Social Software 101: User Behavior and the High Score Table
A couple of weeks ago Penny Arcade linked to my supporting Firefox extension,Pennypacker, and fired down a good 20,000 or so new users into what had previously been a fairly small, niche user base. Within days this newly inflated user base had viewed half a million strips and cataloged them with over 17,000 tags.
The sudden injection of new users was an interesting thing to watch. It's fascinating how much the needs of the system change when you go from a small, organically grown user-base to a much larger one overnight. The sense of community and shared etiquette adopted by the smaller group of people is quickly swept away and there becomes a much greater reliance on the software to police user behavior. In my case, I suddenly had a new problem: tag spam. That is, tags that were either unrelated, offensive or otherwise inappropriate. Tags took on a new role, and were now used for all sorts of communication, from insulting other users to pointing out when a strip was broken.
I think this hints at a really interesting area of social software. Maintaining a healthy community who behave responsibly seems more often than not to be the question mark between step one: get users and step three: profit. Most articles about successful social applications focus on user acquisition and not so much with managing that user base and its behaviour once acquired. Perhaps few of the big players even care about many of these issues (such as churn, or losing users) at this stage -- they're all drinking out of a metaphorical new-user firehose. How does MySpace handle the spammers, deviants and general miscreants? I have no idea. Browse a few MySpace profiles though and you'll see an insanely high amount of noise punctuated by an increasingly scarse signal. To me, this is probably the hardest, but most neglected area of building a successful social platform. All of those carefully set-up catalysts for adoption and engagement can become weapons against you once you've hit critical mass.
A cursor glance at any social app will reveal virtually all of them use the oldest trick in the book for prodding that few percentage points of userbase to contribute more: the high score table. This is one of the most effective tools a social app can employ to encourage usage and you'd be hard pressed to find a successful social website that doesn't have some form of a high score table: LinkedIn and MySpace both have a friends/connections counter, Flickr has photostream views and until recently Digg had it's top user list. Of course Digg recently began to find this feature was working against them. Once you've a hit a critical mass of engagement, these methods can encourage bad behaviour. You'll find yourself with an application where quantity rather than quality becomes the sole motivation of users.
My Giants of Arcade page may have initally been a great way to encourage user participation. And indeed, the "top observers" column was amazingly effective at having users browse 1,250 pages of a web site (often in one sitting) that many of them had seen before. But now these devices are in danger of becoming simply a come-on to the overly competitive. The goal is now to transition to that next level of the evolution of a social network, to enable the self-policing community.
