Session 4

I was tempted to try reddit.com at first, after hearing from several geek friends that it's where they get all their funny material and jokes from. :P Then I wanted to compare it to Digg, since I haven't really visited it either, but it was down at the time, so I thought of other places to go. Eventually I landed upon a social shopping site inspired by Digg: iliketotallyloveit.com and its sister site: handcrafty.com. So that I would have two sites of similar scope and topic, I chose to look at handcrafty and etsy, a site with goods that handcrafty often links to.

Etsy

Etsy is probably the most popular social shopping site for handcrafted, vintage goods, and most of the stuff is actually well-designed and well-made. This site has tended to draw a hipster crowd, and you'll come to realize that nobody does arts and crafts better than they do.

In etsy, it's good to form a circle, or at least belong to one. They help with a "Find Your Friends" feature that looks for existing users in your personal email account. 

When you add someone to your circle, their tastes and likes instantly appear in your own activity feed, even before the other person approves. Unfortunately, they don’t make it easy to browse for people, instead you have to search on a specific name. I entered 'a' and got everyone who entered their last name as a single character A, instead of getting a list of names that start with A.

Since this is an e-commerce website , a familiar trust mechanism used by ebay—the feedback/rating system—is used by etsy. Like with ebay, it does serve to enforce integrity among sellers. Get a negative rating and watch your reputation become tarnished. The difference though, between ebay and etsy (at least theoretically) is that etsy is a place for artists and designers. Art and good taste come first, followed by money, if that even enters into the discussion. You won’t find an article on etsy about how designers made enough from their sales to remodel their home. While there are some folks who might make a good living through their etsy store, it’s more of a place where creators and designers can get more publicity for their artwork/crafts and provide links to their websites.

Etsy’s Chat Rooms

Here’s where observations on social capital and trust can get more revealing: in the chat rooms. I entered one entitled something like “For Fun People.” I said hello and quickly someone replied back. I asked what the chat room was for, and also received a reasonable reply to that.

 One user kept bringing up Space Odyssey and David Bowie movies, interspersed with photos of crafts. I instituted a favorite road trip game of mine with a lot of LOL moments that everyone seemed to enjoy, then left to try another chat room, one called “coupons heart and cart.” That’s not a typo, it was all lower-case.

This particular chat room seemed pretty serious off the bat. There were no jokesters, and the conversation was about crafts and other serious (?) things. I said hello as I did the last time, but received no reply. I noticed though that the very next person to enter the room was instantly greeted by at least three different users, without having to greet anybody first. When I clicked on this person’s profile, I noticed that the user had 37 100% positive feedback ratings, and a full gallery of art items for viewing and for sale.

In etsy, promoting your art is a way to gain social capital in the community. Combine that with a high feedback rating, and you have a powerful combination of trust and social capital. That is perhaps one explanation why this user was more welcomed in the chat room, but there may be others. It’s possible that somehow these people know each other from another online/offline community, or that these people agree to meet online at a certain day/time each week, and thus have already built a rapport amongst each other.

Hand Crafty

Like Etsy, Hand Crafty offers a “Find Your Friends” email address-finder feature, but offers less of the social networking functionalities. The purpose of this site is to bring in photos of handmade, vintage items on etsy and other kitsch goods sites and vote on the ones that users like best. There’s nothing to be bought here, but external links will take you to the item if you want to purchase it. Anyone care for eggs, sunny-side-up?

There’s a “karma system” here. The more you vote on things you like, the more karma you receive. You could argue that karma points are a form of social capital, and it would have also been appropriate for last week’s section on rewards and motivation. The top users get to appear in a “Top User” category.

I did make an attempt to friend someone and send them a message, but have yet to hear back. At the end, I gained 5 karma points.

Suggestions for Improvement

A better people-browsing feature in etsy might strengthen bridging social capital, a concept covered by both the Williams and Ellison, et al. article. It's apparent that you'd need to tell someone your specific user name in order for them to find you, leading me to believe that a pre-existing relationship needs to exist in order to make connections in this site.

Gleave talks about enforcers in a community, and there is a similar role in the Hand Crafty community, the Scouts.

Perhaps to draw in more users, Hand Crafty could ease up on the restrictions a bit more for submission. It is true that I would not want the site to turn into picture after picture of refurbished floppy disk drives, but at the same time, it makes access to the site seem like a faraway goal for a newbie. I did indicate when I signed up that I was interested in becoming a Scout, but have not received word about it yet. If the role topologies mentioned by Gleave were made more prominent or into a visual representation, then perhaps I could better see where I stood within it.

To bring Eryilmaz et al.’s article into the discussion (which I really enjoyed, as in another class I’m working a database prototype to enhance real-life networking in disaster relief situations), we could consider their thoughts on linguistic interoperability and apply it to these sites related to each other by their topic scope. In the case of Hand Crafty for example, would it be more beneficial for it to use the same terminology as etsy, or continue to cling onto their own (e.g. “karma points”)?

Project Ideas

One possible idea that arose from this assignment is to look at how online communities distinguish themselves with their own particular terminologies and how this affects site popularity and usage. Also, at what point do the terms become enmeshed into popular culture? For example, when did everyone start saying “tweet?” Maybe this goes into topic detection and tracking.

I made a list of some other topics:

Motivations of griefers
Online communities as sites of empowerment
Gender differences in OCs

Session 3

Part 1

Tedjamulia et al.’s article gave me a new perspective on certain aspects of social psychology, first of all, and also online communities. I like how the study delved into extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for OC usage. Although I do agree with their claim, the question unanswered for me though is why extrinsic motivation is so much more powerful in the online environment (under certain circumstances).

I guess if I had my own story to share, it would have been my money-making experience in Second Life. Last semester, even in the midst of a ton of homework due the following week, I managed to take a break in between projects to spend three whole hours clicking on this or that object, teleporting all around SL, and getting paid while doing so, with the promise that I could “level-up”. Once I reached a certain amount of Lindens, I could reach another level and double the amount I made, so I kept at it. I was pretty excited about making 60 whole Linden dollars in all… “I can buy lots of new outfits, bicycles, shoes for my avatar, etc.” …Then I realized it came out to like 24 cents in real life, which made me feel a little silly. But the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation were certainly there. Extrinsic being the virtual dollars I make, intrinsic the rush of getting anything for “free.”

However, like they say, time is money. I could have signed up for a part-time job that paid minimum wage and within 3 hours I would’ve made $21.75. That translates into 5,519 Linden dollars. I could’ve bought myself a virtual mansion, virtual SUV and probably my own virtual island.

Tedjamulia also mentions the need for OCs to pay attention to those with high achievement needs, since they tend to set higher goals for themselves and actually complete them. I think this is a pretty good idea, but maybe should be approached with some caution. Can we be sure that the high achievers are getting along smoothly with other users who have low-to-medium achievement needs? Also they need to be sure that they are rewarding high achievers for positive effort and not riling any of the other users.

An interesting point that Ling et al.’s article makes is that group settings tend to encourage social loafing. As an aside, this is the problem that I’ve seen happen time and again with real-life group work, which I’ve personally observed happen about 40%of the time in my own graduate school experience, and tends to be an unacknowledged problem. Also, I think they are on target about online users needing to feel unique. However, I’d like to extend this claim: it may only be true in America and several other countries, where there is an added emphasis on individuality. I wonder how this hypothesis would play out in other countries and cultures where uniqueness is downplayed, and the concept of (real life) community is elevated.

Part 2

Online community: Alternative Health on iVillage

What modes of participation are there?
A public message board that does not require an account to view, only to post. You can: start a discussion, add to a discussion, create a profile for others to view, flag inappropriate responses, subscribe to particular discussions, add tags to your own post, create macros.

How is participation encouraged?
1. Views: You can see how many times your post was viewed so even if only 1 person responded to your post, you know that you’ve made a contribution that was (perhaps) useful to someone.

2.  Quick response: Once something is posted, replies usually come within the next 2-3 days.

3. Consistent response: The designated “community moderators” are very good at not only creating original posts, but responding to members’ posts on a consistent, frequent basis. Community moderators seem to be the backbone of these forums.

4. Useful, descriptive responses: When a member asked “What types of music are calming?” people replied with the exact artists names and song titles that produce a calming effect for them.

5. Control over inappropriate comment: I’ve seen message boards goes down the tube the minute the webmaster loses control over what members are posting. Users of this particular forum (mostly women) want to be able to post in safe, friendly environment free of attacks. Not once among the 50+ posts did I see an obscene or blatantly offensive post.

Which types of content draw the most responses?
alternative medicines: 30
scents and their effect on mood: 25
calmness: 16
food: 12
creative DIY methods used in alternative health: 10

I guess I was drawn to this site because of Schrock’s claim that women tend to be more extroverted and prone to self-disclosure in online communities. I don’t think I could have proven that without a proper comparison to an online forum for men (possible term project for me?), but to zero in on a women’s forum is a start. I would say that the “community moderators” have a stronger tendency towards self-disclosure, since they are ones who not only write the most posts/replies, but more importantly, they put their real-life self-portrait in their profiles and write publicly about health issues that are perceived as very personal and private to others.

The findings of this mini-study actually seem to support the existing theory that Ridings and Gefen attempted to modify in their study: that people join SNSs to exchange information or social support. In this case, I felt that both were stronger here than the desire for friendship and recreation, with the desire to exchange information being the strongest. Social support came up second most frequently, especially in posts were users shared their various ailments with each other and offered not only remedies, but their empathy/sympathy. In my own experience with OCs, I have had the tendency first to use them as a means to socialize with friends, and then secondly as venues for information exchange.