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Designing self-moderating online communities

Designing self-moderating online communities. Julita Vassileva Computer Science Department University of Saskatchewan. Outline. Why do we need self-moderating online communities? Existing self-organizing communities How do successful communities work? Case study: the Comtella community

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Designing self-moderating online communities

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  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. 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

  5. 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).

  6. 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)

  7. 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.pdf

  8. 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

  9. 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!

  10. Case study: Comtella – a P2P system for sharing papers

  11. 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 can’t find anything • If no one contributes new papers, very soon everyone will have the same papers, so no point in using the system

  12. 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)

  13. Status 10% Gold 60% • 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. Silver 30% Bronze

  14. Sorting Criteria Bar -> List of all the available interest areas : Community visualization Hall of Fame Hall of Shame

  15. The total number of the original contributions The average number of the original contributions per participant Table 1. The number of comments and the total number of the shared links. Week 1 2 3 4 5 6 & 7 9 * 10 The number of Comments 31 220 141 75 292 251 395 797 The number of links shared 30 186 122 72 251 240 324 472 * Week 9 in this table is the first week when the visualization was introduced. 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)

  16. 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

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