From, of all things, Cracked. There are some interesting ideas on how some companies are combating the issue of idiots disrupting conversation in many online communities. Although I don’t want to get in too much of an analysis of an article that was well-written and funny in a grade 6 kind of way, I did want to touch on a couple of things:
- Anonymity is for sure a big reason why people seem to act like dicks on message forums. Newspapers in particular seem to be a breeding ground for anti-social commentary. Canwest, who seem to have more angry teenagers than others, seem to have taken a more visitable role, this message conspicuously removed and replaced by a message saying that the comment was removed. Check out this example and then for giggles, check out this example for some quality discussion.
- On Fark.com it seems that the posters who are the most thoughtful have a picture in their profile. The trolls and usually have nothing or a statement proclaiming how badass they are.
- Facebook is an interesting example. On one discussion thread there was some guy talking about whatever and where he was attacked and mocked for making a typo. Somewhere along the lines of “Ha Ha You fuggen loser you can’t even spell LOL! LOL!” So I had to see what an honest-to-god Internet Tough Guy looked like and I clicked on the link to his profile. Let’s just say that, yes, Ed Hardy and indoor sunglasses were involved. One interesting experiment may be to examine trollish behavior on Facebook and see how many anonymous features their profile has and how much they lock it down in their privacy settings.
Anyway, it’s my view that organization that have communities that are overrun with aggressive and abusive members really do damage to their brand. It goes to the point that implementing the community technologies is the easy part. Growing it into something healthy is something else that takes time patience and leadership. Otherwise, as Cracked said, they won’t get participation from the functional adults who don’t want to be called a Shitwhale in public.