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Thoughts on building better (online) communities

Mar 26, 2018     Tags: philosophy    

This is an expansion of some of my personal notes on community building, written over the past few months. It’s written with online communities first in mind, but applies more generally to all sorts of communities (including IRL ones).

I think it’s salient in the current context, namely the Facebook data-sharing controversy and the larger debate regarding the role of individuals, platforms, companies, and states in regulating and manipulating online discourse.

First observation: Communities thrive when people choose to join them, not when they feel they need to join them. Obligation makes people disinterested in the community’s growth.

Second observation: Individuals have limited time and attention, and have broad discretion over how they use their time and attention.

Third observation: Individuals are also bad at actually using their discretionary powers, and many large, extant communities take advantage of this (unethically) to drive retention. As such, bad actors represent a conflict of interest: they lower the standard of discourse in the community, but keep people (and their ad dollars) coming¹.

Fourth observation: Automated rule enforcement² makes people angry and drives feelings of disenfranchisement (which leads to disinterest in the community’s growth). Current popular automatic moderation techniques are wholly insufficient, and ML-based enforcement is likely to make the problem worse, not better³.

Fifth observation: Unless developing an advertising/analytics empire is the goal, quantity is a secondary concern. Good communities grow (and shrink) organically.

So, what can we do to build a better online community?

Manage expectations

In my experience, communities do better when they state their expectations up front: what behavior is expected of members, what integration into the community normally looks like, and so forth. That means no implicit/tacit expectations or rules (even seemingly obvious ones). This is especially important for international communities — individuals from different cultures may have entirely different (but not malicious) notions of what it means to be a good member of the community, and having explicit guidelines can help with those differences.

For new members, that includes:

• Providing a mostly mandatory onboarding process⁴.
• Providing the community’s rules up front, and reiterating them whenever the new user might find them useful (e.g., during their first ten posts/comments/interactions).

And, more generally:

• Making rule enforcement/moderation actions (against individuals/groups) public.
• Making rule and policy changes public, along with justifications.
• Providing a history of rule and policy changes, including changes to privacy policies.

Require user investment

On a similar note (and following from the first observation), communities do better when users are invested in remaining in the community. Historically, this has been achieved through gamification: Reddit’s karma system, Facebook’s likes and notifications (e.g. being reminded of birthdays), and Twitter’s love/retweet account all serve to incentivize “positive” behavior⁵.

However, each of these gamifications has an adverse flipside — point systems can be manipulated by bad actors to artificially inflate the ranking of content (and, viciously, can lend credence to the same actors when score/rank is naively associated with authority and/or credibility).

Thus, we want a system that requires user investment (since invested users want to retain their presence and status) but without traditional (gameable) investment mechanisms.

Some ideas:

• User promotions: on a regular basis, communities can elect a group of members to an elevated status (maybe not as high as moderators, but marked to represent their value to the community). Elections could be done with ranked voting, and with guards against repeat nominations (e.g., a member may only be promoted twice in a row).
  • Pros: Gives users something to aspire for, and represents a repeatable investment (wanting to be promoted again). Relatively easy to implement.
  • Cons: Only works in smaller communities, where everybody knows (almost) everybody else. Doesn’t really accomplish anything unless there are more than a small handful of worthy people in each election. Possibly easy to manipulate (ballot stuffing), unless additional responsibility checks are enforced (see below).
• Demotion: the opposite of promotion, where the community can choose a group of members to diminish for bad behavior. The same mechanisms and protections as above could be applied.
  • Pros: Doesn’t result in a class/caste of pseudo-moderators like promotion does. Makes it easy for the community to nip problems in the bud without heavy-handed moderation.
  • Cons: Codifies witch-hunting. Probably violates the expectation that rules be explicit and consistently enforced (since members can perform a demotion without citing a rule). Possibly easy to manipulate (same as promotion).
• Showcasing: Members who fulfill some automated requirements (helping out new members, being thanked by other members, etc) get added to a lottery for a showcase, which allows them to promote something they find interesting. The lottery could be set up to guarantee a draw eventually (e.g., all members get their showcase within X months of eligibility).
  • Pros: Avoids many of the problems of promotion/demotion. Gives users an incentive to help each other. Doesn’t require user cooldown (i.e., doesn’t penalize the best users).
  • Cons: Easy to manipulate, unless additional guards are added to requirements (only the first X thanks count towards the lottery). Might cause content stagnation (users avoid their best content until they receive the showcase).
• Badging/identity-building: Members can group together into subcommunities, each of which can choose to enforce its own rules/invitation system. Members who belong to these subcommunities can choose to self-identify with them in a standardized way (profile badges, flairs, service awards).
  • Pros: Somewhat tested (Wikipedia (awards), Reddit (flairs), web forums (activity badges)). Avoids many of the problems of promotion/demotion.
  • Cons: Might cause cloisterization (formation of “elite” subcommunities whose only virtue is being difficult to get into). Doesn’t produce user investment unless badges are actually valued.

Many of these can be additionally gamified (“Jane has been promoted X times!,” “Mark has used the showcase X times!”), but none of them require gamification.

Enforce responsibility

Many of the ideas listed above for user investment are susceptible to manipulation: bad actors can flood the community with junk accounts and sockpuppets to control votes, farm showcases, and so forth.

One solution to this is member responsibility, wherein members may never act unilaterally — their actions have an immediate effect on others⁶.

Some ideas for responsibility systems:

• User vouching: Prospective members are sent a personalized (ideally cryptographic) invitation into the community by an extant member. Upon accepting the invitation, they are added as a child node to a larger tree of users. Other members can audit this tree. Protections can be added, like limiting the number of vouchers a user can send per X months and only enabling vouching after X months of activity or some other metric.
  • Pros: Transparent — makes it easy to find the sources of bad actors. Makes the responsibility relationship straightforward (new members can see that their inviter is on the hook for their behavior).
  • Cons: Makes it hard for total strangers to join the community (and thereby limits the community’s potential). Difficult to start (needs a large initial seed of users). Requires extant users to invest time in bringing new users in.
• Post vouching: Registration is open (no invitation is required), but public posts require a majority of a random group of users to vouch for its content and quality. Once posted, other members can audit the set of vouchers. Can be enabled randomly (10% of posts) or only for suspicious accounts, depending on the needs of the community.
  • Pros: Transparent — users build reputation over time for their vouching decisions. Produces a responsibility relationship between the poster and the voting majority.
  • Cons: Difficult to make responsive/fast unless (even if?) the vouching group is selected from online users. Requires extant users to invest time in what amounts to moderation. Assumes that small, randomly chosen subsets of the community will behave in a principled manner, which might be a bad assumption.

User vouching can also be extended/partially gamified: extant users could be allowed to vouch for other extant users (after meeting some requirements), turning the tree into a graph and allowing members to be recognized as especially responsible.

Encourage user autonomy and fluidity

Users like to have broad control over how they identify and present themselves, and many platforms already provide mechanisms for this — Twitter users regularly change their display name (usually a short motto or joke)⁷, and subreddits allow users to select flairs that identify them as a member of a (loose) subgroup.

Some ideas on improving user autonomy and fluidity:

• Account-identity decoupling: Users only create one account, and are allowed to create multiple identities under that account (by default, a single one is created). Users can make identities public or private, and can switch between them as they feel the situation warrants.

• Formalized throwaways: On sites like Reddit and Hacker News, users frequently create “throwaway” accounts to post things that they don’t want associated with their “main” accounts. This phenomenon could be formalized in a few different ways:

  • One large global throwaway⁸.
  • Randomized throwaway identities privately tied to the main account.
  • Randomized throwaways, but only tied through a request system (i.e., receiving a throwaway requires proving prior membership, but doesn’t keep you linked to your throwaway).

Balance subcommunity autonomy with cohesion

Subcommunities, formal or informal, are a natural part of community growth — users want to discuss niche interests without changing venues, and will abandon platforms that don’t accommodate them. That means empowering subcommunities to establish their own cultures and rules.

There’s a thin line to walk, though: subcommunities need to respect the culture and rules of the overarching community, and shouldn’t be allowed to dominate the community when they grow/become the largest fish in the tank⁹.

So, some ideas for giving balancing the interests of subcommunities with the community as a whole:

• Facilitate (limited) internal moderation: Allowing subcommunities to self-moderate and handle most common moderation tasks¹⁰ takes a burden off of site-wide moderators. The potential for abuse by internal moderators could be (partially) offset by responsibility and investment systems.

• Allow exclusivity: Subcommunities should be allowed to be closed to new members and/or private. That being said, the distinction between exclusivity and hostility to outsiders/new members is pernicious: subcommunities should not be allowed to form around (or degenerate into) gatekeeping.

• Develop the overarching community as a federation: Instead of the traditional moderator-user split (with users then creating subcommunities), users could form subcommunities that elect/nominate users to a site-wide moderation team. The same abuse concerns stated elsewhere (e.g., ballot stuffing) apply.

Concluding thoughts

First reflection: I’ve created and moderated several communities over the years, and have routinely failed to realize many (if not all) of the ideas I’ve suggested above. Some of that can be blamed on the medium of each community (IRL, IRC, forums, video game clans), but a lot of it comes down to personal failure — it’s genuinely hard to produce a good community.

Second reflection: A lot of the ideas listed above are difficult to scale up. That’s either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your perspective. Either way, they probably won’t help build the next advertising/analytics empire.