All posts in the topic Participation Inequality

A few thoughts:

1. The more GS helps us measure participation
and see it in summary views the easier it will be to test new ideas.

2. I think web views on topics and posts over say the last week would be a
useful way to allow people to navigate some posts/topics.

3. A "recommend" or four/five star rating option next to posts would be a nice
option even if it is primarily done via the web  and  a recommed click through
in the e-mail footer. (I wonder if we could automatically Digg and Redit posts
recommended from out site?

4. I guesstimate that E-Democracy's use of the two post in 24 hours tool
expands our 1 percent of most active to 3 percent and our 9 percent up to 20 in
some cases. It would be interesting to document our real numbers, compare
forums, and see if we can broaden participation through facilitation/tools
toward specific improvement goals.

See:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

End bit ...

Your only real choice here is in how you shape the inequality curve's angle Are
you going to have the "usual" 90-9-1 distribution, or the more radical 99-1-0.1
distribution common in some social websites? Can you achieve a more equitable
distribution of, say, 80-16-4? (That is, only 80% lurkers, with 16%
contributing some and 4% contributing the most.)
 Although participation will always be somewhat unequal, there are ways to
better equalize it, including:
Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump
through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a
star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero
effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they're
doing. For example, Amazon's "people who bought this book, bought these other
books" recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don't have
to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system.
Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple
activity of reading (or using) something will "wear" it down and thus leave its
marks -- just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you
prepare the most.
Edit, don't create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing
templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a
template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the
horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example,
most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
Reward -- but don't over-reward -- participants. Rewarding people for
contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and
thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can
also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance
notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don't
give too much to the most active participants, or you'll simply encourage them
to dominate the system even more.
Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then
people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned
out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra
prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who've proven
their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.Your website's design
undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse. Being
aware of the problem is the first step to alleviating it, and finding ways to
broaden participation will become even more important as the Web's social
networking services continue to grow.
    

I agree that participation information is important, Steve. One of our [my?]
goals for GroupServer is to have the best participation statistics of any
message-based system: including keywords, and post statistics.

We have plans for adding more participation information to groups and profiles.
Recently, we added the ability to view the participation statistics in a group
  http://groupserver.org/groups/development/stats.html
but there is still some way to go. In particular, I would dearly love to plot
the number of members in the group over time.

In addition to the simple membership statistics, Dan and I are quite keen to
add “sociograms”, which would visualise who interacts with whom. If someone
asks me about sociograms in a new topic I will explain them more fully, and
tell you how I was inspired by the Wattle Tree visualisation of Trac that Judy
Kay help develop
  http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/research/tr/tr582.pdf

I also agree with your second point, Steve: the user should be able to see what
has happened in the last week, which is possible now. Using email, the messages
that the user has or has not read are marked read. With the Web, topics that
have new posts are marked "unvisited", as are posts that the user has not seen.
Dates are displayed against all topics and posts. Various Web Feed readers also
indicate if a post is read or unread. Is there something else that we do not
do, Steve?

I am against grouping anything by a "week" because it gets into all sorts of
religious and cultural arguments about what a week *is*. Someone else can start
that fight… I could indicate when Kalends, Nones, and Ides occur, but that
would be too obscure for most people ☺ Besides, not all groups would benefit
from the weekly grouping:
   http://groupserver.org/groups/development/messages/topics.html

Addressing your third point, any modification to a post (such as adding tags or
rating) would have to wait until we have a mechanism for tracking all changes
to the posts, and have a mechanism to back out of those changes. This *major*
item of infrastructure has been dubbed the “audit trail” project; some other
items also rely in it being done, such as allowing managers to edit aspects of
a user's profile. (Once again, open an “Audit Trail” topic if you want to know
more ☺)

The technical challenge of rating posts aside, we also have the problem of the
usefulness of such a mechanism. As Richard says, the similar feature in Google
has very little use. From my own experience, if users cannot be bothered using
topics correctly, then I cannot expect them to take time out to add extra
metadata, which is only available in one of or three interfaces! Adding tags to
posts is a different story, as I can see the participation coach (alias forum
manager) using them to highlight important posts, such as those written by a
guest speaker in a public issues forum.

Finally, you are right that there are many unanswered research questions
relation to participation in online groups. I am especially interested in how
invitation-only forums differ from more open groups. However, research is very
expensive, and fraught with difficulties. For example, controlling external
factors (promotion of the forum, external events that may make the forum
popular, the weather, the time of year, the changing membership of the forum…)
make experimentation a nightmare.

I actually have a small research project on this month. I will keep this group
informed with how it goes.
    

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 05:27 +1200, Steven Clift wrote:
> To Richard's comments ... one reason I like "Recommend" or positive
> votes is that with agree/disagree I am concerned with the political
> majority pushing out the minority in our forums ... however, for most
> sites this would be a nifty feature.

I actually don't think it is too much of a concern unless the political
minority is *very* small. It would be easy enough to come up with an
implementation that was loaded against 'ballot stuffing' for example.
One suggestion off the top of my head would be something like using the
natural log of the number of 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' votes (so
1000x more votes would not result in anything close to 1000x the
rating), and then use other vectors to weight the 'goodness' of the
post.

For example, 'guest speakers' (as used by Dan in the Canterbury Issues
Forum) might get a bonus points, newcomers might get a bonus points,
people who accumulated many overall thumbs down ratings might lose
points.

Another more sophisticated way would be to track all votes against all
individuals, and down-bias votes from people who regularly vote always
down or always up, and severely down-bias votes from people who always
vote down or up particular people (and up-bias votes from people who
allocate a vote against the trend for a particular individual).
    

--Richard

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 05:27 +1200, Steven Clift wrote:
> To Richard's comments ... one reason I like "Recommend" or positive votes
> is that with agree/disagree I am concerned with the political majority
pushing
> out the minority in our forums ... however, for most sites this would be a
nifty
> feature.

BTW, I just realised I don't think I said anything about agreeing or
disagreeing with the post. My suggestion was that you would indicate
whether you thought a post had interest value or not, which isn't
anything like agreeing or disagreeing.

To Mike's comments: to my mind this entire idea is about adding
relevance to the system -- at any given time there might be 600 posts
that could be considered to be 'new'. I have 5 minutes. Which posts
should I read? It has nothing to do with whether people agree with a
particular poster or not.

Things that don't help me: topics index (because it just tells me what
is new, not what is 'important'), posts index (even worse than a topic
index, it makes me skim through everything).

This is why things like Digg and Slashdot excel at satisfying the desire
to 'fill a few minutes with something interesting' -- things of interest
float to the top. I don't believe the same can be said of GS ... yet.

I would suggest that the 'interest' level of a particular post is almost
*always* tied to the poster -- whether it is because they have
expertise, write well or happen to be the person of the moment.

So yes -- I agree that things like the social status of the user (eg.
guest speaker) are strongly tied to this. Here's a basic proposal:

1. each post has a 'interest rating',
2. the 'interest rating' consists of various weighted values.

For example:

25% of the interest rating could be made up from the 'thumbs up/thumbs
down' rating.
25% from the number of posts made by the user who made the post in
topics *you* have participated in -- "Do I like to debate with this
individual"?
25% from a rating of the number of thumbs up/thumbs down *you* have
given the user who made the post
25% from the 'karma' value of the user who made the post.

The idea is that you get posts *you* are more likely to be interested in
highlighted, so that you're encouraged to participate (you haven't spent
all your time wading through finding something of interest, so you'll
have more time to reply).
    

--Richard

> …at any given time there might be 600 posts that could be considered
> to be 'new'. I have 5 minutes. Which posts should I read? It has
> nothing to do with whether people agree with a particular poster or
> not.

Excellent, a task ☺ Unfortunately, I cannot see how a voting system, or
the voting component of a rating system, will ever do anything other
than tell you what people agree with. However, adding a blog facility to
GroupServer would allow someone to write a commentary on what has
happened in the group, similar to the Linux Weekly News Kernel
Development page
  http://lwn.net/Articles/243052/
Now it only comes down to whether you agree with the blogger, and
whether you can find someone to blog for the group! Blogging has other
benefits, so I would prefer to focus development effort there, rather
than a system for ranking posts.

I cannot think of a less equatable interface than a blog, as it only
lets one (or a few) people post. However, if the problem of too many
posts is caused by participation equality then maybe an inequitable
system is the solution ☺
    

--
Michael JasonSmith             http://onlinegroups.net/
Usability Engineer

On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 10:01 +1200, Michael JasonSmith wrote:
> I cannot think of a less equatable interface than a blog, as it only
> lets one (or a few) people post. However, if the problem of too many
> posts is caused by participation equality then maybe an inequitable
> system is the solution ☺

Well to address what I think were your two points:

1) A voting system would be skewed towards people voting for posts they
agree with,

2) A blogging system would be better because it would allow highlighting
of the good posts

Rating system:

A voting system may well be skewed towards the posts that people agree
or disagree with. The *volume* of votes will always be higher on the
most controversial posts though (which in itself is a way of
highlighting worthy posts). That could in fact be the way of doing it, a
single 'recommend' button (as I think Steve said).

The rating system proposed isn't a voting system. It has a voting
component. The idea is to try and provide some idea of what might be
interesting; to help speed the cream floating to the top.

Blogging system:

Well firstly -- blogging systems depend on someone wanting to blog. It
seems *incredibly* unlikely to me that someone will be willing to blog
for even the majority of groups, let alone all of them.

Now, having said that, blogging systems certainly have their place. For
a group that has a blogger, that would *almost* always be better than an
autonomous system. Unless the blogger goes on holiday. Or gets sick. Or
bored. Or sucks. Or is just plain biased.

It also has the big disadvantage that I have to *read* it through in
order to glean anything useful from it. I don't want to read much -- the
more time I spend reading the meta information, the less time I spend
reading the information.

This is a little like the Topic vs Post feed conversation that never
quite made it into this group (unfortunately). You prefer the posts
feed, because you read it like a newspaper. I prefer the topics feed
because I read it like a table of contents (and read the things that
look interesting in the correct place, in my email or on the web ;)).
You like syndicated content, I like syndicated summaries.
    

--Richard

Richard,

I entirely agree that the next big thing is relevance, and am therefore
glad that we are having this conversation.

> You think rating posts is likely to be ineffective because what you
> want read is likely to be based on what you like to read, not what
> others like to read.

No, I said that basing it on what _everyone_ thinks is ineffective.
Using _others'_ ratings is where the opportunity is, partly because it's
easier to rate people than posts, and partly because the rating is
already on the post when it arrives.

Basing the ratings of people who post to the same topics as me is a
great idea. We'll have our first interface to that soon, judging by the
progress Michael is making.

Actually, I think that whether something is relevant and interesting is
correlated with whether I agree or not - but negatively. By definition,
stuff I already know can't be interesting or relevant.
    

Dan

I'd like to focus on the Useit article's advice to essential turn site use into
a form of participation.

The user task - help less frequent web visitor quickly find out what is hot
this week/month.

Simple Ideas

1. Right Now - Topic list ordered by most recent post. Innovation complete. :-)
2. Posts - Make "Posts" clickable and sort last 30 days of posts by number of
replies, add option to expand time frame to one year/all time.

Next Level

3. Most Viewed Topics - Convert web stats into "democratized navigation"
4. Most Viewed Posts - Topic views for seven? days from posting plus individual
post views
5. Most E-mailed Posts/Topics - We don't have this option, but I find the
results at the StarTribune quite interesting: http://startribune.com - they are
often not the same, e-mailed posts connect more passionately with readers

Ultimate

6. Most Recommended - I vote for a simple "recommend" button next to individual
posts and a click-trough   in the footer (something else may need to be
condensed) and simply let crap/things people disagree with not rise up. May be
it is a "Good" or "Like it!" button to make it snappy. If folks end up not
using the feature, they I would recommend turning it off.

7. Popular Topics - Here is my rough formula - assign points based on:
- Webviews (weighted by %/#registered web members so we can have cross-site
popular topics too)
- Total posts to topic (volume = interest)
- Total number of authors (diversity = good, usual suspects bad)
- Posts within topic recommended
- Hours of sustained posting

Bonus points:
- First time participant post
- Less frequent participant post

Deductions:
- One sentence posts
- Two authors make up more than 50 percent of posts

I would default popular to the last two days and give an option for the most
popular this week, month, this year, specific years, and all-time.

Cheers,
Steve

P.S. Say, check this out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm
    

Thanks for your posts, Richard and Steve! I really appreciate the level of
thought that has gone into this topic!

Richard nicely summarised both my points
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/6gPpYFMezpW6vxzIOmVXTo

  1. I fear that any recommendation system will become an
     agreement system.
  2. I think blogs will overcome this situation.

There were three methods proposed to overcome my apprehension about
recommendation systems:
  1. Limiting choice,
  2. Rating individuals, and
  3. Downplaying the users' voting effort.
I favour 3 the most, as it comes closest to my ideal of dropping the idea ☺ The
first two options still have the problem of votes being the same as agreement
rather than interest; even in the simplest option the vote is either agree or
disagree (ignore).

The problem with getting someone to blog is a major one, but it is one that
(should) fix itself. The groups that will have the problem of too many posts
are large ones, where there is a lot of activity. (We are all assuming that
activity is correlated to interest). As the group is large, there is a large
number of people who could potentially write the blog. Because there is a lot
of interest in the group, the writer will get a heap of attention, so we can
rely on Adam Smith to pull us out of the mess. (I do not have the right Smith
quote to hand.)

Trust networks were suggested by Dan, and criticised by Richard
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/74D0D5PjZfQ9mIyC5vZpn3
I would add another nail into the coffin: most users do not post.

Steve suggested counting the number of replies to a post.
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/4U1xGnhiZ7AO96G5XNnenI
There are huge problems with this:
  * People do not understand threading,
  * People do not understand threading, and
  * People do not understand threading.
For this reason, GroupServer does not have a threading view of a topic, and
does not use threads to determine if posts belong to a topic!

The rest of Steve's suggestions *mostly* focus on one thing: giving the user a
better idea of what is going on. That is a *M*A*J*O*R* goal of mine ☺ The
recent changes to search and the topic lists
  http://groupserver.org/r/topic/6CDpVzg8RLNt9nFFVdRRfu
were made so this was possible. By providing information, we feed the best
pattern-recognition and summation engine we have available to us: the user.

There is plenty of information that we could provide but either do not collect,
or do not display. In the former category is view-information. While this would
only be applicable to Web views, it would still be worth displaying. In the
second category is the number of unique authors in a topic: it is
computationally expensive to calculate this for every topic-list.