People vs Peep Hole

Can a corporately controlled community be free?

On-line community is difficult to acheive - not only because it's hard to build a community, but because it's hard to find a safe place to do so.  Newscorp, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and AOL have all tried their hand in on-line communities.  AOL was an on-line community before there was such a thing.  Compuserve was my first on-line community (I know, it should have been the WELL - but as a high school student in Nebraska, the long distance charges combined with the learning curve and 300 baud just wouldn't let me.) 

What we've seen over and over again is on-line community destroyed in order to save it.  Friendster, MySpace, MP3.com and many other communities have introduced restrictions on activity when it saw people "abusing" the system.  Here are the big issues:

Friendster: - Fauxsters - Friendster users started making silly fake accounts to amuse themselves.  This became a central aspect of community (a community indicator) on Friendster.  It was something to do.  The cost to Friendster of this was minimal.  Some of them were crude or lewd.  Some were  slanderous. Most were just silly and fun.  When an issue came up with a few of them, Friendster killed them all off.

MySpace: MySpace's main issues have centered around perceived issues with child exploitation issues.  Due to some press about potential issues, MySpace started to examine and delete certain accounts that were either lying fallow or included content that didn't conform to site policy.

MP3.com:  MP3.com had a gaming issue.  People would get paid by MP3.com for the number of listeners of their music.  Users would get together listening clubs that would listen to each others songs over and over.  This was declared "gaming" and was strictly forbidden.  Members caught gaming the system were kicked off MP3.com.

All of these reactions are understandable for a business.  As a business you want to make sure there is no negative press and that no one is stealing service.  In the case of Friendster, the number of fake users was enough to cause people to doubt whether the service had nearly the membership it claimed.  For MP3.com, people were outright profiting by getting money for listens that were not based on the actual popularity of the track - but by an agreement born of collusion.

But what we were seeing was actually a corporate interest with one goal and a membership with another.  Since the corporate interest controlled the domain of the social interaction, they had the trump card.  They could dismiss errant users with impugnity  ... Or so they thought.

In Friendster, the fun was taken out of the application and people bailed.  In MySpace, the freedom of expression was taken and people are bailing.  For MP3.com, listening clubs quickly turned into artist collectives - killing them killed the freedom to assemble and associate, so by the time C|NET bought and killed MP3.com it was already floating on its back.

There are many options here.  Laurel Papworth recommends user rankings which is great, but needs thoughtful implementation.  Issues like the MP3.com listening clubs or Digg's issues with friends digging their friends articles can lead to negative systemic gaming where popularity or relevance is improperly measured.

However, digg groups and listening clubs are valid expressions of a community.  Or at least valid indicators of a community.

Nancy White, I call upon you to comment on this.  What happens when a community indicator is good for the internal community but harmful to external society?

Photo: Clara Natoli

Comments

[Nancy White]

It takes me forever, but finally a calm space on a Saturday to reply. My first instinct is "no duh" - of course we see a gap between corporate community indicators and community-community indicators. The rapid rise and fall of corporate sponsored communities in the late 90's is a classic example. People will be coopted for a while, but not forever and when they leave, they leave fast.

This second blossoming of online community there are different patterns and some of the community sponsors are actually looking at how they can evaluate from both their perspectives and the community's. It is sort of the "triple bottom line" approach that we see in some corporations where they measure not only the cash and asset bottom line, but the impact (hopefully positive) they have on their community or environment.

The success of eBay, Bookcrossing and many others is not just that they pay attention to their communities, but that they DO pay attention as a basic business process. They listen.

So it seems to me that one critical element of a community indicator that is shared by both the sponsor and the community is the ability to listen and show that one is listening. In both directions.

Make any sense?

[Nancy White]

OK, I just realized I did not answer the question. My mind was going in a different direction.

"What happens when a community indicator is good for the internal community but harmful to external society?"

Well I suspect that online it is just as it is offline. Some things that happen include:

* the community grows stronger in it's defence against the outside world (nothing unites like a common enemy)

* the community is shut down (look at the noise around MySpace, even though there are no stories about the good things that come out of the network. By the way, I see MySpace as a network of small communities, not a community unto itself for the most part, except when they unite against the world!)

* people in the communit get sick of the attention from the external world and the community falls apart (I suspect most communities thrive better when not under the microscope)

* the values clash generates some real dialog and issues are clarified. I think this is my utopian dreaming, but I do believe it is possible. For example, Global Voices seeks to augment the voices of bloggers in countries not well covered by mainstream media. Part of this mission actually puts some bloggers at risk. So when a blogger is attacked by his or her government for participation in GV, the GV community then stimulates action to protect and support the blogger. So the community indicator within the community is freedom of expression and being heard. In places where freedom of expression is not a community value, there is the clash.

Again, I'm writing fast. i hope this makes sense.