This arti­cle fol­lows a sim­i­lar train of thought as my last post, Qual­i­fy­ing “Web Karma”: It shouldn’t be a game. I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with com­mu­ni­ties and I’ve noticed, as per­haps many oth­ers have, that com­mu­ni­ties often gain momen­tum over time to a point where they are expand­ing at an almost unholy rate. You can clearly see this kind of growth in Digg, Red­dit, and even (to a lim­ited extent, cur­rently) Hacker News, if you’ve watched them over time.

(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.

Posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 6:44 pm, under thoughts.

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