Year: 2003

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Random

Introducing "Everything in Moderation"…

Today I’m launching a new site – my first full new site under my own steam for a couple of years. Everything in Moderation is a new site designed to find creative ways to manage online communities and user-generated content. I’ll be writing up some of my experiences with Barbelith Underground, particularly some of the interesting anti-troll solutions that we came up with, as well as talking about models of full or partially distributed moderation systems to compete with things like Slashdot. I’m quite excited about the prospect and look forward to getting a lot of site suggestions to write about from people like you – Mr and Mrs Everyman!

Categories
Gaming Social Software

Political economies in self-moderating communities…

Derek Powazek wrote an interesting piece last year about rating-based moderation systems: Gaming the system: How moderation tools can backfire. One of the most important lessons in online community management is that top-down management is seldom particularly successful in forcing people to act in a certain way. Certainly if the image of the community that the administrators wish to enforce is radically different from what the community itself wants, then the site is more likely to rip itself apart than to fall in line. Online communities are not made social by the presence of these administrators and nor is the quality of their social interaction defined by that administrator. Groups of people self-organise, self-maintain and even – to an extent – self-moderate. An administrators job is to (more or less intrusively or architecturally) facilitate the creation or the maintenance of these self-organising aspects and to build a community space that suits them.

Moderation systems that are based upon ratings schemes are radical attempts to help people self-organise by choosing people and content worth reading and by ostracising bad users. The most well-known sites of this kind are Slashdot and Kuro5hin. But Derek’s piece reminds us that even these attempts to replicate concepts of reputation and rating online can have problems:

Still, it’s important to remember this essential truth: Any complicated moderation system that makes its algorithms public is eventually going to fall victim to gaming. So my advice is, if you’re going to use a community moderation system, make it as invisible as possible. No karma numbers, no contests, no bribes. Rely on social capital and quality content to get your community talking, and develop a system that helps you moderate without a lot of fanfare. The bottom line is, if you take away the scores, it’s hard to play the game.

I think Derek’s position on this is fundamentally correct – albeit a little strongly worded. I suppose my biggest problem is trying to work out to what extent gaming the system is an abuse of or a fundamental aspect of real-world analogies to these moderation schemes. Perhaps the problem is not that the social structures built within the game are too complex and take away from normal human interaction, but that they’re simply not gameable enough. The online political economy of a site like Slashdot seems to me to have some clear analogies with the problems of inflation in the virtual economies of MMORPGs. It could take many years for the UI and the ‘market’ to come together in gameably useful ways…

Categories
Social Software

The final solution for persistent trolls?

So what do you do when nothing else has worked and you’re left with a board that is at the mercy of a persistent troublemaker? There aren’t very many options. Firstly there’s taking the situation to the ISP or workplace of the person concerned. But if they’re that persistent, then it’s not unlikely to think that they’ll just take such a move as an escalation of hostilities. Contacting the police might be appropriate if you think you’ve got enough of a case to push for harrassment or something similar – but again, it’s more than likely that it would just be read as an escalation of hostilities – and that’s likely to make everything more serious and difficult to deal with in the long-term. At the other extreme, you have the option of just learning to live with them, but that comes with a range of costs – the most significant of which is that your authority (and those of the system you’ve built and the people who occupy it) has been openly challenged and you have failed to resolve the situation. This will encourage other trouble-makers either within the population of the board itself or real-life friends of the ‘conquering troll’ to come and populate your community. Backing down, fundamentally, is only an option if you were wrong in the first place. Under those circumstances you should confess pretty much immediately. This is embarrassing, but not normally catastrophic. Backing down when you’re right because you can’t enforce your decision – however – is.

One extreme – and totally uncommercial – solution is to build upon the social networks of individual culpability and responsibility that already exist within your community. For example – by making it impossible for the unregistered user to see what’s being posted, you limit their ability to check up on what people are saying about them. By making it impossible to register without having been directly invited, you not only get the benefits of a web of trust-style selection process for new members, but you also have someone responsible for bringing the new member into the midst of the community. That person can be held accountable if they invite someone particularly troubling inside. Unfortunately this has a number of problematic elements – firstly it’s commercial suicide if you’re running the board as part of a business (unless you are getting people to pay for your messageboard on the basis of who is on it), secondly it will increase the cliquey aspect of all online communities and finally it will mean that the content produced by your community’s members can’t easily be used as a resource for anyone other than the community members itself. Nonetheless, in many circumstances it can be the only practical way to move forward…

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Random

Caterina and Tom, together at least…

In lieu of real content, while I try and drag my lungs back together from the scrabbly little bits I can see around my sitting room floor attached to scraps of tissue paper, here’s a picture of Caterina and me at the Lego place in Helsinki from earlier this year…

Tom Coates & Caterina Fake

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Random

I am (officially) ill…

So I’ve been feeling really run-down for the last couple of weeks, but – hey – you know – who doesn’t. Anyway I thought if Matt and I stopped working so hard for a couple of days and just let our minds and bodies catch up with the world, then I’d feel a bit better and I decided to end one of those days by going out for a couple of drinks. And – I’ll admit it – I had a couple of cigarettes. And then I woke up this morning unable to stand properly and with a throat that the flu fairy had attacked with a rusty old cheese-grater. Anyway, I went to work anyway because clearly having days off is evil and wrong and only lightweights do it. I bought loads of pills and took loads of pills and just about managed to get through the day and get home before promptly barfing all over the place and collapsing exhausted onto the sofa. I am, it seems, officially ill.

As this has clearly been building for a while now, I think I’m going to assume that it’s the reason that I’ve felt so enervated and unable to accomplish anything for the last couple of weeks. So – taking advantage of the fact that I’ve now been lying on my sofa for three hours solidly without really moving at all and have therefore built up some typing energy – I’m going to (1) briefly apologise for the lack of posts recently (2) say thank you to the lovely person who bought me Nowhere off my wishlist (unless I bought it for myself (which it occurs to me it quite possible, although I don’t remember doing it) and (3) look rather surprised at myself for having just accidentally bought a Powerbook on the day that they announced the shipping date for Panther.

Oops! Here comes lunch again. Best be off.

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Random

On niche weblogging, Google and Adsense…

Matt Haughey writes about putting Google AdWords on PVRBlog:

Make no mistake, last month PVRblog made a lot of money from Adsense. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? Sounds like something you might have heard in 1998, no? Well it’s true today, and I hope a lot more people meet with the same success.

Haughey’s experience sounds very intriguing and his tips for running a successful Adsense-based semi-commercial venture may very well gesture in the right direction for niche commercial weblogging enterprises. I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea of getting money from weblogging, because I’ve always felt that there was a distinction between getting sponsorship for what one writes and getting advertising based upon what/who one is. Weblogs have seemed to be to be a space in which individuals could self-describe and – as such – putting advertising upon them has felt to me rather like being prepared to sell parts of one’s face or body for commercial advertising purposes.

Today at the iSociety event, Cameron articulated a useful and simple distinction between a publishing model of weblogs where a specific site is (to a greater or lesser extent) impersonal and subject-focused (which is – I think – the only part journalists seem to understand), and a social model where the site is no more or less than a representation of a person online and connects with other sites around itself as a proxy for a social connection to the person behind the keyboard. That we can understand weblog space as being a spectrum like that (with people like Mark Pilgrim occupying this weird Schroedinger-like superposition between concept and human) makes it much easier for me to conceive of a comfortable place for this kind of commercial weblogging venture.

Categories
Personal Publishing

On conversations with Cameron Marlow…

While BloggerCon has been ongoing in the States, I’ve spent most of the weekend attending mini events with the charming Cameron Marlow of Blogdex infamy. Cameron came over to the UK to talk at a conference at the Oxford Internet Institute and managed to squeeze in a few small gatherings before heading back to the States.

On Friday afternoon, I hosted a small event with Cameron at the BBC that Matt Jones had organised but was unfortunately unable to attend. Cameron talked about social networks, the similarities and differences between meme transmission and STD transmission across social networks (there are, intriguingly, many fewer types of STDs) and the relationship between link networks and the social networks that they sit upon. There were a fair number of UK-based BBC-based webloggers present (plus Cal who we sneaked in), but irritatingly none of them have talked about the event on their sites, so it’s been very difficult for me to gauge how useful or interesting they found it. The day was nicely capped by Cal, Cameron and I stuffing our faces at Pizza Hut, having a long discussion with a man at a neighbouring table about The Darkness (“Men what do rock, baby”) and then collapsing in front of Finding Nemo. I’m fairly sure I had an argument with someone important about Eastenders as well…

Yesterday – in a more dedicated weblogger-centric (and sporadically organised at the last-minute) dim sum session at the New World in Soho – we got Cameron together with some more bastions of the UK tech/weblogging scene, including Matt Webb, Cal Henderson, Phil Gyford, Paul Hammond and Neil McIntosh from Online Blog. After eating inhuman amounts of tiny tiny food and everyone tolerating another one of my long rants about Eastenders, we decamped to Apogee – a café off Leicester Square – for coffee, cake and constitutional cocktails.

Finally today, Cameron and I found ourselves on a lunchtime panel at the iSociety (written up by James Crabtree in considerable detail) on weblogs and the public sphere which I found very rewarding (although I’m not sure the same could be said of the people who were forced to listen to my ramblings). I think both Cameron and I were particularly interested in the various perceived inequalities and freedoms of webloggia (perhaps as an example of networked individualism), how those freedoms/inequalities might inter-relate with one another and what it meant to be an ethical builder of tools in that environment. I was also particularly delighted to see Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net again, who – while I might not agree with his politics – always has an interesting contribution to make to these debates.

I’m almost certain that I’ve managed to capture only the most limited sense of the events and the issues discussed at them. Should any of the parties concerned with to use this space as a forum for subsequent discussion, they should feel free…

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Random

A Victorian responds to comment spam…

Today – after receiving a few more pseudo-comments from people whose home URLs contain the word “blowjob” – I also received the following:

If you don’t want certain types of homepages listed such as ones about sex then you need to turn off allowing homepage url’s to be listed with the comments. I don’t know what your problem is with sex sites, perhaps you are a victorian or a religious fanatic, beats me, but you do have the option to turn off homepage url listing with the comments.

The interesting thing about the person who decided to leave this message (which like so many was stuck on the end of my piece about the evils of weblog comment spammers) was that they don’t seem to be able to to understand the difference between someone engaging in a conversation and someone coming into your space and trying to sell you something. And they don’t seem able to understand that taking advantage of other people’s good-will to whore your own products and services is innappropriate – that it’s wrong.

The reason – obviously – that webloggers allow individuals to put links to their homepages in their comments is so that we can strengthen links and ties between the members of our heavily abstracted community. We do it so that if people find a comment interesting they can go and read more about the person who commented. The cynicism involved in using such things for pure Google-juice – just to try and scrabble people to your porno site for a few extra cents – is just disgusting. And it’s not because it’s pornography, it’s because it’s brazen, disrespectful and offensive.

I’m trying to find a good strategy for resolving this situation, but in the meantime I’m just going to change the URLs to pages about the evils of spamming, if I don’t just delete them. I’ll try and collate some useful links as soon as I am able.

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Random

Vote Alex!

I can’t quite believe I’m doing this, but if you are in the United Kingdom and if you’re not going outside and getting drunk or having a big party of something, could you please ring 09011 212 210 and cast your trashmatic Fame Academy vote for the wonderful Alex. I wouldn’t normally ask, but this is really important… Sigh…

And thank God! She’s won! Bloody wonderful! That’s really cheered me up. Thanks everyone for being useful and voting for her! The ‘staff’ look pretty happy too, which is probably because they’ve been saved from Sneddon-like embarrassment. Good stuff. Good stuff.

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Random

Advice for members of online communities…

Here’s three pieces of advice that apply as much to moderators and administrators of message boards as much as to the people who are unfortunate enough to have you as unduly elected presidents for life. The first piece of advice I have been reminded of again recently. It’s nice and simple and is profoundly important: Don’t post angry. The second piece of advice is about the content of your posts: Argue the issue, not the person. And the third and final piece of advice is about how you argue your point: The art of winning arguments is all about seeming to be the more reasonable party.