As promised, I'm going to talk about communities, which is a horribly multivalent word, but it's the best there is1. No, I'm not going to give you advice on how to manage a community or trott out Clay Shirky, I'm going to talk about what happens when someone fucks up.

First, let's set the stage. There are many websites whose visitors form a community - wanting to belong is part of human nature. There are discussions, flame wars, friendships2, disagreements. And then, out of the blue, someone in power does something that crosses the norms of the community, and all hell breaks loose. Why? Because most of the time, 90% of the user base is silent, so when the shit hits the fan there's suddenly 10 times the volume of comments. I'll give some examples of the reactions to poor community management.

Back in May, Digg started quietly pulling stories containing 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0, the AACS MKBv1 processing key, and banning the users that submitted them. Digg users are more technologically inclined than the average person, and have quite a dislike for DRM. So when the Digg blog said this was happening because they'd been served DMCA takedown notices, the Digg users revolted, posting the story continuously. Digg management responds by banning more people, and eventually taking down the submission page. Eight hours later, the whole site is taken down for maintenance and Digg capitulates to this civil disobedience.

Flickr recently expanded into several countries and languages. However, as part of this they decided that due to a German law, German users were not allowed to see pictures labeled "moderate" and "restricted", as they did not have measures in place to stop minors seeing them. This change again occurred with no warning, causing users to moan loudly and leave, and note that Flickr was misreading the law, as the German definition of inappropriate for minors covers less than US laws, and Flickr only needed to take down photos when notified, instead of pre-emptively filtering them. After a few days Flickr started talking and after a week relented to allow "moderate" pictures to be shown, but still banned "restricted" images.

Eve Online has been subject to continued allegations that CCP employees have been giving favors to one of the main factions. Some allegations have proved true, others turned out to be disinformation. CCP already had an internal affairs division that performed regular audits, but there were still accusations of bias. So CCP will hold elections for an oversight committee which will audit CCP's operations.

The LiveJournal section of this post exploded so I've moved it to a separate page. The short version is that SixApart has consistently acted against the LiveJournal community in an arbitrary and unjust fashion, while the community has been unable to effect much change - most often after a scandal LiveJournal claims nothing has or needs to be changed: "We are making no major policy changes, we have made no changes to the TOS, and we do not anticipate making any changes in the future." Even open letters with suggestions and asking for clarifications are being ignored for days.

Facebook had over 700,000 people protest over its introduction of News Feeds which broadcast everyone's activities to the world. At first Facebook claimed everything was ok because "The privacy rules haven't changed" but then three days later backed down and added more privacy controls.

So what can we learn from the above cases if you're the owner of a site that has a community? Firstly, don't govern by stealth, banning people on the sly and leaving no traces, because people will notice and complain. Inform your community of the rule changes you're making ahead of time, and make it clear who is affected by them. This is now backed up by law, due to the recent Ninth Circuit3 decision requiring notification when terms of service change. Secondly, communicate. As Hugh McLeod says, corporate blogging reduces the difference in conversations between the company and the community, so the company understands what the community is on about, and is therefore less likely to act stupidly and piss them off. And when you do fuck up, communicate quickly to say you know you've fucked up, explain why you fucked up, and are working on fixing things. Otherwise people will continue to rant and lose faith in the site owners. Thirdly, be consistent. Don't ban some people and not others. In particular, don't let yourself appear to be doing the bidding of a third party with an agenda. List your rules, make a decision about edge cases, and stick to them impartially. Ideally you should involve your community in making these rules, but sometimes that isn't possible.

Or, to steal the conclusion of Governing Transformative Technological Innovation: Who's in Charge? which I chanced upon in the Co-op Bookshop while buying Accelerando (synopsis: Singularity, Stephenson-style), governance must be Accountable, Responsible and Transparent. In particular, I applaud CCP for their creation of a player-based audit committee. The second most recent LiveJournal fuckup prompted this response proposing

that any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base.

It remains to be seen if more businesses will open themselves up to scrutiny by their community.

However, there's a bigger issue at play here - in the case of sites devoted entirely to community, there exists terrible lock-in. Or, to quote Blizzard:

Advantages that accrue to highly successful MMORPGs... high consumer switching costs - the player has to leave their characters and friends!

This removes a lot of the incentive for the owners to behave responsibly, since they'd have to fuck up incredibly badly to force people to leave. LiveJournal seems to have managed this, but the diaspora is spread across a variety of sites based on the LiveJournal code, causing pain for those whose friends are now on different sites. It's somewhat ironic that the "network effects" these sites have accrue by making everyone use the same database instead of being spread out over the network. It's just another level of N=1 thinking, and leads to pleas like "You can have any social network you want, as long as you all pick the same one."

But everyone using the same system is never going to happen, no matter how much Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Yahoo desire it. Which is why the Online Desktop excites me so much, in particular the work towards an open service definition and applications that fulfill it. It's proposing a counter-narrative to the silos of the online behemoths. This is what Eben's talking about. Or as Luis put it:

We are standing at the brink of a huge change in how people store the data that makes up the emotional content of their lives. We must start coming to grips with the policy implications of that ... and I’m excited to think that free and open services could be part of that.

So what I am going to do about it? As a natural sysadmin I have the confidence to host online services myself, and UCC provides the perfect place to host them and provide them for my friends as well. But that doesn't help with integrating with the rest of the world. So for my fourth year project I hope to work on integrating identity across online services. I'll go into more detail once my proposal is submitted.

One closing thought - IRC can act as a social network system, or at the very least helps create an identity story. I talk with most of my friends via IRC, it's a nice unmediated public. And yet IRC is used mostly by the technically inclined, in part because it's most rewarding if you stay connected all the time, which requires technical assets (knowing how to use screen, or having a computer on all the time). IRC is pretty much a non-starter from a mobile device, unlike IM, SMS or any of the web-base social network systems.

1.Calling the people who frequent a website users is too passive, participants is too vague, contributors is too active. Lacking a more specific term I'll use community for the rest of the post.

2. Friend, now there's a multi-valent word that causes issues.

3 Which includes California, Oregon and Washington, hence Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, SixApart and many other dotcoms.