Half of the top ten websites visited daily rely on user generated content. Of these five websites none of them pay their users for their posts. So why do people keep coming back? What is the attraction? And what is in it for the user?
These are the basic questions being asked in all five articles we read this week. Java et al stated, “Microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation (2).” In this article, Twitter specifically was found to be a quick and useful way to communicate. Ridings and Gefen looked into why people join online communities and found that membership is retained for two reasons: 1) to gain a feeling of affiliation or belonging, and 2) to gain information and to “aid in goal achievement (14).” They state, “Virtual communities, like real ones, are joined not only because of utilitarian information exchange, but also because they serve the social need of having a friend and getting social support (15).” For Ling et al user generated material is motivated by an idea of a collective contribution. Tedjamulia et al looks at how website designers can promote retention by rewarding the user. Through these various types of rewards users are given incentives to continually collaborate on the site. Schrock aproched the issue from the perspective of gender and states that “males use SNSs to meet new people and expand their friend network (for example, for dating), while females use them for maintaining existing networks (9).”
I must now ask myself if I find myself within the findings of these studies. Of the ten websites mentioned above I use 6 of them regularly, the 5 sites that rely on user generated material plus Google, contributing content to 3 of these sites. I have minimally added information to Wikipedia but not enough to call myself a contributor. Personally, I use blogger to communicate my thoughts and ideas to others, twitter to get information from others and Facebook more as a many-to-many form of communication.
In general I have a hard time disagreeing with academic articles. Maybe this is a fault of mine but I tend to think, “If it’s published it must be true.” Yet, with this being said, I struggled to agree with Ling et al’s article Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. I struggled through this article because I never really understood what they were analyzing. I understood the basic premise behind the study and the website they were using but this study mostly seemed like they were encouraging the users to simply push buttons. I think that one thing that would have helped support their results was to list the movies the users were voting on and expressed if the users were required to have seen the film. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), through I’m sure a much larger collection of movies then MovieLens, if you were to click on the “rate movies” and limit it to the movies with the least number of votes you would find that nearly 100% of the films listed are movies no has/will ever see because they are either projects from film schools or super low budget independent films that never gained national distribution (among other reasons). Ling et al stated, “More than 20% of the movies listed in the system have so few ratings that the recommender algorithms cannot make accurate predictions about whether subscribers will like them (2).” This study would have been helped with a statement that explained why these films were not rated.
Yet the ultimate question is if we can move past this annoyance to find meaning in the results of the test. The outcome of their study does, in a way, mirror my online behavior. The beauty of Web 2.0 is the ability to collaborate with other users. Nearly 100% of all of my contributions on the web are not for my particular benefit but instead because of the ability to use information collaboratively with others. This works differently on various webpages. Relating this back to MovieLens, or even IMDb, leaving feedback about movies is to inform or influence other users. This parallels the idea that users contributed more when given a group goal (Ling, 23).
To take this a step further Ling et al asked if the information users post needs to be unique. According to their study it does. I wonder if this is really true. I believe that once again it depends on the website being used. If this was really true would Facebook have developed a “repost” button allowing users to repost links and photos contributed by others? Or what about the use of hashtags on Twitter? How unique are the comments when a hashtag is followed? Sometimes each post is unique but many times all the posts tend to be similar (non-unique) to each other or simply reposts of the original statement.
On the other hand, both Ling et al and Tedjamulia et al discuss the importance of rewards as motivators for online contribution. I like to think of this as the MySpace phenomena. The mantra would go something like: S/he with the most posts on a fairly unknown bands page is the biggest fan. Facebook does not really have a devise for this and my experience has been that the person with the strongest presents on my Facebook wall usually posts the most meaningless status updates. Yet rewards are a useful tool on some websites. Geosocial networking sites, such as Foursquare.com, work entirely on this principle. Badges are given for various tasks and the more badges you have the more you can brag about them. Tedjamulia et al state, “Non-monetary rewards like social recognition can be extremely powerful incentives so long as they are public, infrequent, credible, and culturally meaningful (8).” While it tends to contradict this quote, most of the badges on Foursquare tend to be arbitrary. By this I mean they could create a badge for almost anything and people would try to achieve it.
Personally, this reward system does not work for me. It is too arbitrary of a system and rewards people with heavy use without any way of evaluating the quality of the contribution. Instead the rewards that work better for me are recognition and praise. This is always generated by other users and not by mechanisms created by the designers.
A different form of reward I have recently found is national, or popular, recognition. Imagine if your contribution had the possibility to be made public on a network news show, would your contributions become more meaningful? Would you be more willing to come back and contribute more, less or the same? To help explain this theory, and to interact with the weeks readings, I will use Rachel Maddow’s blog properly called The Maddow Blog. This blog is maintained by the staff of the Rachel Maddow Show and is used as a way to diolouge and interact with viewers. It is also a way for the show to connect the viewers with important links and content from the show. The blog is hosted on MSNBC’s website and the comments on the blog are run through MSNBC’s social news website newsvine.
On the February 7th show, during a segment called "Debunktion Junction", Rachel Maddow made reference to a comment made by former Senator Alan Simpson. That comment being, “Stick your finger down your throat and give them the green weenie.” The question Rachel looked into was what Simpson meant by the term “green weenie”.
The answers that Rachel received came pouring over the social media she uses (her blog and her various twitter accounts). Now I love Rachel Maddow but sometimes she focuses on the strangest issues, and this is a good example of that. However, one thing this story shows is how she was able to use her social media to get some quick answers to these questions.
The next day, Feb. 8th, Rachel reported on this story more in-depth and showed how she was able to find the information she was looking for using social media and the help of some librarians.
It is difficult to match the timeline of the blog with the timeline of the show, especially since we do not know when the staff last checked the blog before Rachel went on the air but for some of those who posted information quick enough their posts made it onto national television.
After seeing that Rachel was quoting posts from her blog in her show I went back to the blog to examine the overall quality of the posts and to see how they support what I have been reading this week. Her blog that correlates with this story is called Tracking Down the 'Green Weenie' and was posted on Feb. 8th between the two shows. The idea here is that if posting on Rachel’s blog helps contribute to her show and also brings 15 seconds of fame to the writers of the comment then a majority of the comments should be of a high quality. I organized a majority of the posts into 5 categories that are listed below with the amount of times they occur:
1) Information without a link (10)
2) Information with a link (9)
3) Commentary (9)
4) Note to Rachel (8)
5) No Information – No Commentary (7)
It was no surprise to me that nearly half of the post were presenting information is some manner. The quality of the information varied and often topics and links were repeated. The group I have called No Information – No Commentary were statements that did not add to the conversation:
Surprisingly Kaija has commented prolifically on the Maddow Blog many of which hold a lot more meaning then the comment above portrays.
The group that surprised me the most were the notes to Rachel. To qualify for this group the posts needed to be addressed “to Rachel”. These surprised me because they were written as if they expected Rachel Maddow to read them and personally respond.
Surprisingly Kaija has commented prolifically on the Maddow Blog many of which hold a lot more meaning then the comment above portrays.
The group that surprised me the most were the notes to Rachel. To qualify for this group the posts needed to be addressed “to Rachel”. These surprised me because they were written as if they expected Rachel Maddow to read them and personally respond.
For the most part the comments that presented information concerning the 'Green Weenie' were substantive and often contained a link to further information.
The interface of the blog itself was very user friendly. If you look on the screen shot above you can see that you can quickly navigate to the users newsvine page by clicking their name in the upper left. You can also reply directly to the individual comments using the reply link on the bottom right. On some of the posts, next to the reply button is some text that says "1 vote". I have yet to figure out what this means and how the "voting" system is used on this blog. There is no feature on this blog to flag comments. All the blog posts on the Maddow Blog are posted by the staff of the show.
The interface of the blog itself was very user friendly. If you look on the screen shot above you can see that you can quickly navigate to the users newsvine page by clicking their name in the upper left. You can also reply directly to the individual comments using the reply link on the bottom right. On some of the posts, next to the reply button is some text that says "1 vote". I have yet to figure out what this means and how the "voting" system is used on this blog. There is no feature on this blog to flag comments. All the blog posts on the Maddow Blog are posted by the staff of the show.
What I found on the Maddow Blog fell in line with Tedjamulia et al’s Proposition 5: “As ease of use and interesting content increase, more individuals will want to participate and contribute” and Proposition 10: “Participants with high commitment to achieving a goal will likely work harder to achieve the goal than individuals with low commitment”. The rewards for this particular blog post were two fold, first an informative blog helped to increase understanding of the ‘Green Weenie’ and second, there was a possibility of gaining recognition on the air during the show. Also, by recognizing that she values the contributions on her blog, Rachel reinforced informative responses.
I’ll be honest, before I began reading through the responses on her blog I was sure I was going to find some heated debates and Maddow bashing, which seems to be the norm these days. However, what I found was very little of that sort of rhetoric. There was little evidence of interaction or recognition between users on the blog which surprised me as well.
You bring up a good point about another motivator for posting, possible public recognition. I just finished watching two episodes of Tosh 2.0 and realized that there are a lot of folks willing to do anything for a chance to be on the old-school entertainment format, television.
ReplyDeleteRecognition is always desired no matter what medium though. That was one of the major themes I pulled out of last week's readings. Whether you are the host of an online community or a lurker 2 hoping to get a simple answer, folks just want to know that someone out there will notice.
Nice opening paragraph with top sites having user generated content to summarize our week 3 topic.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to your Maddow example, perhaps there was little bashing as those who are not of the same view with Maddow would not even go the blog or website. It would be very interesting to look deeper to find more reasons why your expectation (and mine) of debates and bashing did not materialize. I expected the debates and bashing because of the trend of commenting in comment section of newspaper sites that tends to be polarized and extensive.
I agree with Palabra too, people do all sorts of things to get recognition, i.e. have their 15 minutes of fame, that might lead to a spot on the morning shows or Tosh 2.0, or an offer for reality show (see: Kardashians, Snooki, etc).
Since Maddow's staff watch the blog, maybe they are quick to remove any negative posts. Like you guys, I always expect to see name calling and heated debates on political and news forums. I am usually surprised how far somebody will go out of their way to post their dissenting opinions. I think controversy is their way of getting attention, and since the conversation is supposed to all be about Maddow's show, the staff remove that motivating factor.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of ways to attract participation - good title this week! I was going through my RSS feed trying to decide who to read next and "In Search of the Green Weenie" got my attention way more than all of the "Session 3" posts in the list.
I heartily agree with Andrea's comment, an intriguing title can definitely result in more eyeballs. In a way, the rewards/levels/badges function across some of the sites you mentioned also serves as a shorthand for creating expectations of how interesting content is likely to be, but the reward of possibly having your contribution featured for a much larger television audience is a unique and powerful attractor as well.
ReplyDeleteThe breakdown of posts by whether they included a link or not is a strategy I'm familiar with; it's one way to determine if there's a difference in response patterns when people cite outside sources versus when they just state their own opinion.
You were among several folks who questioned the uniqueness aspect of online participation in Ling et al., and you're right, it seems as if many SNS tools are designed to invite a "me too" response much more readily than an invitation to craft and contribute unique content. Very interesting post!
Can I just add a "me too" comment?
ReplyDeleteMaybe that doesn't add much, but I do agree with Andrea and Professor Gazan, I clicked on the link for this blog because of the "green weenie." I guess that shows support for the theory that "inriguing title(s)" and other attention getters can work in online communities too.
I also find it interesting that there were posts directed at Rachel. I think those posts can be considered like fan mail. Cheaper and easier than writing a letter and mailing it, but not much different. It does seem like those posters are using a public arena to do something that is usually somewhat private. I wonder if those posters ever revisit the blog to look for a response. Maybe if they don't return to the blog, or at least to that post, then maybe they don't recognize the public nature of blogging.
I'll be honest, I try to name my blogs in a way so that people will want to read them.
ReplyDelete@Palabra Tosh 2.0 is another example that fits with my thesis, though some might question the over all important of those forms of contribution. Honestly, I bet the overall quality of YouTube videos has somewhat increased since that show has begun. And there is not even a cash prize involved!
@Erenst The reason I thought I would find more people disagreeing (besides the fact that comments at the ends of most news articles are so polarized) is because when I looked through her Twitter feed I found 4 or 5 blogs written directly in opposition to this story. It would only seem logical that people would post links to those blogs on her blog. But then again people who would read those blogs are probably not spending time the Maddow Blog.
@Andrea I was also wondering if there was editing involved in what is left up on the blog. I am not sure she would want posts deleted. I should have spent more time in the other posts looking for more heated debates to help support the statement I made.
@Dr. Gazan There were some well crafted arguments that did not post links. Because we do not have face-to-face contact with the people making these posts it seems that content with a link just seem authoritative, like they are not making it up. However, very few of the links led to any traditionally authoritative resources.
@Jude I was not expecting to find letter directed to Rachel. I have no idea how much interaction she has with her blog but I imagine that well written comments do get back to her. Maybe I should try it sometime and see if she writes back with a thank you note!