- Quality versus quantity and what is quality?
- Gated versus open?
- Free versus fee?
- Moderating styles, dictator style versus democratic style versus self policing?
Internet communities also affects our way of living and how we interact with each other, which in turn also affects our local press. In fact, lets start with that.
Local press
In today's society where a clear majority of the western world is connected to the internet and a large part of all industrialized nations around the world are too. Are we in fact having a larger social network online than we have in, what many call, "real life"?
The term Real Life by the is a pretty old term when it comes to communities associated with computers. I'm definitely not sure when it was first used but I read about it in Sherry Turkle's book Second Self when she were describing her meetings with the hacker community at MIT. I wrote a review of the book a while back on this blog.
Going back to the time we spend on the internet, a quick Google search will tell you that it is pretty hard to come by fresh numbers on how much time we on average spend online across the globe (here are a few links to places that try though 1 2 3). One thing we can be fairly sure about though is that we do spend more and more time online, something that the British newspaper the guardian wrote about not long ago when it was discovered that the Brits spend more time online than they do watching the TV. Which is something that again makes the question of what will happen to local news media when we no longer have an interest for local events because we dedicate our attention to events happening to our friends at other place on the globe, relevant.
Personally I have to say that I do not believe in the doomsday prophesies that claim that in the future we will have no need for leaving our homes and no need for ever meeting each other in person. I have both worked and lived in ways that has meant that I have not had much human "real life" contact for extended periods and let me just add to this prophecy that it is folly to believe in it since from my personal experience I have almost run screaming towards perfect strangers with open arms just because I have been desperate for some human contact. Of course I am only one person so I could definitely be wrong and there is nothing scientific in my "research". But the fact that we still have local press and the local press are also available online makes me think that there will always be a need for it. Also there are many people that move away from their birth place but in some way keep in contact with it and a lot of them do that by browsing local press news sites online or subscribe to a local newspaper.
So even though we might have more friends online in different communities than we do have in "real life" I still believe we will always have an interest for our immediate surroundings, especially considering I believe we will always have a need to meet real people face to face occasionally. Mostly because I believe that humankind is a social group animal that is in need of sometimes huddling together with other similar animals.
Quality
Taking the thought of the social animal with us we continue through the list I posted above. We will start off with the question of what quality really is, which is not really an easy question to answer. Of course one answer might be "what ever I think is good has high quality" but that just makes me ask "what about the things I think is good?". Then we have the fact that lots of people claim that 90% of the internet is filled with garbage and most of the last 10% has only of decent quality. One aspect of quality might be that something is "stamped" with a quality level that most people can agree with while an other aspect might be that it receives a quality level by each individual that comes into contact with what ever it is.
Using Google to define quality gives back a whole array of different results that both has to do with the argument I'm trying to make here and that also doesn't. For the sake of this discussion I will nail quality down to this "The level of quality is decided by the majority of people using and/or viewing a service and/or site on the internet." Thus high quality is what the majority think is high quality. As an example if we Google for "buy books" the first result (below the sponsored links) is for bookfinder.com which may mean (I say may since there are other ways to get a link to the top of a Google search) that when it comes to buying books online people in general think that bookfinder is a high quality store. However it might actually also mean that they think that bookfinder is the worst place on the internet to buy books from. My reasoning springs from the fact that Google will move a search result up their list of results depending on how many sites on the internet link to the place you search for. So apparently a lot of places has linked to bookfinder.com.
So what about quality versus quantity in communities? Well, what would you prefer. Would you prefer a lively place where lots of people contributed with loads and loads of stuff but all of it had low quality or would you prefer a community where the members contributed with less but with high quality things? Personally I have always believed in balance, to much of anything is bad but to little of anything is equally bad. I do not believe that Mona Lisa alone is enough to make the Louvre a high quality museum. But maybe I'm getting a little a head of myself? It might be easier to discuss quality versus quantity in communities if we first look at a few different general forms of communities.
Gated versus open?
A gated community is a community where you have to at least register to be allowed in. This makes most communities online today into gated communities but there are still some out there were you can contribute anonymously, this blog in it micro community way is one of the places where anybody can contribute without any restrictions. These places are what is called an open community. Open communities of all kinds are unfortunately places where there will eventually show up spam, if the community reaches a minimum level of regular visitors of course. So open communities are usually considered to be low quality communities both for the reason that there are spam but also because there is no trust what so ever between the members of the community since they can come and go as they want and not have to share anything about themselves with anybody.
On the other end we have communities like Jaiku, and as Gmail started out, as an example of invite only community. You have to know somebody somehow that already is a member and that way you can get an invite. In the case of Jaiku and Gmail the gated community is usually used to create a feeling of exclusiveness around the community. Only you and the people you know are members. There are of course other types of communities too, as an example the three links I have listed on the right on this very blog are links to gated communities. The first two you need to present yourself to the community and tell a bit about yourself and then after a type of trial period, usually used to let the community have a chance to get to know you, you get included as a full member in the community. The third one is even more gated than that, it consists of about a score of people and nobody is invited to the community unless the whole community agrees on it.
Looking at these two types of communities from a quality/quantity aspect I have to say that I prefer some sort of gate to weed out the poorest quality because again I believe in a balance. To little contribution and the community falls asleep and slowly disappears but to much contribution of low quality things also suffocates a community and while it might not slowly disappear it is more likely to eventually explode because of some sort of internet drama (a term I have to admit I thought were more well documented but here is a link to Encyclopedia Dramatica at least). An example of a type of gated community that tends to eventually explode is the the official forums that surrounds MMORPGs. Actually it has gone so far that the next big thing on the horizon that is produced by the company Mythic Entertainment will not have an official forum because the company do not want the hassle of taking care of it.
Free versus Fee
Most communities online today are free communities, actually that should be most forums I have been in contact with are free. There are a bunch of communities surrounding programming that you have to pay a fee to get full access to. Maybe because the contributors to those places work with programming for a living so why should they give away their trade secrets for free? My previous example of the communities around MMORPGs are example of communities that you usually have to be a subscriber to the game to have access to, so they are also examples of communities you have to pay to be a member of. But take communities like YouTube, Flickr, Blogger and so on, they are all free of charge.
Of course many communities that charge you a fee to become a member actually spends that money on the members. There is several PC game communities in the world that charge you a fee and then give you access to servers to play games on. Nobody in the community makes any money but the money is used to sustain the community online.
Again, when we look at free versus fee from a quality versus quantity angle some will claim that you will never have as high quality in a free community as you have in a community with a fee. Personally I do not believe this is true for the simple fact of this example from Flickr. It's totally free and I do not even have to register at Flickr to view it which makes at least that part of the Flickr community not only free but also fully open. In other words fee does not equal high quality but free definitely does not equal high quality either. Personally I don't believe quality and money has anything to do with each other. There are enough examples of people through out history that has made absolutely great things and received no or very little money for it as an example or made great things from very little money for that matter. Most of the great works or art are examples of painters that did not receive any recognition nor any large sums of money while they were alive yet they are today considered to be the best pieces of art through human history. Of course this has little to do with communities but I bring it up as an example of what people do even though they don't get paid for it.
Moderating styles
And so we have what I consider to be the key to creating a high quality community. If we consider spam, trolling and just regular abusive behaviour to be things that we consider be low quality but we do not mind if the community we belong to is both open and free. Then we have to have a way to control all the aspects of that community that lowers the quality of the community and that is where moderating comes into the picture. Personally I consider moderating to be a bit of an art, it is hard to be a good moderator and I can not claim to be a good one at least not on a forum.
But I'm getting ahead of myself again. To start off there are several styles of moderating and then there are also several ways of moderating, which to some extent connect back to the styles. As I said earlier we have the dictator style and the democratic style and then there is also the self policing method. The dictator style usually means that a person is responsible for one section of a community and in that section he/she rules with an iron hand along the lines of the rules that are setup for the community. As an example the community might have a rule that disallows the promotion of any other community within the community, so the dictator style moderator will then delete any such content and in some cases also relieve the member of his/her membership privileges. The other way is when we have a democratic style moderating where the members might have a chance to vote for if the member that broke the rules should be allowed to break the rules or keep his/her membership. An other common democratic way is for the membership to be select moderators through a democratic process and then those moderators becomes a kind of democratic dictators. That is they are elected democratically but they conduct their work as a judge, jury and executioner all in one.
Self policing is very common in large open and free communities like YouTube and the likes. Self policing is also usually only concerning the reporting process but when the person in charge of the community has received the report a dictator or democratic process takes over. Self policing usually means that there is an abuse link to click next to a post, picture, video or what ever kind of user contributed content it may be that will send a notice to the moderator of the community.
When we take moderating into the equation of quality versus quantity I personally see moderating as the filter that removes all the unwanted content from a community and thus lifts the level of quality of the community. Of course bad moderating might push the quality of a community in to the toilet. I see moderating as a bit of an art as it is important to find a good balance between the atmosphere in a community and the rules that are set up for the community. A too hard line approach will usually work in a contradictory way of what is intended with the moderating in the first case. A too lenient approach will end up watering down the rules and thus flood the community with unwanted or in other words, low quality content.
In Conclusion
What it all comes down to, in my opinion and highly layman approach to sociology and psychology, is that we humans are social beings and as social beings we are all individuals that go nuts when we are stuck together in groups but at the same time we can not live without belonging to a group. Communities are a sort of group and in any group there is social interaction and thus chance for us social beings to start acting in a way that does not make sense from either a logical nor rational perspective. If we keep that in mind when we approach the internet community as a phenomena and look for a community that we, as individuals, consider to be of high quality. Then we can also understand that the only way to find such a community is if we find a community that exists in a balance between the gated, open, free and fee parts but most importantly that is moderated in a way that we agree with. Because the bottom line is that we as humans can not communicate with each other in our social groups without rules and/or regulations because of the social animals that we are. Because without these restrictions we turn into animals only and ditch the social aspect of our form somewhere in the polite land of hello and welcome.
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