In my last post, I described the ways in which Yelp and Facebook are different animals, despite Yelp’s social network-like qualities. Yelp feels like a community in which its members share the goal of writing good reviews for Yelp; Facebook contains communities, none of which particularly feel any affinity for doing anything for Facebook.
You would think, then, that Facebook isn’t a community simply because its members aren’t invested in a shared mission. But when you look at MySpace, a site that is also a social network and nothing else, the question of what makes a community a community becomes more complicated.
MySpace, first off, is not exactly a community either. Its members aren’t invested in MySpace any more than Facebook members are invested in Facebook. But it does feel very different from Facebook in a couple of obvious ways.
MySpace feels crazier, looser, and less professional, and thus also more personal and individualistic.
One of the most obvious and immediate visual differences between MySpace and Facebook is the way users design their profile pages. MySpace allows its users to customize their pages, which means MySpace is a riot of colors, animated gifs, and backgrounds. There’s a basic template with neat boxes, similar to what Ashton Kutcher has here:

But there are many more users who have so much animation and graphics, sometimes even their names are obscured.

The aesthetic reminds me a bit of my teenage bedroom, how much I was interested in making sure that the the posters I hung, art and music and what have you, expressed exactly who I was. A lot has already been said about the racial and socioeconomic differences between MySpace and Facebook, so I won’t go into them here, but it’s worth noting that this flexible aesthetic, as danah boyd points out, doesn’t only attract kids who are poor or don’t plan to go to college, but “the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”
Facebook, on the other hand, has uniform blue and white boxes. You might choose to upload a quirky or weird profile photo, or even make up a profile like Peowtie del Toro, but your aesthetic choices are severely limited.
Facebook provides a more corporate, professional framework on which people are neatly displayed, like a telephone book or directory (aka, a college facebook).

MySpace’s design gets made fun of all the time, at least by the kind of people who tend to write for tech blogs, but it’s a draw for people who want to be able to individualize their profiles. Facebook’s design, in contrast, doesn’t promote a particular aesthetic. There are people who are drawn to Facebook’s clean professional look and repelled by MySpace’s free-for-all.
But the reason people praise Facebook’s design is because they value the way it’s a clean slate, bland and able to absorb almost anything and anyone.
Facebook is growing faster than MySpace, and although that may be in part due to its design, but it’s less because Facebook’s design is so compelling and more because it’s inoffensive.
MySpace feels like one big party.

The free-for-all of MySpace, compared to the clean, blank slate of Facebook results in very different atmospheres on both sites. MySpace feels like one big party. There are definitely subgroups within MySpace, but there is an openness to the site that is completely missing from Facebook.
From the moment you go to MySpace, you see content that’s available to you. With a few clicks, you can find videos, band pages with music, and individual profiles that have been made publicly accessible to anyone, even those who are not registered members of MySpace. Although there are MySpace users who don’t make their profiles public, you can browse the profiles of those who are public, and there’s a sense that any of these strangers might connect with each other. (It helps that so many of the photos are aggressively flirty.) Everyone’s at the same party.

Facebook certainly isn’t private, and as its many new developments indicate, the company is aggressively trying to make more of its users’ information public. (More on that to come.)
But Facebook isn’t one big open party. It’s a convention hall where you’re supposed to find your group and join whichever cocktail party, networking event, or shindig is being hosted by your group.

Your first view of Facebook is a virtual wall. The first page consists mainly of a blue and white graphic with abstract images of people connected all over the world. The login for members is the only visibly interactive part of the page, other than the sign up for new members. There isn’t even a search box for existing members. The impression is that until you log in or sign up, you don’t really have access to the site.
There’s definitely no “Browse” function. Even after you log in, you can only search for specific people. At best, you can browse your friends’ friends, but even that is based on the connections you already have. Although people increasingly have Facebook friends they don’t actually know, the connections most people have to each other aren’t based on the fact that they’re both on Facebook. Rather, people friend each other because they went to the same school, work at the same place, or have friends in common. To some extent, I really don’t know the full range of people who are on Facebook because I can only see the people I’m friends with.
It’s not surprising MySpace is the place to hear new music.
Despite Facebook’s rapid growth, MySpace is still the most popular site for bands. Part of that has to do with the ease with which tracks can be uploaded, but it also has to with the one party atmosphere of MySpace. You’ve come to have a good time, you’re open to hearing new music, you might just end up talking to the drummer after a set.

For example, when you look at the MySpace page for The National, the band’s 63,798 friends write messages that are directed to the band like,
THANX SO MUCH FOR THE ADD!! LUV UR MUZIK!! DIGGIN UR ENTIRE PLAYLIST!!
MUCH RESPECT!! MAD LUV!!
Angela Marie 😉
HAVE A BEAUTIFUL DAY AND ALWAYZ REMEMBER TO ROCK IT WITH A SMILE LIKE ME, UR KICK ASS FRIEND MISS A TO THE G!! 😉

Whereas on Facebook, the people who “like” The National don’t seem to necessarily have a sense of personal connection to the band. Some of them write direct appeals, like please come play in my town, but there are just as many comments that are directed to other fans as to the band itself, like,
just purchased tickets for the seattle show in sept!! can not wait to see them live..what an amazing follow-up to Boxer.”
Although The National is a relatively famous band, anyone can upload music on MySpace and hope to make it big, the way Lily Allen did. Many of the comments on The National page are from people in their own bands asking them to check out their music. They don’t have to already know each other to comment or become friends, whereas the social expectations are very different on Facebook.
Even as Facebook tries to make more of its users’ information public, it will never feel like MySpace.
Recently, Facebook rolled out several changes that either encourage or push its users to make more of their information public, depending on how you feel about Facebook.
These new developments — Personalization, Community Pages, and Like buttons across the Internet — are changing the way Facebook users’ information is available. Yet these changes are still in line with the “many communities” model, rather than the one-big tent feel of MySpace, with some interesting consequences for individual privacy.
More to come in a follow-up post…
Building a community — with karma and elite squads
Thursday, April 8th, 2010In high school psychology, I learned that rats that are rewarded for good behavior, i.e., given positive reinforcement, will repeat the good behavior. Humans aren’t really that different.
Several of the online communities I looked at need their members to do stuff to make their communities work. Some of them have decided to explicitly reward their members for good contributions. For example, Yelp is a site with reviews of local businesses. It knows that ratings alone aren’t very useful, as people have different standards, and it also knows one-line reviews claiming a restaurant is “great” or “terrible,” aren’t very informative either.
Yelp encourages detailed, specific reviews in several ways. Yelp invites members to rate each other’s reviews as “useful, funny or cool.” Members can send each other compliments, little encouraging notes about what good writers they are or how cool they are. Yelp removes reviews it deems to be rants or shills. (This has led to some controversy as business owners have claimed Yelp removes reviews to extort business owners to take out ads, to which Yelp has responded with some changes.) The biggest gold star, literally a “badge” that gets attached to the user’s profile, is reserved for Yelpers in the Yelp Elite Squad. To be eligible to become a member of the Elite Squad, a reviewer must post a real photo, use a real first name and last initial, and “be active Yelp evangelists and role models, on and off the site.” Members of the Elite Squad are invited to local events, and they become another community onto themselves.
As a result, reviews on Yelp are considerably more detailed than reviews on comparable sites, and there are more of them. For Abraco, a coffee shop in the East Village, Yelp lists 241 reviews. Menupages, which doesn’t do any of the things Yelp does, has 7, and they tend to be a bit more prosaic:
Of course, everything has a downside. Yelpers have a tendency to be self-indulgent in the way they write, with details about their personal lives and more that aren’t always relevant to the business they’re reviewing at hand. But the details aren’t totally worthless. I appreciate the way Yelp encourages detailed reviews because the details are often helpful in helping me determine whether the reviewer is someone whose taste is similar to mine. When someone tells me that he doesn’t like Chinese food and thought the restaurant should be serving white chicken meat, I know instantly that he does not have the same taste as me, and I will not rely on his review. Whereas if that same person had only written, “Terrible food!”, I wouldn’t know enough to judge.
If I really want to know more about the reviewer’s tastes and preferences, I can even click on the reviewer’s name and see what else he or she has reviewed. I can get a much better sense of who Mark L. is than of TheJuicyShow.
Similarly, Slashdot uses “karma” to encourage smart comments. As a news aggregator for self-described nerds, Slashdot is as much a place to comment on stories as to read them. Anyone who has read open comments on popular blogs knows that they are often full of inflammatory rants where people spout rather than read/listen to what others are saying. Slashdot tries to deal with this by rating Slashdot users on their comments. The better your comments, the more “karma” you get, in the form of assessments that your comment is “insightful,” “interesting,” etc. Karma give you the power to moderate others’ comments, though you have to spend the points within 3 days. Good comments are considered an “achievement” that gets included on the profile of each user, which means, like Yelp, Slashdot users have personas that can be viewed by clicking on their profiles.
Wikipedia awards activities in a slightly different way. Although Wikipedians also get rewarded with higher status, it’s not in as prominent a way as it is for Yelp or Slashdot users. There are no badges or notes like “Insightful.” Rather, as registered users contribute, they gain a reputation in that community. Those who meet the threshold for number of edits can vote in Wikimedia board elections, as well as be a candidate for the board. Other privileges, like administrator privileges, are granted to those who request them after a lengthy review of their contributions. Wikipedia is following the model of open source software projects where people are granted more responsibility, like commit privileges, as they demonstrate that they do good work. They’re rewarded with status, but not in as prominent a way as the badge Yelp Elite Squad members get.
Offline organizations also reward good participation, with awards that recognize exceptional volunteers and positions of leadership. Habitat for Humanity affiliate chapters are often run by volunteers who have taken on responsibility after demonstrating their commitment. But because activities online are transparent to the whole community, the rewards given for those activities are similarly transparent as well. It’s easier to reward online activities in small as well as large ways. It’s also easier to keep track of large groups of people online. Thus, the reward system for these online organizations is more visible and more apparent than for offline organizations.
And because the rewards systems are visible and apparent, they really affect the culture of the community. There are people who claim to be addicted to Yelp; there are also people who really don’t care about being made a member of an elite squad. Yelp’s reward system probably repels as many people as it attracts, and it’s important for anyone building a community to think about who they want to attract and how.
Tags: comment moderation, How to build a community, online forum, rewards, Slashdot, Wikipedia, Yelp
Posted in Best Practices | 1 Comment »