Pot luck dinners are dinners were everyone is expected to bring a dish of food for everyone to share. When everyone who attends does this, you end up with a wide variety of food and usually more than enough food for everyone there. Pot luck dinners also happen to be a great real-world example of [...]
Tagged minimum thresholdEvery time I present my research that looks at how to induce greater contributions to social computing systems, one of the first questions I get is “But what about quality?” How do we make sure that the contributions are actually worthwhile? This is an extremely important question for real social computing systems, and a number [...]
One of the big problems for social media systems is motivating users to contribute sufficient amounts of content. If you are reading this blog, then you know this. Most social media systems need to have new content constantly added so that users will keep returning to the website. For example, Facebook would be pretty boring [...]
Tagged hypeThe most basic problem that any social media system faces is contribution; the system needs contributions from its users. These contributions are usually in the form of some type of information: text, images, videos, etc. The fact that these contributions come from end users is what makes these systems social media. For most systems, users [...]
Tagged minimum thresholdThis post is the first post of a series: Big Thoughts Friday. Every friday I will post something about bigger questions and issues related to social media. For example, this post (and the next couple) all try to identify the important incentive problems that arise in social media. Richard Hamming suggested setting aside some time [...]
Giving users a private, individual reason to contribute to social media can be a powerful incentive to induce contributions. Del.icio.us motivates users to create bookmarks by making them available on the Internet from anywhere and by helping users to organize their bookmarks with tags. These bookmarks are then shared with other users as a side [...]
Tagged side effectsOne of the difficulties in understanding why people contribute to social computing systems is that each person is not acting alone. One person’s decision is potentially affected by everyone else on the site, and everyone else’s decision is in turn potentially affected by that one person’s decision. For example, I sometimes write messages on Facebook [...]
Tagged side effects