(Please ignore the actual numbers and look at the general trend of the graph.)

Watching the communities grow, the low barrier to entry (sign up and go!) is both a very positive factor and a very negative one. It is a blessing in that there is no effort required to post comments, submit stories, and get active in the community — lots of participation is what drives these sites.

At some point, though, I think that this low entry barrier becomes a bad thing. Communities, it seems, have a critical mass at which point they attract:

• Groupthink: People being easily influenced by others in the community, or joining the community simply because it agrees with their worldview.
• Spammers: This is the case with any form of communication that has a wide reach.
• Low-quality commentary and posts: Submissions made solely for the purpose of getting attention, pushing their own views, or posting for personal (monetary) gain.

I have not done any sort of reasearch on this, so I can not say definitively when things like this happen in a community, nor why, but it seems to ring true for the three aforementioned examples.

I’ve been considering a solution for slowing the growth of a community, thereby possibly delaying or eliminating–at least–the three problems above. This solution involves charging users a small one-time payment to join the site, not unlike a membership fee. The major difference here, though, is that the membership fee would grow over time as the community grows.

Now, I’m not talking about fees on the order of hundreds of dollars (unless appropriate for the community), but in the range of $0 — 20.

Essentially, the idea is that the initial investment of joining the site will be low ($0 or whereabouts), and so it will grow fairly quickly. As it grows, the fee increases accordingly, and the investment to join becomes greater. By having this cost system in place, people will put more consideration into joining the community, and will only commit to doing so if they see the value in participating.

Many of you are probably saying at this point: money isn’t the solution to all problems!

You’re right, it isn’t. This is merely a very prototypical concept that I am proposing, and I would love to see someone develop it further. Money is a solution to some problems, or at least patches them to an extent (which may or may not be acceptable).

One clear issue with my solution is that it might make the “old user” status too prominent, and not allow the community to develop in a positive way. I’m not entirely sure how thatcould be solved in this solution’s context.

Just as a point of comparison, I’d like to point out a couple other opinions and suggestions on the matter of keeping a community from going “bad.” Below are quotes from a recent Hacker News posting:

My only thought is to think about limiting submission rights to a certain/higher karma threshold. – timf

An interesting idea would be to make a submission cost 1 Karma point. So people would only submit a story if they think it’s reasonable that someone might upvote it. – cx01

Both of these suggestions have their advantages (removing the necessity of processing money, implementing a rewards system of sorts) and disadvantages (ability to game the system, not based on a system with limited resources). I’m enticed to think that a combination of a number of these ideas would result in at least one decent solution.

Though not always called “karma” (Everything2 has a multi-faceted system involving “reps” and “C!s,” and Slashdot calls it a “score”), the concepts all serve the same purpose: karma has come to be a way of quantifying the contributions of a person to a particular website.

In theory, your karma grows as you make insightful, interesting, or useful comments – anything that contributes to a conversation in a constructive, even if disagreed with. Ideally, that is a great idea, and ideally, any mis-scored commentary would be self-correcting thanks to the generally large number of people reading these comments.

Sadly, in real life, this doesn’t pan out. People, no matter whom, no matter what community, are susceptible to group think. Even in places such as Hacker News, where the average user seems to be fairly well-spoken, group think can – and does – occur.

Worse yet, there is a much more serious issue: that of everyone using karma appropriately. It seems to be that some people use karma as a “like” or “dislike” system. If someone disagrees with a comment, often times they give it negative karma (a.k.a. “vote it down,” or whatever else you would like to call it). There has been much discussion on this topic on social websites such as Hacker News or Reddit:

• I believe Karma should be awarded for posts that generate comments. Conversation starters should be as valuable to our community as a funny pic that’s upmoded.
• Dear HN, I’m worried about us

All this discussion is what spurred me to write this article in the first place. I’ve seen much debate, and even some attempts at improvements:

What I’m surprised to have not yet seen is what I am about to suggest: stop quantifying karma!

I know how great it is to have a “karma score” and watch it go up (or down), but people view those little arrows with so many varied meanings that often, they’re as good as useless. Why not simply provide a system of karma that qualifies karma? Give user’s and even comment’s karma an evaluative rating (perhaps, relative to everyone else): very poor, poor, neutral, decent, good, very good, excellent.

What good does this do, you say? I think (though I have not done any formal studies) that it could potentially eliminate at least part of the issue: the ambiguity. The karma ratings now have meaning to them, and people will think twice before rating a comment (and consequently a user) “poor.”

Now, that isn’t to say that on the backend, there couldn’t be a numeric score. Sure, implement it with a quantitative, integer-based system on the backend, but just don’t expose it to the user. It turns karma into too much of a game, and less of a way to determine the quality of a user’s contributions.

The closest system I’ve seen to this is Slashdot’s system:

While the scores do not accumulate (which does seem advantageous in its own right), the scores themselves are categorized. They are on a limited scale from 1–5 (so even if you make the wittiest comment, you can still only score a maximum of “5, Funny”), and scores are qualified.

As well, karma on Slashdot is a limited resource. Users periodically receive a limited number of points they can use to rate comments. What does this mean? It means that users are much more careful about using their points. Sure, some users use them spitefully and mis-rate comments, but since the scale is limited to only 5 numbers, it is possible for it to self-correct. With an infinite karma system (meaning your score can keep going in either direction), there is a tipping point where a comment is unlikely to recover from false ratings. Consequently, since points are limited, it becomes less likely that you will have many users wasting their points rating down a comment spitefully (a reduction in group think).

To point out a particularly ineffective system, there is Digg. Here, karma is only localized to the various posts – much like Slashdot, but with a very detrimental exception: no qualification to the ratings.

Sadly, this seems to be the worst of all worlds. Since the comment karma is on an infinite scale, and it isn’t cumulative for a user in any way, users have no reason to think twice about posting a comment. Posted a troll-esque comment and got a bad score? No big deal, since it doesn’t reflect on you. From the other side: don’t agree with a comment? Just vote it down! I believe this is partially the reason that the discussion quality on digg is quite low – no checks are in place, and the site has long since reached critical mass.

So this is my argument to all of those social websites out there using comment and user karma systems: don’t let it be a game. Qualify, don’t quantify. You might even go so far as to make comment karma a limited resource. It might just work out for the better.

¹ Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1).

I live (right now) in a dormitory suite setting: a “common room,” with bedrooms accessible through a hallway off of the common room. When I first moved into this suite with my suitemates, the inevitable topic comes up: “How do you want to arrange the room?” As I’m sure you can guess, everyone has a different opinion and taste when it comes to interior design.

Personally, I’m a minimalist. Organize things smartly, increase the amount of empty space, but without making the space seem unwelcoming – zen-like, if you will. Other people, though, tend toward the cluttered side of arrangements. This is when something really became prominent to me — spaces need to—not just should—be “intentional” as opposed to “accidental.” The way in which a room is arranged is important to the image it portrays, as well as the way in which people interact with the room; that much is very obvious to most everyone. What isn’t necessarily as obvious is that the space, especially smaller spaces (as my common room is), need to be arranged purposefully, where parts of the room are set out for specific reasons.

Having the furniture arranged in a certain way just “because it looks good,” without considering purpose or function, is what happened initially; I call this an “accidental living space.” It may have been assembled with some internal reasoning, but without enough actual consideration to the way in which the spaces and the room will be used.

Eventually, I rearranged the room myself (you can only trip over the sofa so many times before it becomes a problem), with consideration about how each part of the room will be used, and what purpose each part of the room serves. This is an “intentional living space.” It has been designed with function and elegance, as opposed to simply elegance.

I wish this would be applied to web design more often (and we are beginning to see this, slowly), as often, designs are created with less consideration about how the space on the page functions and more about how it looks. That simply doesn’t work.

It all started when I received a couple of those little promotional “block pads” – you know, the thick square ones that aren’t sticky – from my father. I’m sure everyone has one or two of those lying around in a drawer or box somewhere, still wrapped its plastic. Well, it’s time to take it out, unwrap it, and put it to use.

For every individual topic, every project, and every group of ideas, rip off a new sheet from the pad and write it down. Give the note a header that represents the topic to which it pertains. Headers are optional, but helps significantly if the note will be around a while; for very temporary notes (a list or note that will be completed or tossed in the next 24–48 hours), you can likely skip the header. Now, write down whatever it is you need to keep track of: a to-do list for a project, a couple thoughts that need to not be forgotten. Always, always use a list format. It doesn’t have to be neat, and it can be downright messy, but using bullet points is important as it makes the information more quickly “scannable.”

These note “squares” are also great for getting quick sketches down to get a general idea of a design or layout. You don’t need a whole sheet of paper for something like that; these notes will help you stay in the right direction, while allowing for some creative flexibility since they won’t be extremely detailed.

As your set of notes grows, keep them organized. I do this by laying them out in a grid format on my desk, with the most important closest to me, and the less important further away. This allows me to find the information I’m looking for at a glance. Never pile active notes! You can, of course, pile old notes into an “archive” that sits elsewhere, but your active notes should always be visible.

As you complete items on your various todo lists, cross them off. Once a list is done, throw it out. If the note is a set of thoughts, but they are no longer pertinent, archive it…you never know when you might need to reference those notes again, or use them as inspiration later.

What’s great about this technique, besides keeping your thoughts and lists very well organized and accessible, is that it is downright convenient. Need to take a note with you? Stick it in your pocket. Need to take 20 notes with you? Still fits in your pocket. You can’t do that with full-sized sheets of paper as easily, and sticky notes lose their stickiness when you attempt that. On top of that, you can save a lot of paper, since you’re only using small sheets, and an old note can be reused by just flipping it over.

There are only one or two real downsides to this method. Firstly, it tends to take up a bunch of desk space. This hasn’t been a problem for me, as the only things I use my desk for are the notes and my computer; if you need to actually work on your desk as well as manage these notes, I’d suggest splitting your desk space in half and limiting the notes to one section.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the notes tend to move around easily, which is both an advantage and disadvantage. On the negative side, if you accidentally knock your notes, they’ll get a little messy; this is easily fixed with 20 seconds of reorganization. The positive, which far outweighs the negative, is that the notes can be reprioritized in an instant. If one note becomes less important than another, you just slide them around and swap places.

I hope some of you will give this a try. It’s really increased my organization and helped me keep my thoughts straight, and it might just do that for you too.

The “this” I am speaking of is, of course, why being your own client sucks. It’s a horrible, detestable, deplorable task that is an unfortunate fact of life. Perhaps I am just an awful perfectionist, or just have masochistic design tendencies, but the path I rode to get to my current design was a long, painful, ten month ride.

At first, the project I gave to myself seemed easy: just redesign my site, as I was tired of my old design and it needed some definite freshening up. Seems simple enough, right? Just come up with a new design, code it, and get it online – no big deal.

…But oh how wrong I was. Frankly, I should have known better, as I’ve gone through this trouble of designing for myself before, but sadly I forgot and “history repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.” (—Anonymous)

So without the slightest second thought about the difficulty of the task in front of me, I began on the first design:

This is from October 2007. I believe I stopped working on this design all of 2 minutes after I began it. As you can probably guess, I dove headlong into working on this one, without any planning. Bad idea! I know better than that, but obviously had a lapse of judgement or I had hit my head on something hard that day. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which…

There isn’t much to this design, so I don’t think there is a whole lot I need to explain here. It sucks, and I dropped it like a hot potato right after (barely) beginning it.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Am I going to have to look at 30 half-assed designs?” Well, the answer is no; I’m going to keep this to highlights only, since I doubt anyone wants to see 40 very, very minor variations on a single design.

After getting a faulty start, I went back to the drawing board. A month of sketches, thoughts, and concepts went onto little note squares on my desk (more on this in another article).

You should know now (if you don’t already), I love minimalism. Less is more, and all that. Problem is, I have a habit of overthinking things, hence I tend to overwork a lot of my design.

In early December, after some thought and sketching, I came up with the next little gem:

A basic design, three vertical sections (including the header), with a two-column split on the content sections. I spent a decent amount of time tweaking this design, playing with this color, that color, this font, that font, etc. I just didn’t work for me, after playing with it so much. It was too stiff, felt too compact, and the color scheme wasn’t doing a whole lot for me.

Yes, I could have changed the color, and I did…many times. Many, many times. When I start to completely change the color scheme of one of my designs, I know I’m done and have to dump it; at that point, I’ve completely lost whatever vision I had for that design.

So I gave it some more thought, and came up with this next design later that same December. Quite a bit of a different style, but I wanted to play more with type than anything.

Now, this design is better than my last one; at least, in my opinion (and that’s what matters during this process). Unfortunately, though, it just didn’t feeel very cohesive. The elements didn’t mesh very well…they each felt like their own little islands that just happened to be floating close to each other.

I dumped this design. Again.

What did I get out of this design? That oversized, serif type looks really nice when set well and combined with smaller type (both serif and sans-serif). Unfortunately, I didn’t get this when I dumped the design, so I began moving in the wrong direction.

Personally, I happen to like the concept of these designs. There was movement to them: the lightbulb was intended to slowly bounce up and down like a balloon; the angled squares would be links to various projects, and when clicked they would glide up and fade off (then loading in the bottom rectangle/section). My major hangup with these designs? I felt it was going to be too difficult to implement nicely cross-browser without using Flash (which I do not know), and the moving lightbulb was somewhat distracting. I actually got as far as implementing the header of the first design, and my feelings were very much confirmed – it works great in Firefox, Safari, Opera, but not so great in (can you guess?) Internet Explorer 6 & 7. While I could, in theory, just have accepted the ugly Internet Explorer fate and completed this design, I’m just too stubborn and too much of a perfectionist to let it slide. I am keeping it as an interesting concept though.

After this design, there was a long dry period where I simply came up with sketches, ideas, and concepts when I could, but no real design was done. Then in April of this year, I thought I (finally) had come up with something good:

Sadly, I was mistaken. At the time, I liked this design; even mocked up some of the other pages (work, blog, contact). And therein lay the problem: I couldn’t come up with a good way to design the Work page. The most important page, and I couldn’t make it work! After trying to simplify and reduce, it still wouldn’t work right.

I dumped it as yet another failed design.

By now, I was frustrated with my inability to come up with a design I could really appreciate, and blased through five more failures.

Two in May:

Two in June (what was I thinking? Yuck.):

I just want to point something out here: there is a noticable trend from beginning to end. I began with less focus on type, and more on graphics, and as I moved along, type became a more prominent aspect of my designs. This is important, as it allowed me to come to the realization that I was over-working and over-thinking my designs. By focusing on type, it forces me to take a step back and think: Is this image necessary? Is there a better way I can place this element?

Unfortunately, my last design before my “epiphany” was a bit of a regression:

It’s funny, though, with this design, I really thought I had come up with my final design. That is, until I realized how god-awfully packed in everything was. And how dark it was. And how the eye didn’t flow naturally inside the page. And…well, you get the idea. I hated it.

And then I realized: why not just work with type? Let the graphics assist the type, not the other way around. That’s why people visit a site, anyway, right? For the content? And while my site functions as a portfolio, which is mainly graphics-based, the content is equally as important to the visitor.

And then, starting from scratch, I came up with this design. It was it…well, as good as it was going to get, considering I hate everything I do.

In the end, what should you take away from this? Designing for yourself sucks. It is a long and arduous process that involves lots of time and many different concepts (if you’re a designer, you should have known this before). This fact is also true of designing for anyone, clients or otherwise.

But you also come away with many concepts than can be used in later projects. While I definitely will not implement any part of my old designs directly into another project, I now have twelve concepts that I’ve learned from. I’ve looked at what did and didn’t work in each, and now can use what did work in future projects.

So I’m my own worst nightmare when it comes to designing for myself, but at least I woke up with a new set of views and a final design.

Fairly soon I’ll be writing up a somewhat detailed look over my design process and why I’m undoubtedly my own worst customer. It will detail the many other designs I created, pondered, and subsequently scrapped, as well as some other fun tidbits.

As for right now – I hope you enjoy the new design.