One 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 because I know others will see them and comment on them. This strategic interplay between contribution decisions can make understanding the reasons behind these decisions difficult.
Del.icio.us has a great way to deal with this problem. They sidestep the whole “strategic” problem by giving people a mostly personal reason to bookmark. Users on del.icio.us choose their bookmarks primarily because they think that they might go back and visit the website sometime in the future. And tags are chosen mainly to support this potential re-finding activity; users tags are chosen to help themselves organize their collection of bookmarks. Users create these bookmarks for personal reasons, and would continue to do so even if no one else ever saw them.
However, del.icio.us makes all bookmarks public by default. Anyone can go and view my bookmarks or anyone else’s bookmarks. This public benefit is a side effect of the private incentives that users have to create bookmarks. The main purpose of creating bookmarks isn’t to benefit others, but this benefit happens because of the default-to-public nature of the site.
This suggests a more general mechanism for inducing user contributions. Social computing systems can provide a strictly private benefit from contributions — potentially by emulating something that users already do on their computers like store bookmarks — and then make these contributions public by default. Making things publicly available as a side-effect of normal, personal use is a great way encourage contribution to a social computing system.
Rick Wash and Emilee Rader. “Public Bookmarks and Private Benefits: An Analysis of Incentives in Social Computing.” In American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting (2007).
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