“With your help, we will provide a friendly, safe, easy to use place on the Web … This is a place where you take the lead in telling your own story. … In return, we ask that you meet this character challenge: be a good citizen and exhibit community leadership qualities. It’s a simple and golden rule. Act as you would like your neighbors to act.”Communities. Don’t you just love them? Everyone wants to build, create and sustain them. Well anyone who remembers the vid for Bronski Beat‘s Small Town Boy will recall that communities aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They’re home to cranks, bullies and narrow-mindedness of original ’00’ Hornby gauge. Yup, Durkheimian anomie has something going for it after all.
But there are still plenty of people who think the online world can be different to the real world. Steve Yelvington appears to be one of them, and he has obviously had enough of the people he calls ‘bums’ and ‘scum’. He blogs on social surgery here, and has this advice:
If your message boards are rotten, shut them down and start over with a sense of purpose. You can’t do it without the help of your community. And the community needs you to be a leader.
And without wishing to make trouble – we’re back to a world of control and leadership. Do as you would be done by. Homespun philosophy, the way mom made it.
Let’s all say it again slowly – new media is not an instrument for grass roots social change. Nor is the next new media, or the one after that. (Conspiracy theorists please note: nor are they instruments for elite social manipulation either.)
2 responses to “Social surgery…”
I kind of disagree with you in some respects here, Adrian.
One of the things I did during my work with LiveJournal was to come up with the idea of and design for it’s community features. I also promoted them heavilly, created international communities, and moderated some of the largest communities on the site.
Can the online world be different than the regular world? Not exactly. However, it *can* function according to established guidelines for social conduct, with hard and fast rules on how you behave yourself within a community. And if you want your community to be of any real interest to people, you need to be able to occasionally weed out users who break the social contract.
While I disagree with yelvington’s idea of shutting down the entirity of a site’s communities in order to fix it — the goal should be regular admin’ing of the community, to make sure it never gets so bad, with redesigning done on the fly and implemented in the least impacting way — you do have to do something to make sure the community is usable and useful to its primary audience.
The way to handle this on a basic community level is to have established guidelines on what is and isn’t acceptable. I have guidelines I created here for LiveJournal’s primary community for the San Francisco Bay Area.
One of the best parts of having such guidelines, is that you can get the community involved in discussion about both what the guidelines should be, and also empower them to help you police them effectively, in order to create what is called a “self-moderating” community, where if someone violates the guidelines, other members of the community are empowered and recommended to politely say, “Your post broke the guidelines for ________. Could you edit it so that it doesn’t do this any longer?” Also, if someone is repeatedly difficult, other members of the community can let me know, at which point I, as the admin, can either delete their post, explaining clearly the reason for doing so… or, if absolutely necessary, ban them entirely from the community. By and large, this kind of moderation by ownership works quite well.
On a larger level, major websites do this kind of behavior behind the scenes ALL THE TIME, both by having features which empower community admins to oversee their communities, and by having and actively enforcing their terms of service.
This continual process of keeping people who aren’t obeying the rules off the site, and informing people about the common rules and culture of your online community are absolutely essential. The trick is to handle such things in the least impactful, most consistant, most fair manner that you can. This is important, not only from a social standpoint, but also from a usability standpoint. People only join and use your community features to the point where they don’t degenerate into spam and heated flamefests. If the signal-to-noise ratio gets too bad, then people will go elsewhere, where it is lower. This is, of course, a big deal if you’re a dotcom with an actual business riding on your ability to successfully attract people to use your site. Your site will only keep growing to the point where you can keep the signal-to-noise ratio acceptably low, while still keeping the freedom of expression and of opinion as high as possible. Both are vital, and there’s a real art to doing this. And, of course, maintaining a community website only gets harder the larger it becomes… which is exactly why you need to empower the users themselves, and make sure they are socialized on what is acceptable.
So, in that sense, every successful community website is an instrument for grass roots social change. Absolutely so. It’s a business necessity.
And if you haven’t noticed this constant tinkering and culling at your favorite online community website, then odds are that they’ve either neglected their jobs and that their communities are falling into disuse and disarray, or they are simply doing a pretty good, uncontroversial job of running things.
Mark – what I mean is, the messianic social hopes that sometimes attach to technology are really only realizable by us as individuals. The intellectual excitement of the internet is watching someone like Steve Yelvington precising Rousseau. It’ll be Feuerbach next. Grass roots social change needs people, not bandwidth. And communities are all about who we leave out…