Comments on: A System for Maintaining an Online Community http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/2009/05/11/spreading-the-honey/ A blog by Joan Morris DiMicco discussing social software and group collaboration Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:11:03 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Joan DiMicco http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/2009/05/11/spreading-the-honey/comment-page-1/#comment-43787 Joan DiMicco Tue, 12 May 2009 17:43:50 +0000 http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/?p=285#comment-43787 @Jake, thanks for reading the paper! In the previous work we did with rewarding points we had a lot of gaming of the system and then a lot of annoyed/angry users. So that is interesting to hear that Flickr has had gaming of something that seems hard to game, and that has also led to some annoyance. For whatever reason, hopefully because of how we designed it, we haven't had gaming with the honey bees and, most importantly, we haven't had a group of upset or angry users complaining about the system. It has been running for a year with mostly no trouble. @Jake, thanks for reading the paper! In the previous work we did with rewarding points we had a lot of gaming of the system and then a lot of annoyed/angry users. So that is interesting to hear that Flickr has had gaming of something that seems hard to game, and that has also led to some annoyance. For whatever reason, hopefully because of how we designed it, we haven’t had gaming with the honey bees and, most importantly, we haven’t had a group of upset or angry users complaining about the system. It has been running for a year with mostly no trouble.

]]> By: Joan DiMicco http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/2009/05/11/spreading-the-honey/comment-page-1/#comment-43786 Joan DiMicco Tue, 12 May 2009 17:41:51 +0000 http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/?p=285#comment-43786 @James Morris Hi Dad, the system you're describing is a bit like what slashdot has where a rotating group of people is given the power to rate the comments on posts. Those comments than get pushed up in the list. Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick wrote a paper about it <a href="http://www.msu.edu/~lampecli/papers/chi2004.htm" rel="nofollow">Lampe, C. and Resnick, P., Slash(dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. in Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), (Vienna, Austria, 2004), ACM Press, 543-550.</a> @James Morris
Hi Dad, the system you’re describing is a bit like what slashdot has where a rotating group of people is given the power to rate the comments on posts. Those comments than get pushed up in the list. Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick wrote a paper about it Lampe, C. and Resnick, P., Slash(dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. in Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), (Vienna, Austria, 2004), ACM Press, 543-550.

]]> By: Jake http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/2009/05/11/spreading-the-honey/comment-page-1/#comment-43785 Jake Tue, 12 May 2009 05:41:15 +0000 http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/?p=285#comment-43785 Neat paper, I just read it. Before I got through the first page, I thought about Flickr's Explore page, featuring what they call the most "interesting" photos of the day, http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/2009/05/11/ When the service was introduced years ago, it was a revelation. And while it was a completely automated "secret" algorithm, before long the rankings were being gamed by users far & wide (search for silly sheep to see one fine example). Most users tolerated this, as most of the photos seemed to be deserving if a little narrow (lots of self-portraits featuring attractive women, sunsets, HDR, heavily processed photos). Lots more little history there. But recently, it seems one group of users has perfected the gaming of the system, whereby up to 85% of the day's 20 featured photos ( http://www.flickr.com/explore/ ) came from one small group of self-selected users. This angers a few and annoys many, as being on Explore is a nice way to make new contacts and interact with new people. Others were angry as they tried really hard to get onto Explore and couldn't. But most were bored, and just stopped paying attention to Explore. Except, Flickr highlights Explore photos everywhere, such as on the mobile web app and many Google widgets. So now the photos that Flickr goes out of their way to highlight each day are repetitive and from a narrow group of users. Which, in the long run, seems to be counter to Flickr's best interests. I don't really have a point, but thought you might be interested in this "problem. Here's a long discussion about the recent, organized gaming of the system, http://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157612926060266/ . Neat paper, I just read it. Before I got through the first page, I thought about Flickr’s Explore page, featuring what they call the most “interesting” photos of the day, http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/2009/05/11/

When the service was introduced years ago, it was a revelation. And while it was a completely automated “secret” algorithm, before long the rankings were being gamed by users far & wide (search for silly sheep to see one fine example). Most users tolerated this, as most of the photos seemed to be deserving if a little narrow (lots of self-portraits featuring attractive women, sunsets, HDR, heavily processed photos). Lots more little history there.

But recently, it seems one group of users has perfected the gaming of the system, whereby up to 85% of the day’s 20 featured photos ( http://www.flickr.com/explore/ ) came from one small group of self-selected users. This angers a few and annoys many, as being on Explore is a nice way to make new contacts and interact with new people. Others were angry as they tried really hard to get onto Explore and couldn’t. But most were bored, and just stopped paying attention to Explore. Except, Flickr highlights Explore photos everywhere, such as on the mobile web app and many Google widgets. So now the photos that Flickr goes out of their way to highlight each day are repetitive and from a narrow group of users. Which, in the long run, seems to be counter to Flickr’s best interests.

I don’t really have a point, but thought you might be interested in this “problem. Here’s a long discussion about the recent, organized gaming of the system, http://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157612926060266/ .

]]> By: James Morris http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/2009/05/11/spreading-the-honey/comment-page-1/#comment-43784 James Morris Tue, 12 May 2009 05:25:06 +0000 http://www.joandimicco.com/blog/?p=285#comment-43784 I would love to see an experiment in which the thumb-up, thumb-down buttons that readers push are used to rate not just the articles but also *earlier* raters. This information could be used to (1) find raters I usually agree with and (2) somehow reward early raters that many people agree with. My fantasy is that good former newspaper editors can support themselves by reading and rating stuff they are expert on as it emerges. Good former editors-in-chief can support themselves by reading and rating the stuff the good former editors endorsed, etc. I would love to see an experiment in which the thumb-up, thumb-down buttons that readers push are used to rate not just the articles but also *earlier* raters. This information could be used to (1) find raters I usually agree with and (2) somehow reward early raters that many people agree with. My fantasy is that good former newspaper editors can support themselves by reading and rating stuff they are expert on as it emerges. Good former editors-in-chief can support themselves by reading and rating the stuff the good former editors endorsed, etc.

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