Category Archives: Identity

Comments are important

Interesting piece on the future of communities blog (Thanks Chris for pointing it out). It talks about what bloggers can do to incentivize more and better participation in communities.

“Given limited time and resources, where do you spend your time to increase participation?”

Here are some approaches:

1. Focus your efforts on the 1% and help them by making it easier to contribute. Compelling argument: Focus on the what you do best, is an approach that many have heard from several experts. Phil Wainewright suggests that you focus on those who are motivated to contribute. Its also easier to help people that want to help you. The real challenge is metrics that matter at times tend to be skewed by this group of enthusiastic participants who might sometimes intimidate the 9 or 90%.

2. Attempt to increase participation among the 9%: Compelling argument: Any incremental uptick will get you a more engaged audience. This is the marketing person’s dream come true. I remember hearing an entrepreneur pitching me his new idea 5 years ago on mobile phone accessories. There are going to be billion phones – even if I get 5% that’s a huge market. The trouble is our experience most of the 9% is of a different mindset and profile than your 1%. Hence getting them to participate is not materially different from the sample size.

3. Get rid of as many of the 90%. Compelling argument: They are not significantly enriching the community, but just parasites, so go forth and look for the next 1% types – or the “alphas” in your user community. The disadvantage of this model is that if your target addressable community is of a low number, the lurkers are really needed to justify the investment in the community.

4. Do a little of everything aka “peanut butter approach”: Compelling argument: Try several things at the same time and keep what works. Trouble is if you have the community being Sue’s night job and David’s “part time assignment” or Anil’s “opportunity to excel”, none of them really want to do everything. Also a “controlled experiment” is a lot harder to run in this case.

5. Do nothing but understand and accept, plan accordingly. Compelling argument: Before you scoff at this consider how little we know about these things just yet and letting “things take their course” may not be a bad option. But for the MBO-driven, metrics oriented, get it done culture we have this may clearly not be acceptable in some companies.

You may ask: What does this have to do with your comments or future of communities: Your comments are valued and I thank you for them!
I have a hunch that unless we get participation to be more encompassing and device good methods and means to make it better, the future — plurality of the masses will just be an empty promise.

Lack of quality participation is a real problem in most online communities. In the blogosphere especially, for the longest time, there was a mindset that if you got something good to say, you blog. But as more and more people are realizing that blogging is pretty hard and takes a lot of time commitment and energy, there is a renewed focus on figuring out, what can be done to get better participation from ad hoc commenters, in order to improve the quality of discussion. I think, the first step in the process is to really recognizing the importance of quality comments and ad-hoc participation.

Once we accept the importance of quality participation in blogs, we gotta look at how we can get more participation. A lot of the lack of participation really has to do with the lack of incentives for users that participate. But how can sites reward their participants…A lot of these rewards can be non-monitory like Amazon.com recognition of a top raters or viral spread of user generated content on YouTube, in contrast, commenters on blogs get nothing…Heck, most people can’t even be sure who the commenters are, so the ego boost angle is hard…This is a tough nut to crack but once we figure out an equitable and just mechanism for rewarding the participants we will be well on our way to solving this tough problem.

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free

Fascinating piece in the Time Magazine, titled “Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free” by Justin Fox, about how the new wave of open-source kind of projects are creating real riches for some:

It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called “reckless individualism”–is very relevant these days. That’s because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free.

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Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser have also established themselves as significant and lasting economic realities. That’s not true yet in the worlds of science, news and entertainment: we’re still figuring out what the role of volunteers will be, but that it will be much bigger than in the past seems obvious.

“The question for the past decade was, Is this real?” says Yale law professor Yochai Benkler. “The question for the next half-decade is, How do you make this damned thing work?” Benkler is a leading prophet of today’s gift economy, and he fits the part:

What might those things be? Take the case Benkler makes in his 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks (available, free, at www.benkler.org) for the economic benefits of “peer production” of software and other information products–from journalism to scientific research to videos of people mixing Mentos and Diet Coke. Peer production by people who donate small or large quantities of their time and expertise isn’t necessarily great at generating the original and the unique, but it’s very good for improving existing products (like software) and bringing together dispersed information (Wikipedia). Often better, in Benkler’s telling, than corporations armed with copyright and patent laws.

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Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism–but only if they don’t get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is “managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.” In software, where IBM and other companies charge billions of dollars to install and run otherwise free Linux systems, this seems to be working–in part because Linux volunteers can make money from their expertise and there’s a clear understanding of what one can charge for.

In other fields, it’s not so clear. In a critique of Benkler’s work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this “new kind of labor.” He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the “Carr-Benkler wager”: a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals.

I usually love Nick Carr’s blog, but on this one I tend to agree with Benkler…People who set up open source systems do setup schemes to reward the participants in a number of non-monitory ways. Some of these rewards are recognition as a leader in the community, or enabling users to connect with other members or to enable user to share their content (youTube) with their family and friends. Most of the users find these to be suitable reward for their efforts and don’t worry about the owners of such establishments getting huge chunks of money.

I think a good parallel for the community sites on the web is hot night clubs…These clubs (like club 52 in NYC) attract a lot of people and charge substantial cover charges in addition to obscene amounts for beverages etc. and still typically have a line of people wanting to go participate. Going by Nick Analysis, such popular establishment are just exploiting their visitors (much like youTube etc.) and don’t really deserve the profits they get. I tend to think that instead of disparaging such businesses, we should be appreciating and learning from them as they are able to create an environment where community members want to participate. I think they fully deserve their riches and their rock-star statuses.

I think at the bottom of it, we need to recognize that non-monitory rewards can just be as effective as financial incentives. Human beings are really social creatures, and social interaction and recognition can be a powerful motivators for most people. Its no wonder solitary confinement is considered a punishment…I know its a hard think for most efficient market advocates to admit(full disclosure, I actually studied at U of Chicago) but I think the facts are stacked against them…

What do you think?

Public Connections

Great piece from Danah Boyd on her blog about the way Internet and social media makes it easy for people to document and publish their thoughts and feelings…and the effect it has on people’s behavior and relationships.

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt

Have you ever found yourself not saying something that is on your mind because you’re afraid that if you say it, it will become real? This is a really interesting conundrum in the context of blogging because it has to do with the ways in which public performances make ideas real. Arendt argues that one of the primary roles of the public is to make things real. People seek out witnesses to validate their emotions, ideas, actions, or mere existence. Our stories become real when we have other people to share them with, when other people saw and experienced what we experienced. Having no access to public life can be maddening (literally) because everything might as well be a fable with no witnesses to validate what took place.
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The Internet has allowed us to take the most “intimate” thoughts and ideas and perform them in a public before witnesses. This makes real every neurosis and stupid act – stuff that might simply have slipped away before. It makes it possible to be heard.

Of course once you make public a bunch of private things like your relationship, you need to undo them publicly as well if things don’t work out…Check out this youtube video of a UNC Pit student who decided to have a public breakup on valentine’s day:


I suspect, the ease with which the Internet enables people to go public, even changes dynamics of relationships…Anybody remember the speed dial episode on Sienfeld…now imagine kids, who are dealing with growing up and building up a more mature public persona, having a rich and public equivalent of the speed dial list. It isn’t hard to imagine, how kids will use the web to communicate various transitory feelings and crushes and regret some of those public communications later. No wonder their are companies like ReputationDefender that just focus on cleaning up online histories of kids.

Now the effect of public nature of connections might not just be limited to kids either. LinkedIn provides a good example of public connections that more and more adults are using. Using LinkedIn people can browse people’s professional networks. Now there are people on LinkedIn who have a huge number of connections. Some of these people build up these connections without really even meeting the person (I am sure you get such connection requests as well). I suspect its the public nature of the linked in connections that compels people to establish these useless connections…What do you guys think?

Why People Are Such Jerks Online

Great Piece by Mike on TechDirt

The concept of the flame war online is certainly nothing new. It’s been around since before most people were even aware the internet existed. However, more people are starting to look into the issue of why people tend to be such incredible jerks online when they might be perfectly nice in person. It seems that there are few different things contributing to the effect. First is that people somehow feel “disinhibited” when sitting behind a keyboard and monitor — whether it’s because of the supposed anonymity, the fact that you’re effectively “invisible” or even the fact that there’s a time lag between being a jerk and any response to it. The fact that you’re somewhat separate from the response just makes it that much easier to be a jerk. Some feel that it has even more to do with the lack of direct human contact in terms of either seeing hurt feelings or hearing someone’s voice. There’s just less empathy involved in seeing black and white text then seeing a physical reaction to being mean. Some of the latest research on this actually looked at how brains process messages during a conversation, and noted that in a normal conversation the person is tracking a variety of different cues in terms of how the other person is responding, and those cues help moderate what we say. Without any such cues when sitting behind a keyboard, you don’t get any of the warning lights to moderate what you’re saying, and the natural tendency is just to go right to the extreme edge without ever cooling off.

Another take from International Herald Tribune:

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one another a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.

“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e- mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

Also there is this pithy cartoon from Penny Arcade (via a comment on TechDirt).

Out of the explanations, I tend to like the last one the best (The one in the cartoon). I think lack of accountability or even reliable identity and reputation online is the root cause of people being jerks. Without such mechanisms, I suspect even the real world, emotions/facial expressions or not, will disintegrate into a lawless flamefest. Another potential cause could be the lack of broad community participation on the Internet. This leads to people, who feel the strongest about a topic, to participate thereby causing the perception that people are jerks on the Internet.

Digg to support OpenID

Things are just going crazy for OpenID…Digg just announced that it is planning to support OpenID. While its not that big a deal in raw numbers (see our coverage of AOL announcement, which is far bigger in terms of sheer numbers), it is a pretty big deal in terms of buzz and the demographic group it effects and therefore could have a pretty significant effect of the adoption of OpenID.

It looks like the OpenID solution is snowballing…I don’t want to sound a pessimistic note but I just hope the community figures out the solution to the phishing issues (see our analysis here) before too late.

See more coverage GigaOM, TechCrunch, RWW

AOL creates 63 million new OpenIDs

Over the weekend, I saw the announcement from AOL, to support OpenID for all of their 63 million AOL/AIM Ids (for those looking for a quick introduction to OpenID, click here). The details of the announcement are as follows (from panzerJohn blog):

  • Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/screenname.
  • This experimental OpenID 1.1 Provider service is available now and we are conducting compatibility tests.
  • Our blogging platform has enabled basic OpenID 1.1 in beta, so every beta blog URI is also a basic OpenID identifier. (No Yadis yet.)
  • We don’t yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we’re actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
  • We are tracking the OpenID 2.0 standardization effort and plan to support it after it becomes final.

AOL tries to make AOL/AIM user names sticky

This is an interesting gambit for AOL, who has been shifting from a subscription model to a rich media content/ad based business model, by leverage their access to the Time Warner content library. Opening up AOL/AIM user names via OpenID adds another dimension to this strategy. With OpenID integration, AOL hopes to find more uses for AOL/AIM usernames and to drive more sticky and consistent traffic to AOL. How does it affect AOL/AIM users? With the OpenID integration, an AOL user will be able to login to a service provider that accepts OpenID, using their AOL/AIM username/password, without needing to create a new service specific username/password. This is a great way for AOL to try and retain its once formidable and still significant user base by providing an OpenID based solution to the knotty problem of web signal sign-on.

Further momentum for OpenID

For the OpenID community, this is a significant number of users that can force more vendors to accept OpenID as a sign-on mechanism. One issue to keep on eye on is that this announcement could cause premature mass adoption for OpenID, before it is fully baked. This could potentially expose OpenID to user backlash based on its well documented security issues (see our analysis of the OpenID security issues here). Still, AOL opening up OpenID to its 63 million users is a great validation for OpenID solution. On the heels of the Microsoft announcement, this announcement builds further momentum for OpenID solution as the answer to the web single sign-on problems.

Solution in Site?

With the recent news about OpenID and the movement by giants like Microsoft and AOL, the solution to web single sign-on problem might finally be in sight. Let’s hope we continue along with this torrid pace towards a web where users don’t have to create and remember separate IDs for each service they use.

Also available on Read/Write Web.

Identity Vs Membership

Check out this interesting piece from ocean@concedere…

But everybody does understand the concept of a community, and belonging to a community, and they would understand that such a membership would grant certain privileges.

Membership is, I think, a far more interesting and useful concept than identity. It’s also one which is much less prone to abuse and much more unlikely to exhibit control. Rather than trying to cook up identity scheme after identity scheme people ought to focus on working with the many communities that already exist on the web to capture the value of these memberships.

I tend to agree with his take on the importance of associations as opposed to a standalone identity in human networks. The issue though is weather it is possible to have relevant and useful associations in an environment, like the Internet, where it is impossible, even for serious participants, to establish their identity.

Wikipedia Case Study

Fascinating case study on the history and sub-culture of Wikipedia by Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee of HBS.

The study delves into the evolution of Wikipedia and makes for an interesting read. You can see the controllers of Wikipedia struggling to strike a balance between the need to empower people and the need to ensure that the system is reliable. The result – Wikipedia has more than 10 times the number of articles available in Encyclopedia Britannica, an extremely high page-rank, and a community that, although rickety and slow at times, produces an astonishing quantity of quality content. Nick Carr, has an interesting take on the bureaucracy at Wikipedia (reminded me of a number of big corporations):

For some of us, the popular online encyclopedia has become more interesting as an experiment in emergent bureaucracy than in emergent content. Slashdot today points to Dirk Riehle’s fascinating interview with three high-ranking Wikipedians, Angela Beesley, Elisabeth “Elian” Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.23 (See Dirk Riehle’s article (PDF). Note that the article is copyrighted and does not fall under GFDL.) They describe Wikipedia’s increasingly complex governance structure, from its proliferation of hierarchical roles to its “career paths” to its regulatory committees and processes to its arcane content templates. We learn that working the bureaucracy tends to become its own reward for the most dedicated Wikipedians: “Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing.” And we learn that the rules governing the deletion of an entry now take up “37 pages plus 20 subcategories.” For anyone who still thinks of Wikipedia as a decentralized populist collective, the interview will be particularly enlightening. Wikipedia is beginning to look something like a post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.24

Another interesting piece of the study deals with the tussle between different visions of what Wikipedia should be:

As the encyclopedia grew, a tension appeared between Wikipedians who had broad and narrow definitions of notability, or what made a topic worthy of a Wikipedia article. Inclusionists adopted the slogan “Wikipedia is not paper,” reflecting their belief that since new articles consumed no scarce resources, they should be encouraged and welcomed because they would help make Wikipedia more comprehensive. Their Wikipedia page stated:

Inclusionism is a philosophy held by Wikipedians who favour keeping and amending problematic articles over deleting them. Inclusionists are also generally less concerned with the question of notability, and instead focus on whether or not an article is factual.

If, for example, an article has some good content and some substandard content, the inclusionist will see the good content as reason to keep the article and, like eventualists, will have faith that the wiki process will improve the substandard content in time.

Deletionists, in contrast, maintained that “Wikipedia is not a junkyard.” Their page stated:

“Deletionism is a philosophy held by some Wikipedians that favors clear and relatively rigorous standards for accepting articles, templates or other pages to the encyclopedia. Wikipedians who broadly subscribe to this philosophy are more likely to request that an article that they believe does not meet such standards be removed, or deleted.

Deletionists’ two central goals were to “1) Outpace rampant inclusionism and 2) Further our goal of a quality encyclopedia containing as little junk as possible.”

Overall, the authors have done a great job putting together a case that reads well along with exhibits that provide a lot of interesting information for those who are not very familiar with how Wikipedia works.