Hawaiʻi's Technology Community
Reputation Systems and Civil Online Discourse
One of the most interesting discussions at today's NewsMorphosis event centered around the difficultly of keeping online discussions productive or, at the very least, civil. Sarah Lacy described her frustration with the abusive comments that often show up on tech blogs such as TechCrunch and, given the volume of responses, the difficultly in managing them. John Temple and David Shapiro expressed similar frustration with abusive comments on their online newspaper articles. In fact, Temple said Peer News articles won't have traditional commenting functionality and hinted at some sort of new system for supporting true "civic square" style discussion . I assume Peer News is implementing a reputation system, similar to what Pierre did with eBay for establishing trust in online auctions.
One of the things I really like about local grassroots sites like TechHui and Kanu Hawaii is that our discussions tend to be very civil. Obviously its much easier for us because we have smaller communities and many of us know each other in Real World 1.0. For larger communities civil discussion is still possible but it requires the ability to identify participants (i.e. associate posts with actual people), active community monitoring and, ideally, a reliable reputation management system. Just removing the ability to do anonymous posts makes a huge difference. People tend to show a lot more aloha if they know their real name is attached and their neighbor or mother might be listening. The next step is knowing a person's general reputation (i.e. are they a random nutter) and, if relevant, their areas of expertise. If Peer News has developed a simple system for handling this, then they really have something special. As always, the devil will be in the details. It must be simple, unobtrusive and reliable.
During a brief discussion after the panels, Sarah Lacy suggested the solution may be to only allow comments via Facebook connect. I like this idea. People tend to be nicer when they know all their friends are listening, and I have no doubt this would greatly reduce abusive comments, but highly motivated jerks could always create faux Facebook accounts to use for trolling and mud slinging purposes.
Google's search is a reputation system of sorts. As we all know, their intuitive leap was realizing that no content analyzing algorithm could really determine the relevance or importance of a web page. Only people know what pages are relevant, and they indicate this by linking to them. Important sites tend to link to other important sites, so link "votes" need to be weighted. The web badly needs an equally sophisticated reputation system for people.
Ikayzo - Design • Build • Localize | Web • Desktop • Mobile
One of the things I really like about local grassroots sites like TechHui and Kanu Hawaii is that our discussions tend to be very civil. Obviously its much easier for us because we have smaller communities and many of us know each other in Real World 1.0. For larger communities civil discussion is still possible but it requires the ability to identify participants (i.e. associate posts with actual people), active community monitoring and, ideally, a reliable reputation management system. Just removing the ability to do anonymous posts makes a huge difference. People tend to show a lot more aloha if they know their real name is attached and their neighbor or mother might be listening. The next step is knowing a person's general reputation (i.e. are they a random nutter) and, if relevant, their areas of expertise. If Peer News has developed a simple system for handling this, then they really have something special. As always, the devil will be in the details. It must be simple, unobtrusive and reliable.
During a brief discussion after the panels, Sarah Lacy suggested the solution may be to only allow comments via Facebook connect. I like this idea. People tend to be nicer when they know all their friends are listening, and I have no doubt this would greatly reduce abusive comments, but highly motivated jerks could always create faux Facebook accounts to use for trolling and mud slinging purposes.
Google's search is a reputation system of sorts. As we all know, their intuitive leap was realizing that no content analyzing algorithm could really determine the relevance or importance of a web page. Only people know what pages are relevant, and they indicate this by linking to them. Important sites tend to link to other important sites, so link "votes" need to be weighted. The web badly needs an equally sophisticated reputation system for people.
Ikayzo - Design • Build • Localize | Web • Desktop • Mobile
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Comment
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Comment by Daniel Leuck on March 19, 2010 at 11:20am
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Hi Barry & Alex - John mentioned that he has "a number of professional journalists" involved, so it sounds like they are going to do a combination of professional investigative journalism and fostering a citizen journalist community. I only know what I heard in the conference and conversations that occurred after John's keynote, so this is largely speculation.
After the conference I asked John if they've developed a new reputation system. He smiled and politely indicated that they weren't ready to talk about that aspect of the business.
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Comment by Alex Salkever on March 19, 2010 at 11:05am
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It sounds interesting but I am unclear on the business model. If they are going to rely on the community for expertise and require the community to pay, then how will they get the necessary expertise they are relying on from the community? I am sure they have a plan but what has enabled community-driven enterprise news operations in the past is openness and reductions in openness has a corresponding reduction in potential to access expertise. I am looking forward to seeing it develop. The FB suggestions makes sense as it should cut down on 99% of troll posts by making it just hard enough.
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Comment by Barry Weinman on March 19, 2010 at 10:14am
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Great presentation testerday and Sarah's post was well done. The business model will still be a challenge. Maybe they will have multiple levels of membership so people can pick and choose how they want to participate and pay by that participation level. My VC Fund, Allegis Capital invested in Women.com in 1994 when they had 8,000 subscribers on Prodigy and CompuServe. Subscribers paid in proportion to their participation. The vision---at the time only 17% of on line people were women---was to disintermediate newspapers and be relevent to women. Too bad the traditional media didn't take that threat seriously.
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Comment by Mika Leuck on March 19, 2010 at 9:41am
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Sarah just posted on TC about the event.
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Those are excellent points John. We could have used you in the discussion yesterday!
I'm excited about Peer News. Everyone involved has a record of success and they are clearly passionate about the mission.
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Comment by John on March 18, 2010 at 8:32pm
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While I agree that reputation systems help, I believe there is another important element of the problem; Specifically, the quality, integrity and interest of the content producer. Lots of sites implement comments, some result in abuse/discord, others are productive and additive to the community's overall knowledge.
A few common characteristics exist for sites where abuse/discord are common:
- The site tries to sensationalize a topic to generate more page views
- The site regularly attacks people or organizations setting a tone of abuse
- The author(s) lack competency in the area that they are covering
- The author(s) rarely or never respond in detail to comments
- The site is perceived as deeply biased or controlled by sponsors or advertisers
The more readers perceive that the author is intelligent, cares about the topic and the commenter's opinions, the more likely the discussion is to be rich, useful and cordial.
What I was most impressed by Peer News announcement was the decision to adopt a membership model. Core to the abuse/discord issue is that this is a natural outcome of the advertising model (the marginal revenue of moderating and posting thoughtful, intelligent discourse is usually far lower than its high cost). I think the membership model will financially incent Peer News to provide higher quality information and discourse with members, naturally reducing the motivation to attack/abuse.
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You are right Truman - mug shots absolutely help. Video helps even more. You don't see nearly as many Seesmic threads spin out of control.
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Comment by Truman Leung on March 18, 2010 at 6:17pm
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Great blog post, Dan. Commenting by Facebook or Twitter accounts will be a good first start. I wonder if applying a badge reputation system like Stack Overflow would fit a news website? Perhaps just up/down voting would suffice. One other topic, which I think was discussed on TechHui a long time ago, is that people are more civil when their avatar is their actual mugshot.
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