When your community becomes toxic
by Francois GossieauxIt can happen in any community. A recent and very unsettling example is what happened to Kathy Sierra over at her great creating passionate users blog. In this case it escalated to extremes - with death threats, accusations of character assassination, and downright anarchy.
But these things can happen in any community - including your otherwise subdued customer community. That is why thinking through the social architecture on which you will build your community - i.e., role of anonymity, reputation mechanism, etc. - is more important that the technology infrastructure you put in place.
Could this have been avoided by not allowing anonymity? We do not allow it on this forum as we have had a bad experience with it in another forum - when a nefarious competitor of one of our clients started to trash our client’s sponsored online thought leadership conversation. Once we required a verifiable email address, the tone of the criticism changed and people no longer made unsubstantiated attacks.
What do you think? Seth obviously thinks that anonymity is bad for you.
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Francois
This is a difficult one. On the one hand you want simple anonymity so that the transient outer-edges of the blog/community feel free to contribute without the onerous process of registering, remembering passwords and so forth.
In public communities that generally suffices until you get burned. Sadly, too many people are happy to use their right to enjoy free speech without ether the responsibility, or to be more blunt, the good manners to use the right wisely. Rights and responsibilities are inseperable if society is to function.
Then, on the other hand, you need some sort of easy but robust registration to ensure that contributions are visibly traceable back to individual named members. Which with instant-email addresses and Internet cafe’s doesn’t of course mean that they are traceable back to individual people.
A significant number of blogs either moderate comments to keep out spam and offensive material (which on a privately operated blog in the public domain should not be confused with public free speech) or require rehistration before you can post.
Personally, I have no problem with registering at blogs/communities where I want to either listen or to contribute more actively. But I don’t want to remove the ability for outer-edges can contribute.
Graham Hill
Anonymity can be extremely problematic & that’s why most forums/blogs require some sort of information before posting. The secondary issue here is moderating effectively enough to drive out the trolls.
Free speech: A lot of people throw this around when there’s an issue. A private operator of a blog or forums, be it a private individual or company, does have the right to remove any material that they feel is inappropriate for the discussion.
Of course this is an age-old debate; we have been grappling with how to handle deviance of expression since being able to communicate at all.
Lawyers, social scientists (and philosophers) have all developed their own codes to deal with these outliers who explore the edges of our comfort zones.
In truth, the right reaction is probably a mixture of the tools we have available: we ought to litigate libel and hate speech; censure unseemly and divisive material; and fully ostracise those who delight in their malevolence.
But most importantly, it’s up to us to decide where our boundaries lie and, as in Kathy Sierra’s case, have the courage to collectively say, “That’s not okay.”
Free speech is one issue, but privacy is perhaps a more relevant one. How can we protect our personal privacy but at the same time be accountable when necessary?
Anonymity and real names are often presented as the alternatives. However, most people who are concerned with online identity recognize that stable pseudonymity is a far more powerful and effective way of establishing communities where people don’t have to forfeit their privacy and yet can remain accountable when matters such as this arise.
See OpenID and the Identity Gang at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society for prolonged and deep considerations of these issues.
The question of anonymous posting confounds marketers using community. Legal departments hate it. Users love it. There must be a balance between the needs of community teams and the wants of users. That balance is trust.
In order to establish that trust, communities must have experienced moderators who know how to not only reduce the friction but to also use personas to establish and reinforce the norms of the community. Depending upon the type of community, the transient outer-edge members are not useful nor particularly attentive to the community norms and end up disrupting more than contributing. Registration with a valid email address (at the very least)is required to make communities function better or to help them avoid becoming disfunctional. Moderators must engage their community members both publicly and privately to get the best results and to build trust. You must be able to tell members that in our community, this behavior is not tolerated. The ability to have confidential conversations is critical. Otherwise the world sees it and comments, taking the conversation down the proverbial drain.
Too many companies do not understand the role of personas online and how they can help the community to move forward…this is a crucial area for companies to build up their skill set if they want to avoid the all out flame wars and threats that some communities seem to generate….
BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com/ has an article about Kathy Sierra and the threats against her.
Dispatches from the Blog Battle Zone
Threats against a prominent female writer reflect the worst of online discourse. But is speech any more hateful on the Net than elsewhere?
by Catherine Holahan
Holahan points out that women “often bear the brunt of over-the-line comments.” And the comments are more likely to have a sexual undertone. This is not a new issue but I wonder if it is being exacerbated by the fact that there is a level of anonymity online allowing people to feel more comfortable with this despicable practice.