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