This 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 every week from you normal work to think “big thoughts” about your field: what are the big questions and what might progress on those questions look like. He suggests that doing this is important to insure that end up making larger research contributions to important problems, rather than lots of incremental contributions. Big Thoughs Friday is my attempt to do this.
To this point, most of my work has been focused on providing incentives for users to contribute information to social computing systems. For example, I have described a side-effect mechanism and a minimum threshold mechanism for inducing users to contribute information. Contribution is primarily an issue of quantity: are we getting enough contributions from users? But there are many other important properties of social computing systems that are controlled by users and are therefore amenable to incentives. Here is a brief list of a number of places that incentive mechanisms might be able to improve social computing systems:
The most obvious one that always gets mentioned is quality. How can we make sure that what users contribute is actually worthwhile? This is a big issue in a lot of social computing systems; are “status updates” on Facebook really worth anything? Quality becomes even more important of an issue when you start to think about designing social computing systems for a specific purpose. Random status messages about your (lack of) personal hygeine might work for Twitter, but can be a big nuissance on a corporate social networking site.
Another issue on social computing systems is user retention. How can these systems keep their users coming back regularly? And why do some users stop using these systems? Getting a user to contribute to Facebook is good, but if they only visit the website once a month, and then stop altogether after 6 months then they aren’t really adding much to the system. On Wikipedia and in open source, we frequently see regular contributors suddenly stopping their contributions for no apparent reason. There are many one-tweet wonders. Why is this? How can we get them to stick around and continue contributing? And, should we do this, or is it better to let them leave?
Many social computing systems work best when users collaborate with each other. For example, Wikipedia is a much better encyclopedia when users collaborate and co-author articles and edit existing articles; its competition Google Knol has exclusively single-author articles. How can we motivate users to not just contribute, but to work together so that the sum is greater than the parts?
And finally, since most social computing systems are open to pretty much anybody, one of the big issues is maliciousness: not all contributions support goals of the system. Trolls on Slashdot are a classic example. But the problem is a lot bigger than that. Blogs and wikis regularly suffer from massive amounts of spam that can make them almost unusable. Is it possible to discourage people from this type of contribution? In some ways this is similar to the issue of quality, but focuses on the opposite side: reducing unwanted contributing rather than encouraging valuable contributions.
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