How to avoid the Internet to harm your user community

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(Original from the Next Web, Tiger sniff translation)

Online platforms and offline communities have similar patterns of operation. The breeding of illegal and destructive acts can lead to mass abandonment. The same is true for online communities and markets, especially in the process of community growth.

Because of the network effect, the increase of online community size makes it more valuable. However, if the system can not manage the user behavior, the breeding of destructive behavior will make the network effect play the opposite role. Once this happens, a rapidly evolving user network will begin to churn out users (such as Chatroulette) and the atmosphere of online discussions will become absurd (such as YouTube reviews), and decisions made online may even result in unpleasant results on the line ( For example, Airbnb homeowner was ransacked.

Startups that win a lot of attention and are growing fast will also face failure, especially if they can't design a set of control systems to avoid, regulate, and correct this behavior.

Understanding user-driven (user-initiated) behavior

Each online user-driven behavior is designed with two objects:

Producer (The Producer): A subset of users produce content or information on a platform based on which to interact and communicate with other users. The authors on the writing platform and the sellers on the website of the electric dealer are the producers in their respective systems.

Seed: Refers to the basic unit of content or message, produced by the producer. On the video site, it refers to the production of video. On the short term website, it refers to the product on the list. In short, this platform is the basic unit of production and consumption.

Measures to avoid the occurrence of sprays and irregularities in the system may be imposed on the producer side or on the seed side, which we will see in the example below.

Institutional design framework for avoiding irregularities

Borrow a metaphor from the medical profession (for a community, destructive behavior is like an organ disease), an online platform design system can have three ways:

Prevention

The easiest way is to break the source. Here are two ways:

Producers: Online platforms should be selected before producers are allowed to use the system. Some sites have employees who are specifically responsible for which users can access their systems. There is a writing community that restricts the author's identity, but opens the door to the reader. The problem with this approach is that when you say no to some people, you lose a certain amount of attraction.

Second, the seed: online platform will not meet the requirements of the seed content elimination. Application stores require that certain requirements be met before app shelves. Question and answer community Quora require users to have a certain level of system user credit before asking questions before allowing them to interact with other users. Similar to the disadvantages of the previous approach, this approach also loses some of the attractiveness of the user and leads to lower user activity.

Supervision

A better way to encourage high quality contributions is to open access and production permissions to all, but just to limit visibility (visibility) and the probability of Discovery (discoverability).

First, the producer: based on the historical activities of a producer, the design of a credibility system to determine the degree of reliability. For example, the hackers news and Reddit algorithms for these platforms favor highly reputable users. These prestigious users also have higher privileges, as do Wikipedia editors and super users.

Second, the seed: voting and rating functions to achieve social selection, can be selected after the content generation. Some platforms prefer the credit rating of the producer, as well as the grading of the seed content, the rating results. Some sites only focus on the quality score of the seed content.

In general, the regulatory strategy needs to be designed based on the size of the user, capable of serving thousands of users and serving tens of millions of users.

Correct

Finally, online platforms need to correct the problem of producers and their content seeds. The need to provide users with a channel to report violations and the ability to judge the pattern of violations from an algorithm is critical to building a broad system.

I. Producers: dating sites often need to block out users who are behaving inappropriately. In some cases, users are not completely shielded from the platform, but are only barred from interacting with one another, such as LinkedIn, which allows users to pull black users to contact them. Facebook allows users to block some of their friends ' content (status updates) in their news feeds.

Second, the seed: Usually, the user may not be removed, but in order to reduce the system noise, the seed content will be deleted. YouTube removes pornography/copyright content, and Quora also folds "joke answers", which the community addresses in this way, as an example of removing system noise. In many cases, the act of removing feedback from the seed content may eventually lead to the removal of the producer from the system.

Avoiding online irregularities, especially the presence of the sprays, is critical to a developing start-up. While many online platforms are grappling with the "chicken or Egg first" issue in the early stages of entrepreneurship, companies that do not need to address these problems may lose the benefits they accumulate if there is a threat of a squirt in their user community.

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