Derek Powazek @Webstock 09

The wisdom of communities

“All successful virtual communities nearly always resolve to real life.” (Derek @ Webstock 09)

Crowd sourced material – how realistic is it? It works if you don’t ask the crowd to do too much.

• Small simple tasks
• Design for selfishness

Writing a whole news story is too much, but picking who to interview is a task they can easily complete.

Many people did small edits. This “aggregates selfish behaviour” to make something better for everyone. Derek cites Google and Flickr as examples. Whilst we aren’t really intentionally helping other users by tagging our content and proritising search results, globally that’s the result.

Aggregating the results?

Derek says its a balance between creating a leaderboard game where you get people who will do anything to get to the top and genuine votes or participation. Monitoring behaviour that’s not explicit can still monitor the trends, but won’t skew the results.

Derek also recommends seperating any social “voting process” from the results. “Just like every web poll you’ve ever seen.”

“Popularity does not have to rule”

Maybe the “controversial stuff” is more important. “Show me the stuff that’s not important, or the stuff who’s popularity has declined.”

“Human editors still matter”

Derek says…

“Human editors still matter” … “you need a blend of human and machine intelligence”…

…phew! I still have a job then!

Dealing with “trolls”

They are out there and they do damage. “They thrive on our gullibility”.

“When someone is try to get your goat, ask yourself if you have green hair. If you don’t respond they go away.”

Identifying them can take some effort. Believe it or not some people will create multiple accounts on a community site, and then have conversations with themselves. Derek also suggests that deleting accounts is not the answer. Maybe a timeout is more appropriate. Its an online version of…

“Dude, are you having a bad day?”

Derek reminds us there are two different types of people online. People who see the web as generally a good place full of friendly people. The other is out to find to bad or the down right ugly.

Nice talk Derek!