Content and Community Matters

Online community is an incredibly powerful idea. But is it still a good idea?

Photo by Stefen Tan on Unsplash

Maybe a computer should not come with a keyboard. The keyboard could be sent to you after you’ve owned the PC for a while . For safety, you start out with just the mouse. Just click on things that other people have created for a while. You’ll be allowed to contribute once you’ve shown that you can do so responsibly.

There was a time when “community” was continually on the lips of web people. We wanted to build a participatory web by turning content consumers into thoughtful creators.

Community is such a powerful idea, but I’m not sure it’s always a good idea, anymore.

There’s no question that the internet and social media have had a meaningful lasting impact. In a certain sense, they have improved human rights in an irreversible way.

The web has also grown truly toxic aspects. The same things that make it so powerful at changing the world for the better also make it dangerously susceptible to empowering bigotry and hate.

How did we get here?

New products come into the world saddled with staggering expectations for growth.

In order to achieve that, many rely on crowdsourcing of content creation. By this I mean that they publish content created by unknown people before it has been shown not to be terrible.

Reviews are a particularly interesting case study.

Remember Vindigo? I loved it so much. It was a nightlife app for PalmOS which had one exquisitely-written review of every NYC nightspot of significance. We read every review, and we went to every place. If Vindigo didn’t have it, we just didn’t go there. It was that good.

Today, I can contrast this experience to Yelp or Google Reviews. I’ve noticed that when I use Yelp, I involuntarily scan the page looking for the most extreme reviews.

I think our brains our wired this way and I think this has a lot to do with what’s happening to Twitter.

A counter-example is Wirecutter, one of the best products ever. The signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly high. I no longer even read Wirecutter reviews. I just blindly buy whatever they recommend. There’s some community participation, but for me it’s not integral to the experience of using the product.

Off my lawn, kid!

In the old days, the newspaper would got dropped off at the front door. If I didn’t like the news, I didn’t go out on the porch and throw the paper back at the kid who delivered it. I didn’t try to knock him off his bike to argue about it. That’s not what community means to me.

A lot of people seem to want to interact with the news this way. If you are one of those people, I suppose that’s ok. I prefer communities like this one that we are using together right now.

I see evidence that it’s possible to have communities that incentivize creation of more meaningful content. LinkedIn profiles have a bunch of aspects that seem relevant to this. Reddit has others. Where have you seen more?

The web is a marketplace for content. In any marketplace, quality is impacted by producer incentives. Moderation affects content quality at the end of that process.

I’m interested in incentives that influence creators earlier. Better incentives might attract better creators to the web. Maybe we can help it become healthier as it grows. Let’s hear your ideas.

I’m trying to use my keyboard more responsibly, and I hope you are as well.