I recently blogged about minimum threshold mechanisms: set a minimum threshold for contribution and exclude anyone from using the system who doesn’t meet that threshold. I recently encountered a great example of a popular social media system using a minimum threshold to encourage contribution: Facebook. In order to use Facebook, a new user must do [...]
Tagged minimum thresholdThe first problem that any social media system faces is how to get the first few contributions from users. This is known as the bootstrapping problem. The basic problem is that each user gets value from the system that depends on how much useful information is currently in the system; but when the system is [...]
Recently there has been speculation that the rise in computation power will put us scientists out of business, or at least seriously change our business. Chris Anderson has probably the most extreme view with his End of Theory article. A more reasonable approach is the Risk of the Data Scientist by Nathan Yau. The [...]
Twitter is a fascinating service. To many people, it is not clear what exactly it is supposed to be used for. Chats / conversations? There are better services for that, like email, IM, and discussion boards. Blogging? There is better software for that too. Twitter seems to be something new that can’t easily be put [...]
I previously wrote about an interesting system of awarding “points” for contributions that IBM introduced into its social networking system. Despite explicitly not being worth anything, the points turned out to be a strong motivation to contribute more information. Unfortunately, the paper that describes this doesn’t really give any theoretical reasons why points might work [...]
Unsurprisingly, if you give people a reward for contributing to a user-contributed content system, users repond by increasing their contributions. But how much of a reward is really needed to induce contributions? The social software research team at IBM tried one of the simplest reward systems: they awarded people “points” for contributing to their internal [...]
From an interview with the Chicago economist Kevin Murphy: What really does matter is the cost of treatment. If treatment costs are $10 trillion, the project has a negative net present value even if the research is free. With $2 trillion in treatment costs, the net gain from success is $3 trillion, so that we [...]