I say this having run a variety of social networks, from blogs and forums to MUSHes and Facebook ‘Wall’ type things. I’ve been around and I’ve had to manage cats in myriad situations.
The problem they all have is managing spammers and trolls.
Spammers are, weirdly, easier. You use a decent plugin/extension, you block the idiots, you move on. But trolls. Oh lord, trolls. You know those users you just want to take out back and kick until they find a clue, but you know they never will? Right.
When I was on a MUSH, I came up with a tool called the ‘Ban Hammer.’ If you’re not familiar with it, the basic idea is anyone can log on, make a character and join a role playing game. Sounds great. If someone breaks the rules, the people in charge (Wizards) can delete their character. The problem I had was someone was coming and not breaking the rules, but had made himself basically unwelcome. The Wizards wouldn’t delete the account because “Being a Dick” isn’t against their rules. I decided to write a tool that looked for this user and locked every room, door and exit against him. On top of that, if he tried to teleport into a room, it booted him out. And he got a message “You are not currently welcome here. Please speak with Ipstenu.” (or whomever was the local area boss). Then I shared it with everyone on the game.(If you can’t tell, I’m a huge proponent of sharing and Open Source. I gave people the source code too.)
As I see it, the problem is that most social extensions are fantastic in a closed system, but the minute you open things up to anyone, you have the problem of user management. Facebook and Twitter are failing at it today. There’s just too many spammers and trolls to manage. Most people spend time and effort hunting down spammers, which is probably why managing morons falls by the wayside.
The other interesting point I’ve noticed is that most programmers don’t run social sites. They use them, but they don’t manage them as an end-moderator. These are totally different skill sets and, as with all separate skill sets, there’s often a disconnect between what one sees as a need and what the other sees as a want.
I have to rewind here. My high school had a big emphasis on teaching us the difference between a want and a need. You need food. You want hot water. “a simple life school, where one learns to get on without” (Paul Squib – Founder of Midland School”) A lot of my decisions in life roll back to that simple premise. If you needed something, the school provided it. If you wanted something, you worked for it. I learned how to chop wood and make a fire in order to make enough hot water for 14 teenage girls to shower because we wanted the water hot. (Funny Midland story. We basically had an old propane tank, fitted with a small stove ‘hole’ to make the fire. You started the fire, added the logs, and stoked it for about 2-3 hours to heat the water, often augmented by the solar panels. If you made the water hot enough, however, you created steam, which would flip a switch on the safety switch so people didn’t get scalded. It was called the ‘Steam Lock’, and we measured our abilities by how efficiently you could activate it. I learned how to do it on my second shower fire, having been taught by Amber and Katie. Thanks, girls!) Because of that, not a day goes by that I don’t think “Is that a want or a need?” And I am ruthless with myself about that. Because of that rigorous crucible, I am confident what I say that I know what I need, I really mean that.
The tools I need to deal with trouble-making users aren’t many.
Track IPs – only to keep tabs on repeat offenders. A spammer’s IP doesn’t matter. Bob the troll’s does. This is going to always require a level of manual intervention, that a human will have to go in and think about things, but that’s not a bad idea anyway. I made a WordPress plugin called Register IP Multisite to handle that for both single and MultiSite.
Flag as spam – I need to be able to say ‘Bob’s acting an ass. I want him to go away.’ Really this should be ‘flag as bozo’ as he’s not a spammer, but I’ll take either one. A time out feature to put people out of sight from the users for a while. Obviously, again, there’s a level of manual work required. You can do this on WordPress MultiSite, but not single site, and it’s silly to think that you would have to go to MultiSite to enable this.
Bad Words – Sometimes it’s easy to stop the jerks. Sometimes I just want to keep a place clean for kiddies. Most tools, blogging or otherwise, have a way to clean words, but then you have strange problems. If you use, say, “cialis” as a bad word, you block “socialisim.” Ooops! Also, I would like to block people from using bad words in their ‘name’, and not just comments. But again, this needs manual monitoring.
The tools I’d want, but don’t need, are also few:
Report users – Most forums have this ability, to let people patrol each other. Google+ has it. If you’re opening up your site to the world, you have to be able to let the crowd help you. But within reason. You can only report people once, for example, and after X reports, someone should be just blocked for now until a moderator manually steps in.
What about you? What tools do you know you can’t live without?
Comments
4 responses to “Running My Own Social Network Falls Short”
Interesting thoughts. I’m reminded of Anil Dash’s piece: If Your Website’s Full of Assholes, It’s Your Fault.
For a lot of people, people see community interaction as a bolt-on, generic extension to a site which cares more about the person with publishing permissions – and so it’s no surprise that the interaction then sucks!
I strongly believe that you can design a system which promotes a certain kind of interaction naturally, rather than one which requires an extra administrative overhead requiring tons of rules and moderation. Would you rather police your community, or guide your community in a direction where they naturally want to be great to each other?
Look at the different kinds of conversation that occur on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, all of whose features are designed differently. Or compare old-world forums to Reddit, which both has crowdsourced ranking and several algorithms for sorting comments to better surface the quality conversations. Heck, look at how the blog commenting experience changes depending on whether threading is enabled, or whether people can reply via email, or if a blog network like Tumblr has a central dashboard where all this activity happens in one place.
The problem with crowdsourcing is (first off) learning to let go and let the crowd do it, but moreso, getting the crowd in the first place!
You have to build up to to where the number of good souls who are willing to give up their free time to moderate outnumber the morons so you (the admin) don’t spend all your time. But also, in some places, the helpful folk aren’t tech savvy and need things to be easy. An easy way to say ‘Bob’s being an ass.’ and an easy way to go “Yes, he is. Banned.”
Oh yes, dear everyone, allow me to report spam on your website please!
It’s note quite the same thing of course, trolls and spammers, comments on blogs and actually having a social website. But, I’m willing to report spam on your website if only you’d let me!
Actually more on topic, I’m quite against the idea of tracking IP addresses over a long period, for privacy reasons. I think that it is better to not track IP addresses at all than to keep them forever. Of course, it’s possible to track IP addresses for only a short period of time. Perhaps say six months. If a person is being a troll, or if spamming occurs within that six months, the IP address tracking can be reset.
The reason I oppose indefinite tracking is privacy. Especially for long term members of the community.
As for other tools, well, I’ve never been on the monitoring or management side of things. So I can’t really comment…
I don’t see it as an invasion of privacy. If you call me, I have your phone number (unless you block it), and I have your email if you comment. Your IP lets me make sure that you’re who you say you are, in case someone tries to impersonate you (which is really common for some people). When you’re trying to stop a troll, who is unwelcome, it’s a very helpful tool.
Personally I only monitor registration IPs, but I rarely block them. My firewall might, but I don’t.
Your IP isn’t private. Nor is your email, for that matter. They should be respected, though, and I won’t give out anyone’s without a court order, but just like I get the name (and usually phone number) of everyone who visits my house, similarly I get your IP when you visit my site.