Category Archives: Community Management

30 Days Of Sexism | Kotaku Australia:

From March 7 – April 7, I documented everything blatantly sexist anyone has said to me. None of these comments were provoked, none of them were replies to something I said, none of them were at all out of the ordinary and the vast majority of them (an original count of 77 images) have been taken out so that this post isn’t as long as it probably should be. This is a 10-picture indication of what it’s like to be a woman who endorses game culture, every single month

Isn’t it sad things are still like this? But is it surprising? unfortunately, no.

Okay, you’re a community manager, and this starts happening in your forums or in the comments section. Are your site rules and T&Cs set up to let you fix the problem? And — how do you define “fix the problem?”

How do you handle it? Well, if you’re Youtube, you evidently stick carrots in your ears and pretend nothing’s wrong… 

(hint: WRONG ANSWER)

I’ve just signed myself up to go to the Online Community Unconference in May. It looks like an interesting event with some interesting people in it. If you’re here in the greater Silicon Valley region and interested in Community Management, you ought to consider going. If you are going and want to meet up during the day, drop me a note and we can figure out the details. 

An Unconference?

If you’ve never heard that term before, an Unconference is difference from a typical conference where you show up and people talk at you. In an Unconference, the organizers set up the event and reserve the space, and then don’t create any programming. Instead, it’s a blank slate where the attendees get together and create a program on among themselves. This may sound scary (and it can be for some) but what it really does is give people an opportunity to get together, network and share with each other what they know on interests they find to be in common. 

The unconference came out of the O’Reilly Foo Camps. I was allowed to go to the first of those, and it was a blast. Intimidating? definitely. But a blast. And it’s weird to think that was ten years ago, because that Foo Camp turns out to be where I first recognized some things going on in my life that turned into some major changes, including leaving Apple and making a shift out of writing code into Community Management. The first Foo Camp is where we saw the beginnings of the people organizing around the Maker movement, for instance, and out of that came Make Magazine — and in many ways, it was just because Tim pulled a bunch of people together, and some of those people realized they all had common interests and were hacking on those types of things in isolation, and it started a lot of talking and collaboration.

So who knows what’ll come out of this unconference? At the very least — you can meet and interact with a whole bunch of people who are likely going to make you think you’re only qualified to bring the bagels. And in reality, most of the people there will feel that way, too…

I may try, if I find the time, to build up some possible talking points for the unconference. One that comes to mind might be to talk about what it was like doing community management before anyone used that term. Or had invented HTML and the web and web sites… It might be fun to see if people want to talk about the good old days of USENET, too, and how today’s modern communities grew out of the things we were trying to build there, and what things we based some of the USENET design on… 

Or maybe I’ll just sit back and listen to everyone else… What I do know is I expect to come away with a whole lot to think about and see how to make happen in the communities I run… 

Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough? Tech News and Analysis:

Will there be people who have such a uniform social graph that any form of social filtering will just allow them to live in an online echo chamber? Of course there will be — but then, those people already exist, and seem to have no trouble living in a cocoon with or without the Internet. Social filters aren’t going to make that phenomenon any worse (J.P. Rangaswami has a very thoughtful post about filtering, and business blogger Tim Kastelle also wrote a great post recently about the virtues of different kinds of filtering).

This has always happened online, going back to the days of USENET where kill files could virtually disappear someone out of the social circles of a group if they didn’t follow the party line well enough. One of the great struggles I’ve seen with mailing lists going back 15 years and more is for a tendency for a list to stagnate over time. I used to look for ways to break that stagnation and try to keep fresh blood entering the community, but one of the side effects of keeping a group of people together for years is they get really comfortable with each other, and whether they realize it or not, they don’t always make newcomers welcome. It may not even be a visible “we don’t want you here”, but a more subtle lack of being welcoming where people just don’t end up feeling comfortable so they don’t tend to stick.

In today’s environments it’s easy to set yourself up so that you only see what you want to see; I think that’s inherent in the unknown and uncomfortable causing stress and as humans, I think most of us unconsciously try to minimize our stress where we can — as such, whether we realize it or not, we filter for the known and comfortable because it’s, well, known and comfortable.

There’s no place where this is more overtly visible than what I like to call the Silicon Valley tech bubble; you know who they are, it’s the high profile A-lister bloggers who are a large part of the group that writes or influences what’s written in the tech and analyst press about high tech, especially here in the valley. This group all watches each other very closely, and stuff found by one tends to circle around to all quickly, and when they get it in their mind that something is (or should be) true, disagreeing opinions rarely get much visibility.

Worse, when they are wrong, the mistakes tend to get quietly buried. Look, for instance, about the hype and predictions leading up to the release of the Verizon iPhone. In the view of many, that was going to be the death of AT&T and that there would be mass riots of AT&T customers chasing Verizon iphones. Could this be influenced by the fact that AT&T networks are particularly bad in some areas of silicon valley and maybe that influenced their thinking? Well, maybe. But that thinking also clearly influences the tech and financial analysts, and the whole “Verizon iPhone diaspora” concept because kind of a running meme in the tech press, until finally, Apple and Verizon actually shipped the damned thing.

And it turns out, it was a nice, modest success on all accounts, but… Where was the massive shift of customers that everyone was predicting? And how many of these people actually stood up and said “well, heck. I guess I got that wrong?” — few. And how many actually analyzed why so much of the predictive coverage of this was wrong? Almost nobody, that I saw. And how many of you actually held them accountable for being wrong and demanded accountability, or stopped reading them because they proved themselves to be more about wishful thinking than real analysis? Hmm.

That’s one problem here. Analysts and writers with frankly pretty lousy track records aren’t held accountable, especially if they’re interesting/fun writers and because we as readers love the rumor/gossip aspect and don’t actually seem to care if any of that is actually correct. There’s a strong aspect of Entertainment Tonight to all of this, which is amusing because many of these folks would pluck out their eyes rather than admit they pay attention to that kind of stuff. Unless it’s in the geek press.

There are a couple of things in play here. One is the tendency over time to focus what you follow away from things that cause stress, meaning a quiet tendency towards narrowing to the comfortable and familiar. On the flip side is what I think is a subconscious worry that you’re going to miss something important, which leads to bringing in more sources and more feeds, which means you’re spending more time going through all that stuff (and skimming, so you’re actually seeing even less detail and capturing less info) — until ultimately, you hit information bankruptcy and blow everything away and start over. Do that two or three times and you probably find yourself and you find youself simultaneously stressed over adding new sources to the things you’re watching (because you’re already overloaded and struggling to keep up already) and also stressing because there’s stuff you wish you could follow if you weren’t already stressing over being overloaded. And once you hit that point, you’re firmly in the grip of your personal echo chamber.

I’ve fought those issues; we all have. I continue to, but I feel like right now, I have things set up in a way that I’m comfortable with and which seem to be working pretty well. And I figured some folks might find how I simultaineously fight the echo chamber while avoiding information bankruptcy useful as hints to adopt into your own information surfing workflows… So here are a few thoughts on what I’m doing today:

(1) If it’s important to me, it will be brought to my attention. This is a core concept to get your head around; it’s the core of all of these social networks we’re in, yet one of the hardest lessons I had to teach myself was that I didn’t actually have to find all this stuff myself, but to relax and leverage the networks I’ve built myself into. This is easier said than done, but I think it’s very true: if you touch the right points in the network, then stuff you should know will end up being within your attention space. And if it doesn’t, you probably didn’t need it. Those exceptions you will run into (because no network is perfect) are those places where you need to figure out how to tie into the right networks to get  that information the next time). Embrace this concept, and you will likely wave bye-bye to bankruptcy forever, because you are embracing leverage over sheer volume.

(2) Budget by time, not size or number. I finally got over the “how many feeds can I read?” mindset. It ignores things like how busy a feed is and how noisy a feed is; you can’t treat a feed that updates weekly but is full of gems the same as some of the sites that post 30 articles a day, 20 of which are crap. I finally realized what mattered was time, so I budget time: my goal, about 90 minutes of surfing for information a day. If you come up with a budget for how much time in a day this is worth to you, you can start adjusting what you do to maximize the value of that time investment. I don’t know about you, but time is the one commodity I can’t flex and the one I very much tend to need to be creative about. If time were available in packages at Lowe’s, my credit cards would be maxed permanently.  So decide how much time you are willing to invest in this, and then that gives you permission to explore (if you’re under) and makes you edit (if you’re over); and through the editing you’ll keep yourself pro-actively away from bankruptcy.

(3) At the end of the day, throw it all out and start over. How often do you find yourself around someone who fires up Google Reader and it shows they have 1,000 unread articles? 10,000? And they peck at a few things and then leave the rest of that mass there, and rpobably say something apologetic. They’re in bankruptcy and won’t admit it. The amount of time they’re willing to commit is clearly smaller than the wad of information they’re trying to process, and they’re choking on it. They are in reality editing (by picking stuff on the fly) without editing (by leaving the rest behind in this faux fantasy they may catch up soon). And they’re stressing themselves out by doing so. So my suggestion: at the end of the day, if it’s not read, mark it all read and move on. Start fresh tomorrow. Remember point 1; if it’s important, it’ll be brought to your attention. Of course, if you’re that far overloaded, you may be too overloaded to see that it was. Which is why you need point 4.

(4) Edit. Ruthlessly. Often. Whenever you start falling a bit behind, start dropping things out of your feeds. Find the things that are least useful, least interesting — the least value for your precious time commodity — and unsubscribe them. don’t just mark them read, mark them gone. How often do you look at at site you’re following and wonder why you subscribed? Or the last time you got a useful article from it? Or clicked through a link to  something? Or did you research how to write web apps in Dec/RSTS three months ago and are all of those feeds still in there even though you ended up adopting Node instead? Edit. Edit. Edit. Even if the feed you drop is mine, drop it. seriously, I won’t mind. Think of ever piece you’re committing to follow as needing an ROI, where there’s an investment of time and a return of information of value. Anything that doesn’t meet that ROI that isn’t a boss, co-worker, spouse or your mother’s blog, should go (there will always be a need for VIP sites, of course). Think about it this way: the act of editing what you read can be intimidating because the process of going through all of those feeds can be time-consuming, and time is what you’re most missing anyway. If you get in the habit of editing out low-value feeds on the fly, one here, a couple there, you won’t hit a time where it all overwhelms and becomes a big hairy monster. And you can build the habit such that as you’re going through things, you’ll find yourself mentally suddenly do a sanity check: “when was the last time this site gave me value?” and if you can’t answer it, you drop it. And by building that habit, you’ll find your feed management almost becoming automatic within the time you’ve budgeted; if you start spending too much time in the feeds, you’ll edit more seriously, if you’re well in your time budget, you won’t. but by building that habit, you may hit a point where you rarely even notice your time budget any more; it becomes almost automatically self-sustaining.

(5) Fresh Blood. Lots of it. Always be adding new things to the mix; don’t be afraid to audition a feed. About 80% of the feeds I add get removed again within a month, but that’s okay. Many times I’ll check something out because of a particularly interesting piece someone linked to, but I don’t see much else that keeps me interested. Rather than continuing to skim and hope, I know if something else really interesting pops up, I’ll get told about it, so that’s okay. Also, don’t forget that your interests and needs and skills change over time; as I’ve grown as a photographer, the list of sites I follow on photography has changed by about 80%.; that’s not because those sites stopped being good or interesting, it’s because I stopped being their demographic and I started wanting different kinds of information to feed on. That’s good, but adapt your feeds to it, don’t just keep stuff around because it was useful once….

That’s another aspect of the edit ruthlessly; it not only helps you avoid bankruptcy, it gives you permission to explore ruthlessly, too. That’s how you avoid echo chambering yourself. My typical pattern seems to be that I subscribe to a number of feeds roughly equal to 5% of my feed collection every month. Most of those don’t survive the month, but many do. Along the way, I drop out weak feeds that come to my notice, but not as many as I add. Eventually (it seems to happen about every two months) I decide I’m spending too much time on all of this stuff, and I go in and do some more enthusiastic editing that typically takes me back to about 80% of my time budget. Note that all of this is thought of in terms of time expended and the value received for that investment in time — but if you want a raw number, my Google Reader subscriptions tend to cycle around 400.

You can almost think of it as an agile process; lots of short iterative acquisition/editing cycles instead of massive binge/purge projects.

And the core determining value is a simple one, in theory: are you getting a good return on the investment of your time? If the answer is no, then you need to adjust and edit until you do.

Of course, that’s still easier said than done, but I’ve found it definitely worth doing…  And if this helps, great. If not, well, maybe this site isn’t a good investment of your time… (grin)

To understand the feature requirements for moderation we need some goals. Keep in mind that no moderation will be perfect, and you can easily come up with scenarios that will work around anything we come up with.

Therefore, we should focus on just some initial goals that will work right now, and keep in mind that these will need to be constantly tweaked and worked on as the spammers evade the measures.

• If given the choice between restricting free speech and preventing unwanted communication, free speech always wins.
• The system should increase the quality of discourse for any project, regardless of human language used.
• It should never give a small group the ability to hide communications from others.
• It should be implementable and not have high hosting costs.
• It should not rely on a dedicated person’s constant intervention.
• It never gates email through system before sending it, but rather allows initial emails with moderation after.
• It should use information from people’s rating habits to classify them as “ratings trolls” to prevent abuse.

With those goals in mind I’ve teased out two potential list quality strategies that might work.

via Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies.

Someone I work with turned me on to Librelist because they knew me interest and history with mailing list systems, and I find it interesting that some folks have decided it’s time to rethink the mailing list again.

They’re right. When I faded to black on the mailman project, it was at least in part because many of us felt that mailing lists were a technological dead end, and that deliverability issues because of anti-spam systems made the “personal mailing list” an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish.

Both are — for the most part — true. I certainly would never run my own mail server again, because the advantages of doing so are far outweighed by the time and hassle of trying to manage deliverability and reputation to make sure mail it sends gets accepted, and the constant onslaught of incoming spam turns them into a permanent infinite time sink. That’s why I either retired our lists or moved them to Yahoogroups (which I personally think is a pretty good system).

But there’s still room here to rethink the concepts and the Librelists seem interested in trying, and I think that’s great. Email and mailing lists are far from dead — but instead of stand alone delivery tools, they really shine as part of an integrated web strategy; Yahoo groups is a nice first generation of that, although there’s a lot more Yahoo could do if they decided to.

Message moderation really breaks down into two big problems:

• “Subscribe spam” where spammers sign up to the list to spam it.
• “Member warfare” where existing, approved members get into fights and they escalate into unacceptable territory.

The first is really simple to solve: new members are moderated, and messages aren’t posted until reviewed by someone to vet their content. Simple implementation; Yahoo Groups does it today, and on the lists I still manage, it works well to keep the spammers at bay. The way I manage it is all members are moderated until their first post. if their first post is acceptable, I turn off the moderation bit. To minimize delays in propogation of new member messages, simply choose a moderator pool large enough to guarantee held messages get reviewed and approved in a timely manner — you could even make that moderator pool all members in good standing if you want, because all you really need is someone you’ve trusted to post vetting that someone new is trusted to post.

Member warfare is trickier. I hesitate to call it trolling because the pure troll is a subset of the larger issue of two (or a small group of) people getting pissed off and going at it. A troll is simply one person going off on the rest of the list.

I’m more and more convinced the answer here are reputation systems, where over time a user’s membership in a group is used to define their abilities and restrictions. The longer a member is in the group in good standing, the more often they contribute material, the higher their reputation goes and the more the can do and the more sway they have on the decisions of the reputation engine. You can tweak the details of the algorithm almost any way you want, but if you define it in terms of “how long they’re a member” and “constructive contribution to the community”, you can come up with a metric on how valuable that member is to the community, and then use that to rank that member’s contributions and recommendations.

Here’s one rough view of how to build this. Please note that I firmly believe karma rankings are private and users have no way to see what their ranking is or compare it to others, except in really broad user categories (“member”, “senior member”, “top contributor”, “advisory board member”). As soon as you create a list of any form, you will attract people who see it as something they can game, and so they will.

User Karma is a value between 0 and 1, which starts at 0.5. Every time a user contributes to the system (a posting, a reply, a moderation recommendation, etc), the number gets bumped by some value. How much the value is incremented or decremented depends on how it’s rated by other users — so if User A posts a message, User B flags it as spam, but 80% of the membership feel that was a bad decision, User B’s karma is reduced in future decisions, they lose influence. Over time, the system self-corrects by giving increased influence of those who’s decisions match the community consensus and reduced influence to those who’s postings and recommendations don’t match up well.

The system can then choose whether to accept or flag for moderation a posting based on a poster’s karma score. You could potentially reject outright users that have karma scores below some value, or allow other members to choose not to see messages by users with karma scores below some value. Over time, users who are disruptive to the community will get karma’ed into the moderation queue (or out the door), and users who are seen as top contributors will have stronger influence.

My goals:

• A system like this can be built nicely with a good SQL backend and a bit of horsepower. I’ve actually done a detailed design and schema on this before, and it’s a fascinating thing I’ve always wanted to implement.
• It enables the power of individuals to police themselves.
• It limits the ability of an individual to harass or cause problems.
• It doesn’t lend itself to people playing the game of gaming the system by not exposing the details of the system (slashdot karma whores need not apply).
• Trolls get edited out of the system because the community will quickly recognize them for what they are and trash their karma, causing their postings to disappear to the bottom of the list.
• Cliques and Mafias have to be large to influence the results significantly. You don’t completely avoid the clique/mafia problem, but you can severely limit it’s ability to wreak havoc.
• It doesn’t require a lot of manual handholding or babysitting. Admins end up stepping in only in extreme cases.
• Because trolls tend to get edited out of the system quickly and automatically, they tend to go elsewhere because without feedback and controversy, they wither and die. And by editing them out of the system quickly, you avoid the whiplash and fighting that happens when people start fighting with the trolls and the wars break out.

Weaknesses:

• Any community tends to turn into an echo chamber. Automated systems like this encourage this because “different thinking” tends to get rated down.
• That’s usually a lesser evil to letting the trolls run wild.
• To my knowledge, nobody’s ever solved the problem of the conflict between the group-mind reinforcing the echo chamber and allowing the free thinkers to poke at the community’s comfort level by pushing them to think about things that make them uncomfortable. One person’s rebel is another person’s troll, and that’s not solvable in real life, much less in automated life like this…

These techniques are all based on (or stolen from) things that are in use around the net, with Amazon’s review feedback being one I really respect; while trying to avoid the pitfalls I’ve seen around the net (yes, I’m going to keep bashing on Slashdot’s karma system, it’s way too easy to game and always has been). It also (I believe) avoids the nasty politics that have made Digg a bit of a pesthole. And it’s also pretty lightweight and low-key, or at least it should be. The implementation details will be crucial, as will be tuning how the karma values adapt…

According to Greenbaum’s blog post (which was mirrored on his personal blog), someone posted a comment on a story in which they used a colloquial or slang term for female genitalia. It was deleted, but then was reposted. Greenbaum says he noticed that the comment alert from WordPress showed that it came from a nearby school. So Greenbaum called the school, and they asked him to send them the email with the comment, which he apparently did. About six hours later, he says, the school called and said that an employee had been confronted and that he had resigned.

Am I the only one who thinks that doing this goes way beyond the normal course of editorial behaviour?

via Comment behaviour: How far is too far?.

There’s been some interesting commentary on this case — but there are some aspects that I think haven’t been addressed very well yet. It’s a more complicated situation than many have considered, and the answers really aren’t clear cut.

Here’s my take:

There are really two separate issues here.

Did Greenbaum over-react by reporting this person to his employer?

Yes — but.

Yes, he did. In the grand scheme of things, reporting a violator back to their host is a serious thing because it can have serious implications — like getting someone fired. Which effectively happened in this case. So it’s a last resort thing. Before you do something like that, I prefer taking many other tactics first:

• Delete the post
• Warn the User
• Ban the User (and ban the IP and/or IP range as necessary)
• Make it clear that if it doesn’t stop, they’re going to be reported

If those all fail, or if for some reason aren’t possible, THEN you start considering going back to the user’s host for support in making the behavior stop. As far as I can tell, only the first was tried, so a number of (to me) necessary steps were skipped. This could have been ended with much less serious ramifications, and wasn’t.

However, here’s the butt:

• The post was deleted, and the user insisted on putting it back. The admins made it clear it wasn’t acceptable, and the user decided to overrule their authority. This user was far from innocent here.
• Once the user is reportd back to their host (and I use that term carefully, because it’s many times unclear if it’s an employer or what, and to some degree it doesn’t matter if it’s an ISP or a boss or whatever), it’s out of Greenbaum’s control. The rest of the escalation to losing the job was the result of actions of the host (i.e the school, or this person’s boss). None of that is caused by Greenbaum (directly) or his fault, beyond that he should have been sensitive to the fact that his action in reporting might have caused other actions to happen.

So, you know what? I think Greenbaum’s transgression is a lot less serious than the user’s transgression in reposting his vulgarity after it was made clear it wasn’t welcome. I would have tried other tactics to cut the abuse, but let’s not forget that it was abuse, and it was repeated abuse after the site made it clear the posting wasn’t welcome. Whether you shoot over someone’s virtual bow one time or three times is a minor thing in the scheme of it.

The user’s fault in this problem was a much bigger problem than Greenbaum’s reaction.

But what about the school? They’re the group that took the complaint and escalated it into a situation where the person lost their job. None of that is Greenbaum’s fault. Was the school wrong for turning this into a termination issue?

I’m not so sure. It’s easy to say they over-reacted, but let’s not forget:

• This person did this using the school’s network
• It looks like he did it while on duty at the school – while he was being paid by them.
• He likely was on a school-owned computer
• He was (I’m sure) under some kind of employment contract with behavior clauses. The school very likely has acceptable use standards for computers and networks, and for all we know, also personal use restrictions (which this would be a violation of).
• So while this cascaded into a situation where someone lost their job, it’s not at all clear that the details of the action were the cause. We also don’t know if this person has a history of previous violations of work rules that might have been part of this. Has this person been warned about this kind of behavior before? We don’t know. It could well be from the school’s view that this was a “last straw”. We don’t know.

And those complications are why I believe reporting back to the host is something not to be taken lightly; once you do, the final outcome is not really under your control. On the other hand, the person who could have prevented this was the user who posted the vulgarity — either by not doing it in the first place, or by stopping after it was deleted the first time, or by being smart enough to not do it from his employer on company time and company equipment. He had plenty of opportunities to not turn this into what it was; Greenbaum had one.

And it’s not as simple as many of the folks commenting on it want to be. Real life never is…

App Store reviews have been controversial from the beginning — while they can be helpful for buyers, you often have no idea just who’s leaving comments or what their real agenda is. Njection, the makers of Nmobile (which we played with a while ago) are having a huge problem with what they’re calling “sockpuppet” reviews on the App Store.

Someone (they believe this person is in cahoots with their competitor) is posting bad reviews on their app and trying to trash them and their product elsewhere (including in a comment here on TUAW). And unfortunately, as they say, they don’t really have much recourse against this behavior — they’ve appealed to Apple, who’ve replied that they’ll leave comments up, unless they’re offensive or extremely false. Apple’s own guidelines for reviewing apps asks that the reviewers deal with apps on their own merit rather than attacking competitors, but that seems to be more of a recommendation than a firm rule.

Njection says the comments have kept consumers from trying out their apps, though it seems difficult to actually track how many people haven’t tried your app (and why). It’ll be interesting to see if Apple makes other changes to the review system if this sort of thing rears its ugly head more often. At this point, it seems devs just have to deal with it by doing damage control when necessary and making their app good enough that “sockpuppeting” doesn’t strongly affect public opinion.

via Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

I guess I’m not convinced. Looking at the app in question, there are a total of twelve reviews, seven of them 4 or 5 stars, only 3 gave it one star. Since others have the ability to rate the usefulness of each review, there’s some feedback going on with the reviews themselves, and so it’s not until the ninth review that you get a rating of less than 3 stars when sorted by “most helpful”. that seems like some fairly positive reviews overall.

Given that Apple only allows one review per store account and that account has to have bought the product, it’s rather hard for me to see a significantly organized turfing attack here. I don’t know which is reality, but my gut feel is that the turfing worries are overblown.

You could also think maybe it’s a developer looking for a way to explain away bad reviews. And it presumes that the developer didn’t have their friends all log in and report the five star reviews, too. Turfing can go both ways, of course. Not that we’d ever do that — and not that I’m implying the developer did. Definitely saying they shouldn’t, FWIW.

Having said that — there are some ways to limit the impact of turfing if it exists.

First: free limited versions. If users are hesitant to pay for the App because of some bad reviews, then give them a way to trial the app before paying. That’s been very successful with me trying out various free versions of apps on the store and then buying the full version. there’s really little reason to NOT do this, and yes, Apple really needs to formalize support for this in the store in some way, but until then, Lite versions rock, and remove the worry of buyer remorse.

Second: Yelp has this same problem. One way its gets solved is via high numbers of reviews. The larger the set of comments on something, the less impact any individual or turfing campaign can have. So a simple way for developers to limit the impact of turfing attacks is to encourage the users to submit their own reviews. Something as simple, perhaps, as when they fire up the app after having used the app for some period of time, putting up an alert encouraging them to review the app and explain how. add in a couple of buttons (“take me there”, “not yet”, “stop annoying me”), and make it as easy as possible for them to put the review in.

If you think about it, if your users are happy with you, a percentage of them will go and say so. And that stream of reviews will blow out any impact of a turfing attack.Of course, if the users aren’t thrilled, you might get buried, but you wrote a great app, right? aren’t afraid of some criticism, right?

There are other things you can do — a lot of it boils down to giving users information about the person writing the review so they can evaluate the reviewer and decide how much to trust them — and I went into some details on my ideas on that a couple of months ago. Most of that would be relevant to upgrading the App Store reviewing system. Honestly, though, I don’t think it’s all that bad these days. Could be better, but the big missing piece is the ability to do free demos. I expect Apple to solve that at some point, but developers can do something about it on their own.

I can’t think of an app I’ve used that suggested I go to the store and review it, though. Why the heck not? Free advertising, folks. Do it in a tactful manner, and I’ll bet a good chunk of the users will cooperate. Seems to me the BEST advertisement for an app isn’t a five star rating, but that 500 or 1000 users reviewed and recommended it. That’s what you want to aim for.

Comments: Messy and flawed, but valuable — mathewingram.com/work:

In my new role as the Globe’s “communities editor” (you can find more details on that in this post), I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about comments — that is, reader comments on news stories, columns, blog posts, etc. The Globe and Mail was the first major newspaper in North America to allow comments on every news story when it launched the feature in 2005, and judging by the ever-increasing numbers of people who use them, they are hugely popular. On some major news stories, we can sometimes get as many as 500 comments.

Comments aren’t popular with everyone, however. Some readers (and even some Globe and Mail staffers, to be honest) complain that too often our comment threads are filled with what might charitably be called “noise” — everything from bad spelling and grammar all the way up to partisan political in-fighting, ad hominem attacks and all-around rude and boorish behaviour. Some say they don’t really care what most people think about a topic, and don’t see the value in having public comments on stories at all.

The big problem is that comments are currently unfiltered; ultimately it’s still part of the wild-wild-west of the internet, and so the people who get filtered out in other areas of the net still show up in comments. Ultimately, reputations seem to be taming the trolls and the flamers, but haven’t really migrated to comments yet. It’s a reason why I’ve been watching things like Disqus — but I keep wondering if distributed reputations for comments is really a positive. We’ll find out.

Think about a typical comment: a site may require some ID/registration, but in many cases, it’s faux-authentication, where you can more or less make it up as you go along. That kills accountability, so users can play whatever games they want without much worry about policing or future impact to their ability to comment; at best, a post gets deleted. Bans are, well, pretty trivial to circumvent if you’re motivated and don’t mouth-breathe.

So where this is all headed, and to some degree has to go, is reputation.

A while back I started a project (which I ended up abandoning unbuilt) that had a lot of the same feel as what Yelp now does. A big part of the design was how to create a reputation system that is:

1. Primarily or completely automated (or it doesn’t scale)

1. Limits users ability to “game” the ratings

1. Doesn’t turn the reputation system into something to be gamed

1. Actually helps someone decide whether or not to read (or trust) a piece of content

1. Non-intrusive

Easier said than done. A first approximation are the karma systems of places like Slashdot, but it fails for me on (2) and (3), and is really of limited utility for the key issue, which is (4). It’s more of a chainsaw to help a user hide the worst.

So back to the yelp-like example. You look up a restaurant. There are four reviews of the restaurant, two good, one so-so, one hate. there are a few comments on some of the reviews, mostly people disagreeing with various points.

How the hell is a reader supposed to figure out what this all means? That’s the crux of the comment problem; how to put a COMMENTER in context. First, there has to be a context — and that’s missing in commenting systems today. this kind of harps back to my belief that anonymity on the net is bad, but the net mixes up anonymity with pseudonymity – i.e., I don’t need to know who you are, but I sure need to know that you are you (but I digress; see, if you care, identity proxies, 2004, anonymity destroys transparency, 2007, A group is its own worst enemy, 2008, SezWho, 2007, (who seem to have disappeared behind Disqus), A history lesson from usenet, 2007. That’s a hell of a digression…)

The idea is the basis of reputation systems — that over time, the “real you” comes out, and other users can use that information to judge whether or not to value your contribution — or perhaps tell the system to not even show it to you.

In the Yelp-like system, here’s what I came up with as a first cut. If I’m a J Random User looking at those reviews, what information would be useful for the user to determine what reviews and comments are useful? Try this:

First review: five stars. Best Restaurant Ever. the submitter created his account 2 hours before posting the review, hasn’t posted any content since. Easy guess: it’s the owner, or his spouse, astroturfing. Even if it’s not, you ought to assume it is.

Second Review: 1.5 stars. hate the service. rant. rave. grump. Again, account created an hour before posting, never used since. Obviously someone with an axe to grind. or maybe the waitress broke up with him.

Third Review: 3.5 stars. good food, uneven service, dirty fork. yada. The poster’s been a member for seven months, posted 25 items, average rating 3.8.

Fourth Review: 4 stars. Great food, good service, owner came out and talked. Went back and enjoyed it. Member for 3 months, posted 5 items, average rating 2.8.

Suddenly, with just a few bits of information, things clear up significantly. Astroturfing issues become visible quickly if you simply make it easy to see how active a member is in the larger community — if they’re a hit-and-run commenter, you can bet there’s some ulterior motive (positive or negative). This actually creates a fairly complex web of interactions, it encourages users to contribute to the site to build a reputation, for instance, and that’s good for the community.

Once users have been on the site for a while, they’ll get rated by other users. In my system, I used the rating of the user doing the rating to weight how strongly to count a rating, something I haven’t seen sites try yet, but that is a way to discount the idiots and encourage the strong contributors in a quiet but important way — the less others think of what you say, the less power it’ll have to affect other users on the site. In theory, below a certain number we’d likely just throw your opinion on the trash. Quietly, of course.

Quiet is a big aspect of this; to me, the second you start publishing these “reputation” numbers, it becomes a game of trying to “win” the reputation game. So simply don’t go there. I planned on sticking to the more general five star rating as part of the user profile, but no comparative public stats. Instead, users would be honored with “senior member” type labels based on longevity, activity and rating. Make up half a dozen titles, and allow them to be earned over time as a way to reward your best members. Just make sure that how you determine “best member” actually causes them to contribute and improve the community”. Bad metrics kill.

the final piece, of course, is making this information easy for someone browsing the site to find and use; something like showing the posting account name and rating (chuqui: 1.7 stars), and popping up more detailed info if they mouse over it (3 postings, member for 8 months, this was their 2nd posting and they were a member for a month at the time, last activity a month ago….); for users who want them, you could create slashdot-like filters that would automatically exclude, say, material posted by people with ratings < some number, or with fewer than N postings, or whatever.

The system is still open to gaming — but it’s a lot harder to hide from it, I think. Never got around to implementing it, but maybe one of these days. I’m still mulling bringing it back to life, but not i the original form.

Similar things could be done on a news site, or pretty much any community site. It’s a combination of

• making people create an identity

• tracking that identity’s actions

• allowing other identities to rank those actions

• allowing access to those rankings in rational ways

The combination of an identity, ranking/tracking and weighting things to discourage the one-post wonders can really put a dent into the sock puppets and trolls. sock puppets get marginalized by not building a track record to base a reputation on, trolls get marginalized because, well, as soon as you start building a reputation on a troll, it becomes self-evident. And if all of this encourages more contributions to a site and more community activity as a way to build that reputation, so that people will want to hear what you say, how is that bad for the community?

And done right, it’d be 99% self-policing and automated. I think.

This view isn’t confined to Globe readers, by any means: in a column in the National Post, author George Jonas said that the Web is like “an elegant restaurant with garbage on the menu,” and that “a huge blackboard on which anyone can write anything doesn’t mean much for those with nothing to say, i.e., most people.” Similar feelings have been expressed by various writers about comments on blogs, and some prominent Web writers have turned theirs off completely. Even the director of BBC News said in a recent speech that while she values comments, they are the work of a “vocal minority” and therefore shouldn’t carry too much weight.

It’s not an elegant restaurant with garbage on the menu; it’s a large, vibrant city where you aren’t even noticing that you’ve self-selected into that elegant restaurant. but otherwise, they’re all right. And the way to fix that?

Build accountability into the system. How do you do that? well, what’s worked so far online are reputation systems. Simply requiring a name and email isn’t going to be enough. And yet, that’s basically what we do today in comments. We focus on identifying someone, but forget that it doesn’t matter if we know WHO you are — it matters that we know whether you are worth reading. A simple identify doesn’t do that. A reputation does.

So the future for “fixing” comments has to be a reputation system of some sort. It’s not (just) about better identification systems, or about giving up. This is an area we’ve just started to explore and innovate.

Clay Shirky is at it again. Go read the whole thing, it’s awesome.

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy:

n the Seventies — this is a pattern that’s shown up on the network over and over again — in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn’t own computers, institutions owned computers.

Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. “Communitree” — the name just says “California in the Seventies.” And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.

And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren’t before.

And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren’t terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn’t defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”

But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn’t have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.

Now you could ask whether or not the founders’ inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn’t stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn’t matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There’s no way to completely separate them.

What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they’d set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn’t shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow

This is a classic pattern that we re-invent on the internet time and time again:

First, we think of whatever we build as something new and revolutionary (which it may well be), and therefore we can ignore past history because it’s not relevant to what we’re doing (which is invariably wrong).

Second, we start using it with a small set of people who generally have a common set of goals and ambitions, so “can’t we all just get along” works. For a while.

Then, if the technology is useful and proves out, the user base expands. the more it expands, the more it gets used by people who’s goals and ambitions are different from the original core group, and the conflicts of “what’s appropriate” starts. How well a system scales is more dependent on how well it allows for these divergent uses than how well the technology can handle the load. the more these conflicts stand in the faces of the users, the more likely the system will fall over and die.

This is really the ultimate failing of mailing lists, because the only way to scale mailing lists across these conflicts of “what this list is about” is to create more mailing lists for each diverging sub-population, and once you split the group up enough ways into enough shards, it loses all context among shards and it’s no longer a community (if it ever way). the only way a mailing list scales and survives is to get seriously anal about focussing content on the tightest definition of “acceptable” for the community and limiting side chat, which is a serious limiter of building community among the users.

At some point, the freakers and trolls move in, because there’s a section of society that gets off on destroy stuff other people build. If you don’t plan for this, when they move in, you die.

And yet, with decades of repeating these mistakes under our belts, we keep re-inventing systems that don’t deal with these problems up front. USENET’s lack of any authority system. non-verified SMTP. Wiki’s without authentication. Anonymous blog comments. non-validated trackbacks. The list goes on. We end up wasting huge numbers of resources trying to backpatch solutions instead of designing them in up front.

And we probably will continue to. sigh.

To me, it ends up to a few simple rules:

Anonymity bad. The net mixes these things up pretty badly. Anonymity implies there’s no way to know who you are, so there’s no way to police or manage your actions. Reality: for every person with a legitimate need for Anonymity, there’s 99 hackers, trolls and freakers taking advantage of the system to frack things up.

Pseudonymity good. No Anonymity doesn’t imply full disclosure. It’s not about knowing who you are, it’s about being able to know that YOU ARE YOU, so that if what you do is unacceptable, it can be policed. And yes, it means that some people (site admins) need to have some identifying info about you, but it can be implied identification, maybe as little as an email address or an IP address. Enough to give them a handle to enforce rules, although obviously, a really motivated troll will make any admin grumpy in any online system, if they want to. Fortunately, those types are fairly rare.

Always authenticate. Every village needs walls and gates, because if you don’t have them, when the vikings arrive up the river, they WILL burn the village. Even with walls and gates, they may still burn the village, but if you don’t do the basics, you dn’t have a chance. And they will arrive, someday. In my experience, usually at 2AM when you’re on deadline before vacation…

You need authority. Anarchy is a nice theory, but if you don’t set rules, when people push beyond what’s acceptable for the group, you have problems putting the genie back in the bottle. The middle of a crisis is a lousy time to try to build consensus on where to draw the lines.

You need police. Even if they spend 99.9% of the time in the donut shop drinking coffee (and in a good community, they will, because it self-polices well) that over .1% of the time, they can mean the difference between losing the community over a conflict.

But beware of self-appointed police. There will be people who will want to define things in terms of what they want instead of what the community at large wants, and will enforce their personal rules on the community if you let them. Don’t let them.

Enable the quiet voices. Most of the material created within a community is from a very small percentage of the user base. Look for ways to find those “quiet voices” that get crowded out of the mosh pit and enable them to contribute. It’s well worth it. Not everyone wants to be part of the loud and noisy group that loves the fight to be heard — and many times, those quieter voices will be your most interesting contributors, if you get them involved.

Beware the squeaky wheel. Just because there are some folks loudly complaining about something doesn’t mean they speak for the community in general. It’s key to understand these complaints in the larger context of the entire group. For me, a classic example of this is “reply-to” on mail lists. If you didn’t set it, there were always a couple of people loudly whining that it was the One True Way of setting up mailing lists, and they hated taking no for an answer. In reality, every time I did a survey of the ENTIRE mailing list population, I found — invariably — that the vast majority (80% or so) simply didn’t care either way, and of the ones that did, the “pro reply-to” group was the minority. I did this survey maybe a dozen times over the years, and got the same result on every list despite wildly divergent populations (from geek to sports fan to skiffy fan). the pro reply-to people hated this, because, of course, they knew better than the entire list population what was good for them….

I always saw the communities I built as community bars where people of similar interests congregate, in fact, I liked to promote the mailing lists not as “a place to talk about the San Jose Sharks” as much as “A place for Sharks fans to talk about stuff”. you’d never walk into a sports bar and get told to shut up if you tried to talk about something other than sports, for instance, but online, that’s fairly common — but in the side chatter is where the friendships and community building happen.

As an admin, don’t be afraid to let a group self-police. Probably the hardest lesson I ever learned. But having said that, the key to being a successful admin is knowing when to step in, and doing so decisively when necessary. Lots of admins (and the most active members of the mosh pits of the community) like to think they can just let the group figure it out; the reality there is that the loud and noisy and the trolls and freakers will drive out everyone else, and then all you have left are noisy freakers and trolls.

If you don’t police it, you’ll end up with that friendly community sports bar being turned into a biker bar by the bikers — at which time the people you built the thing for will all run off and find some other place to watch sports and chatter. Is that really what you wanted to run? a biker bar? Maybe, but not me.

Of course, the bikers always hated that… funny, that.