How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community. Interesting. I guess it's like buying a new car. Before you bought it, you hardly ever saw another one, but as soon as you drive off the lot, it seems like on every street corner there is another one just like yours. Along the same vein, I posted yesterday about the interconnected developer community and mentioned things like wild and wooly newsgroups and flaimbait, trolls and such, so I was bound to find some other information about such things. You can bet I'll be forwarding this article around internally...
I am an admin at Kuro5hin, so I can answer (in part) Cory's "I'm not sure why this is": because at some point the community was overrun with people who preferred that sort of dialogue to the calmer, more rational dialogue the site had at first.
ReplyDeleteOnce that happened, peer rating caused hostile and unpleasant posts and comments to be rated more highly than tranquil and friendly ones, and the entire scheme fell apart.
Which is to say: peer rating schemes are great for enforcing community standards, but they are terrible at preventing the standards of the community from shifting.
by the way, in my old marketing courses, "this car ..." was named "cognitive dissonance", which states that for important purchases, you want to be sure that you did'nt make the wrong decision, and therefore are much more sensitive to other people's choices. But I guess this has nothing to do with people poisoning newgroups.
ReplyDeleteActually, I bought a 2004 Lightning Yellow RX-8. It was a limited edition color and is no longer made - and there's only one other like it in town.
ReplyDeleteSo that analogy doesn't work for me :)
Randy,
ReplyDeleteThat's also why I bought a 2001 Mustang SVT Cobra Coupe... only 3,867 were made. Don't see too many of them on the road and when I do there's always "the wave" or "the nod" :-)
Felix,
ReplyDeleteCognitive Dissonance... interesting. I seem to remember reading or hearing about that phenomenon... Thanks for the little info..
Allen.