I’ve written before about the bootstrapping problem for social media systems: if people are coming to the site because of the content, how do you draw the first users in? Bootstrapping social media is a classic instance of a positive network effects problem: how do I get enough people to start using my system such [...]
A lot of my research can be seen as look at the effects of various types of technical interventions on social media systems. I change something about a social media system, and I look to see how people act differently. There are many different ways of trying to predict what will happen, but in [...]
As social computing systems grow, it becomes increasingly important to institute some sort of site management or governance. Site governance work is important to help keep the site working smoothly as many new people with many new motives and agendas use the site. Wikipedia is famous for making public its large quantity of [...]
Tagged governanceDesigning social computing systems / social media systems is difficult. This is at least partially because our existing design strategies don’t work very well for the extremely-social systems like Facebook or delicious.com. The basic problem comes from trying to straightforwardly apply user-centered design. You certainly can put a user in a lab and watch them [...]
Tagged ICDThe 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 [...]
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 [...]
Every 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 [...]
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 [...]