Designing selfmoderating online communities

1
Designing self-moderating online communities

• Julita Vassileva
• Computer Science Department
• University of Saskatchewan

2
Outline

• Why do we need self-moderating online
  communities?
• Existing self-organizing communities
• How do successful communities work?
• Case study the Comtella community
• Motivating participation
• Self-regulating the quality of contributions

3
Online communities

• Formerly newsgroups, forums or message
  boards, blogs
• Now virtual / online communities, social
  software, even social computing
• People send messages, questions, answers.
• Anyone is free to sent anything
• Everyone can see the all the postings.

4
(No Transcript)
5
(No Transcript)
6
Too much stuff

• And sometimes bad stuff
• How to find what you want?
• need to organize the postings
• a moderator of the newsgroup
• worked well with small groups
• It is important to design software and the rules
  of the game for self-organization by the
  participants.
• For example, Orkut allows joining only by
  invitation from insider.
• A classical example Slashdot.org

7
(No Transcript)
8
Self-organizing online communities

• Slashdot.org
• A Linux-geek newsgroup/discussion forum
• Users can ask questions and give answers to
  others questions
• Users can rate the answers and the questions
• Users who ask good questions or give good answers
  earn karma
• Ratings by users with high karma have more weight
• Every user has only a limited amount of ratings
  to give (depends on the karma-level)
• Users with high-karma have the privilege to be a
  moderator for some time
• Result excellent forum, good quality postings
  are visible, low quality postings are not easy to
  find. Everyone has a chance to build up his/her
  karma. A form of democracy, people-ruled.
  Maintenance costs close to zero
  (self-organizing).

9
The EPS Game (from CMU)Louis von Ahn, Laura
Dabbishhttp//www-2.cs.cmu.edu/biglou/ESP.pdf

• Goal to label web images
• Why? Try to Google image with a car
  http//www.google.com
• Two players (random) are shown the same image
• Each player has to guess how the other player
  will label the image (have 2.5 minutes per image)
• If their guesses are correct, both score and move
  to next image
• Players can not communicate (otherwise they can
  cheat)

10
Player 1 guesses Handbag Player 1 guesses
Purse Success! Agreement on Purse
Player 2 guesses Purse Player 2 guesses
Brown Player 2 guesses Bag Success! Agreement on
Purse
After agreeing on 15 images big bonus of points
for both players.
Example from http//www-2.cs.cmu.edu/biglou/ESP.p
df
11
Features of successful online communities

• Need to serve some real users needs
• Need to have a critical number of users
  (critical mass)
• Need to have a constant stream of new information
• Examples KaZaA, Blogs, Orkut

12
How to achieve this

• Need to cultivate in the user the feeling of
  being a member of the community
• Contribution to the community should be rewarded
• With reputation (ranking)
• With visibility
• With more rights / privileges
• With cash
• Harmful behaviours (cheating) should be punished
• The success of every social system depends on
  having the right motivators and the right
  inhibitors to stimulate and regulate individual
  behaviour!

13
Case study Comtella a P2P system for sharing
papers
14
First deployment in CS DepartmentFall of 2003

• Main problems
• Ensuring participation - unable reach critical
  mass
• Motivating users to contribute new papers
• If there is no one on-line, you cant find
  anything
• If no one contributes new papers, very soon
  everyone will have the same papers, so no point
  in using the system

15
New deployment 4th year Ethics class, 35 students

• Users earn status by participating. They need
  to
• bring new resources in the system
• comment on the resources they have seen
• keep online
• log on the system frequently
• download resources (share them with others)

16
(No Transcript)
17
Status
Gold
10
60
Silver

• High-status users are rewarded with
• Visibility in the Community (visualization)
• Better search options
• Low-status users (free riders) are punished
• Visibility in the Community (Hall of shame)
• Not so comfortable search options.

Bronze
30
18
Community visualization
Hall of Fame
Hall of Shame
19
Results
BUT, also some poor contributions - not really
relevant links - links similar to other
contributions ? clearly, many students were
trying to submit as much as possible to get a
higher status (a form of cheating)
20
How to deal with the decrease in quality of
contributions?

• Measure quality
• Track how many people download a contribution and
  how they rate it (like Impact factor)
• Reward users for rating contributions
• Track cheaters
• Compute a reputation of a user as a contributor
  and as a rater
• Reward quality good users become moderators
• Give status points
• Give more rates to give away and higher weight of
  these weights (like Slashdot)
• Punish poor quality
• Lower status, lower weight of ratings, less
  ratings to give
• Less visible contributions