality control. Today’s Digg, with bans on top users to moderate the community as well as algorithmic limitations on vote efficacy is very different from the early Digg versions with a simple set number of votes required to promote a story and a small but loyal following that kept things in line.

del.icio.us manages their chaos as well through putting limits on user interactivity. Joshua Schachter has been quoted on many occasions that he does not want to build a community, but rather a social tool – because of the management problems community brings.

A good example of the promise of chaos and the problems it brings can be seen in a recent patch to World of Warcraft the other day. Although Warcraft is mostly static with a window dressing war that doesn’t change, for holidays and other occasions Blizzard will introduce a seasonal patch with goodies for the time of year.

For Christmas (Winterveil) this year Blizzard introduced reindeer, fruitcake, Father “Winterveil”, and throwable snowballs. Snowball fights abounded. But there was a problem. Players hit with snowballs move back. In Warcraft, only members of the opposing side are supposed to be able to attack each other, but suddenly there was a new game called “snowball your team mates off of the cliff”. Pretty soon the forums exploded with people complaining about their fun being ruined by mean kids with snowballs. Quickly, Blizzard issued a hotfix to end the snowball fights: no more snowball fights with your friends.

This small change highlights the process that all of these social sites go through. Whether it’s Google YouTube turning to censoring comments or it’s del.icio.us blocking my private bookmarking service, control over the community is taken away from the users and put in the hands of the host.

This is not the wrong decision. The impulse is to say Warcraft should have let the snowball fights go on. But World of Warcraft is a great game, a fun game and safe for kids to play, and it’s because of a thousand decisions like this: it’s a constant battle to keep it that way. Disneyland might not be a very interesting place, but I liked it when I was a kid and they have to cope with an enormous scale of visitors, offering a consistent and satisfying experience to each paying customer. The alternative is Second Life, with 1/3 of its player economy devoted to pornography, and an explosive item cloning issue, it’s not something I’d buy someone for Christmas.

There’s a lot to be said for a controlled experience. In SWiK we see spam every single day. People are trying to take control over our pages, abusing our open system. The temptation will always be to close it, to require registration to edit, to put up captchas and email verification and other lockouts. And it’s not a bad impulse. The bad impulse is to stop innovating in the face of chaos. I’m glad Blizzard tried the snowballs, and I’m glad they took them out quickly. The key is the focus on the experience. For experiments and new services, chaos works well and is a lot more interesting, but as things mature people want something that just works rather than something that has promise and flexibility.

I’ve looked into doing invite only kind of things before, based on hype and GMails’ example: I came to the conclusion that invite only is mostly a bad idea.

Even GMail has now backed off of invite only, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen any new site demand a personal invite.

Is this fad over? I think people have figured out now that it’s hard enough to get people to sign up, you don’t need to write software to make it harder.

- 27k -

Noticed another social network in the logs for who is using my Digg this button—Zorpia.com

Zorpia has tripled their traffic in the past three months, no easy feat (although easier if you start low)

Graph:

1. Social Networking
2. Groups
3. Photos
4. Journals
5. Messages
6. Forums
7. ???
8. Profit!

I don’t think MySpace is the end of social networks, it’s more like the AOL of Web 2.0, just the early dominant player.

There’s a really interesting story cropping up – some users of Digg are peeking behind the curtain of the mechanism that runs Digg.com.

Specifically a blog called ForeverGeek is outraged that Digg.com might employ any editorial control, when it clearly states their mission is to be a community edited news site.

The whole thing is completely overblown, but it points to the fact that communities feel they have squatter’s rights: wherever they are, they have some part ownership of that property.

I’ve written about Digg before, about the social dynamic of the site and how the community brings out a steady stream of interesting news.

What I didn’t mention however is that the hidden Digg algorithms makes a lot of this magic happen, and it’s a for-profit service, so Digg.com is strongly motivated to keep a high level of service, and not necessarily motivated to make the community part of running the backend service.

As Joshua Schacter has pointed out, there’s a strong negative to allowing users to make community features their home, because things quickly get out of control, it’s much harder to make a utopian society than it is to make a useful tool.

The issue with Digg is that it appears as though there is some hidden editorial control, and some overt editorial control, behind what stories get buried and what stories get promoted.

If you actually look at the mechanism that promotes stories, that by itself is an editorial mechanism—there is no published rule about how many diggs are required to get to the front page, and in fact it’s not that straightforward and Digg.com changes it on a regular basis.

And Digg bans sites explicitly from being submitted, as ForeverGeek discovered, which is likely a big part of their outrage.

The funny thing is that although the story is being treated as a revelation, or of Digg’s selling out to the man nothing much has changed. Digg.com has always used editorial control over the story submission process, it just emphasizes community because the process is driven by the community in a very large part.

Also, Digg is now a huge website, having to deal with a torrent user contributions and filter out spam and people trying to game it, all while remaining snappy and easy to use. Behind this lies a lot of database servers, and code to tie them all together, although the site is still basically simple and generally robust, some errors do occur from time to time.

It will be interesting to see how Digg braves this balance of providing the service that is expected to the 95% of visitors who don’t really know or care about the details behind the digg queue and promotion mechanism and the 5% who care a lot and make venomous posts about perceived injustices in it.

In communities, a precept of personal motivation to work within a community is often governed by a two stage reward system. The two stage reward system works thusly: All new entrants into the community gain small but satisfying rewards for basic participation, but fanatics claim the larger rewards through elite competition.

This principle exists online and in real life. Many people play chess, and find it a stimulating and rewarding game. However to the masters of chess, motivations revolve around competitive ranking levels among other players. In massively multiplayer online games, the end game is very different than the casual game, because a certain class of player will commit vast amounts of time to play and game designers anticipate this by structuring the end game around an obsessive and competitive style of play.

Wikipedia, like most other communities, shares in this same principle. And despite Wikipedia’s claims to egalitarianism, there are really two classes of Wikipedian rights defined in the software: ‘Administrators’ and normal editors. Somewhat confusingly, the title Administrator does not signify any kind of official association with the Wikipedia foundation, instead Administrators are simply regular users who are granted special privileges in the system. It’s difficult to pin down to an exact number, but about ten percent of seriously active editors have Administrator status, which is rewarded to those who are among the most prolific contributors with thousands upon thousands of edits.

The core mechanic for Wikipedia is both the thrill of editing a grand project collaboratively, and the more basic reward of having the power to be the expert in a subject that is near and dear. Wikipedia self-selects for people who are obsessive about various subjects or just editing in general, as in every case the person or set of people willing to hammer their edits obsessively will win power over the page, and thus the reward of participation. For controversial subjects where two groups are equally obsessive, this will work itself out in a compromise where only the most obviously provable details remain, such as seen in the common Controversy sections: “Among many, there exists a school of thought that Hitler was really just misunderstood”. This compromise is otherwise known in the sometimes cryptic Wikipedia shorthand as of WP:NPOV, or Neutral Point of View.

In terms of the high level goal of Wikipedia being the sum of human knowledge, edit wars may be sub-optimal as some useful information provided by domain experts is overwritten. In optimizing for the most prolific editors, Wikipedia does not select for the most expert editor to win, or offer a reward for the most expert edit, instead the most widely acceptable edits among the mostly non-experts will win. This mechanic does however succeed in creating an environment where thousands of people are willing to make thousands of edits, creating a very wide and useful resource for many types of information, such as facts, basic details of concepts and controversial topics phrased in neutral tones.

And the Administrator level follows in the same reward and selection mechanicism: the reward for thousands upon thousands of edits is a new level of power over pages that no one else is granted.

Wikipedia Administrators have a wide and powerful variety of special abilities that allow them a huge degree of control. They may edit any protected page, including the front page of wikipedia, the 26th most popular site on the internet. They can protect pages, meaning that only other administrators can edit them. They can semi-protect pages, meaning that all but a certain level of editor is blocked from editing.

They can completely obliterate pages from existence – the process for which involves a straw poll where an Administrator can receive opinion from the user community, but the Administrator can make their own decision. The presence of these opinion polls leads some to believe that Wikipedia operates democratically, when in fact it is the policy of Wikipedia not to be democratic, placing power instead in the hands of Administrators. Power serves as a reward for Administrators and as a simple safeguard against the tyranny of the majority.

Administrator control extends very broadly, from specific text presented in the user interface to the the stylesheets, and account and IP ban lists. Once a user is granted administrator privilege, there is not much on Wikipedia that they do not have control over.

And that’s the end game of Wikipedia, power extending over not just article contents, but control extending to every part of the Wikipedia system, a range of control just short of the root level user of Wikipedia: “Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales”. And the end result of the edit market is the encyclopedia itself, a vast repository and edit battleground, where the basic reward of editing a page grows more valuable as Wikipedia is used by more people.

Digg.com has shot up from non-existence this year to be a net publishing powerhouse, challenging the longstanding giant Slashdot for the crown of nerd news. The way Digg.com did it doesn’t seem too complicated, they allow the democracy of users to pick the stories instead of a short list of editors.

Peering into the Digg.com social framework a bit further as part of research I’m doing for more social features in SWiK, I found that the system really is very simple, but that there is an interesting ecosystem at play behind the scenes of just the front page.

There are five groups of people who make digg.com what it is.

There are the readers: an educated guess would be that probably ten to twenty percent of those ever click ‘digg’, they are mostly just there for the end product of the digg machine: an array of interesting news and links often presented before the other news sources.

There are the diggers: some percentage of the readers, probably ten to twenty percent. They bother to vote for the stories on digg.com, which changes the numbers next to the stories and enables stories to get to another queue – the diggnation podcast.

Then there are the hardcore diggers – people who sit in the queue of submitted stories and watch for breaking news that should make its way up to the front page, or report stories as being spam or irrelevant.

An even smaller subset of users are the submitters: people who post fresh stories. It’s difficult to post a fresh story to digg at this point, it’s a competition for who can submit it first.

Finally there are the news publishers themselves, often bloggers who want to get readership for their content.

What’s really interesting about these groups is that each of them is required for the system to function, they all came together relatively quickly, and each of them have different and complementary rewards for what they do.

The readers are really important for this system, the value of a link being on the front page is proportional to the number of eyeballs that will see it. Digg’s readership is at this point so massive it can bring down servers ala Slashdotting. Someone on digg posted a link to the wiki page version of Ajax Mistakes on SWiK, it was quickly reported as being a duplicate of the prevoius news about Ajax Mistakes but before it was taken down, SWiK received 10,000 hits from digg readers.

The mainstream diggers – for whom digg seems to cater and be about – are ironically the least important. to the system. Once a link is on the front page, it makes marginal difference the number of votes next to the link. The only difference between a highly dugg front page story is that some people may note that it’s a popular story and kevin rose may feature it on diggnation.

There is an interesting functionality, which got me interested in clicking the digg button in the first place, wherein once you click on digg, the link is added to a list of other stories you have dugg. This comes complete with an RSS feed, although it doesnt’ appear you can take your list of diggs out of the system altogether. In this way, digg is a kind of a lightweight del.icio.us – you don’t have to bother tagging, just click on the links you like and they are saved for you forever. (finding them again later is another story)

The main function of digging is really used by those who patrol the link queue. People who probably have run out of interesting things to read, are looking for the newest of the new news, or want to help control the front page watch over the torrent of submitted links, looking for diamonds in the rough that belong on the front page. The interesting thing is that these people are served differently by digg than their upstream brethren, they use digg to look at a giant link queue and not just another news site. Without these people, digg would cease to function: nothing would make it out of the link queue.

The stream of torrents is created by story submitters. Some submitters are so prolific they have their own following, such as albertpacino, who has published over 750 of digg’s front page stories so far. The story submission process is rewarding too: there’s an instant reward of seeing other people digg your stories, and there’s a fun gamble to see if your story will gain enough traction to be featured on the front page, where thousands of people will see it.

Yesterday I set out to get a story published on the front page of digg, to see how difficult this was. My tactic was basically: submit a lot of links and then hopefully one will get picked by the digg queue group of people as being front-page worthy.

It’s actually difficult to find links that have not been already submitted to digg, there is a race to see who can be the first to write up a link and submit it, as links may only be submit once and digg has some very basic filtering scripts to remind you to watch for other similar links.

Of course I remembered I wrote a good supplier of fresh and interesting links: LiveMarks. Plus I even had remembered to put a convenient ‘digg this’ button on livemark links, so it was simply a matter of going through links on LiveMarks and clicking ‘digg this’. LiveMarks also includes code to check if a link is ‘new’, which was put to good use in my task.

On my 6th try, I had a winner: “Matt Brett started a site to promote the use of a standard feed icon for RSS feeds.”. 558 diggs, 2 blog posts, 40 diggesque comments: ‘he stole his whole design from apple.’, ‘retarded’, ‘i was just thinking someone should do this, great idea’. Unlike slashdot, only 1 person had taken advantage of the moderation feature to moderate someone’s post up. (Slashdot however has its own ecosystem around comment moderation). And my name in the submitted by field, woot.

By the way, I hadn’t noticed, but I had also put myself in the final group: the content publishers. Digg has produced an interesting viral effect of bloggers sticking ‘digg this’ on every one of their posts, and I had done the same thing by sticking the ‘digg this’ button on LiveMarks. Bloggers want their posts to be widely read and appreciated, and they also want to find things to write about, digg nicely plugs into this need by letting you blog a story on digg or letting bloggers post a digg this button on their site. (Actually this seems to be a hack, it’s surprisingly untrivial to slap this button on your site and digg.com doesn’t promote or document this at all.)

Overall, with blog publishers creating content they want dugg, submitters scouring the net for stories they can add to their ‘published on the homepage’ list, digg queuer watchers looking for cool links before anyone else has seen them, and digg readers reaping the benefits and creating a powerful digg.com frontpage readership, digg has come a long way very quickly.

As digg tries to go into other fields to live up to their venture valuation, such as perhaps political news, general news, or more innovative areas, it will be interesting to see if they can keep this same ecosystem going or if they have to try to invent new dynamics.