For most of you who have been part of any communities, online and offline, you recognize that the above diagram as being a pretty rough estimation of the ‘levels’ of intimacy people who touch a community site/product on any level have. Of course, there are all sorts of gradations in between and people tend to oscillate between these levels, but here it is. One of the things that drives me nutty about the current use of the word, ‘community’ is that it has started to stand in for every hit one has to their site. As you see on the diagram, the casual visitors are not the ones invested in it.
So why are so many sites who purport to be striving for community implementing quantity-enhancing features like anonymous commenting? Now, I understand the need for Onramps, but Onramps and barriers to entry are not the same thing. Onramps/offramps are the ways that you assist your customer/contributors with ways to create content and then share content. It’s basically a data booster.
Barriers to entry, like site sign-up, for instance, aren’t always necessary. Google doesn’t make you sign up to search. But they do make you sign up to use anything else. Yahoo! doesn’t make you sign up to search or browse, either, but I don’t know any other Yahoo! properties that will allow you to post your own content without having that Yahoo!ID. There are definite benefits and drawbacks to this, of course. The drawbacks are that, if you don’t have an account, you have to go through the process of setting one up. Before you are ready to ‘commit’ yourself somewhere, you may not want to do that. The benefits, though, are numerous for both the company and yourself.
I know having Google p0wn me, I get a great deal in return. I get better search results. I get to unite my gApps to interoperate beautifully. Sure, they use my patterns to try and sell me stuff, but the more I use it, the more relevant those ads become. And I usually ignore them anyway. Don’t get me wrong. I am a bit concerned about the amount of data Google has on me, but my choice is clear…I can avoid them. Yahoo!, too. They own the social part of me and for that, I get a history of my social interaction. If I was a developer, I could take the data APIs and create cool maps of my interactions.
But these barriers also help me feel a little safer from stuff like SPAM (which I hate). The more complex the sign up, the safer I feel. I know when I stumble around Facebook, I’ll find 99% people because of their barriers to entry. And because they add other barriers (co-friending, etc), it feels like a closer knit community.
I don’t know if there has been a study done, but I’d expect that the closer knit communities have higher barriers to entry. I had to have a phone conversation to get on The Well! It made it feel way more substantial.
Of course, there is a happy medium. You don’t want to make people jump through so many hoops that they give up, either, but the trend towards sites that you never have to sign up to participate in the community in just feel…well…like they are striving for maximum quantity over actual quality.
Tell me, if someone isn’t willing to sign up to a simple webform to participate in a discussion, are they really your audience? And, as casual passers by, why would you design features that reward them and not your passionate team members who are contributing heavily?
Maybe I’m totally wrong, but whenever I go to a site that tells me I don’t have to sign up to comment, edit, create something, etc., it feels impersonal to me. It reminds me of the old media model where you broadcast to many to catch a few (vs. new media where you help create amazing experiences for a few who go out and tell many):
Personally, I feel that it just sets the wrong sentiment from the beginning. If you truly want to create a long term, sustainable community, you have to realize that this takes time and patience and effort with everyone who does sign up.
And, from Citizen Agency ‘wisdom’ it breaks one of the core rules of community fostering: it puts quantity ahead of quality.
View Tara Hunt's profile
12 Comments
Tara, we did some work about a year ago that implied that network intimacy - the the “layers of belonging” if you like - are going to be increasingly critical as social nets - and our own online friend networks - get bigger. Most today are very blunt instruments - friend/not friend is about as good as it gets in most.
However, the point I wanted to pick up on today is entry barriers….if you take commenting for example, I don’t like to have to log in to comment on any one particular blog - I read so many, really can’t be bothered with this hassle….from my pov its no longer the Web 2 world anymore, its slipping back to Web 1.
As the reader, I also feel I am giving the blog some of my valuable attention, so asking me to jump hoops to comment gets my back up a bit. (I feel the same way about blogs that don’t show my trackback when I link to them btw). I think its a reciprocality thing.
What would be useful is if I, and your blog, were part of a trusted system eg your blog knew I was bona fide identity - a system a bit like eBay where I was a registered reader and your blog was a registered blog, both with transaction ratings…..and (as there are a number of these systems already) they were federated so that being a member of one allowed access to others automatically with my “trust” data.
It could be that if we both owned blogs there was an automatic peering, (hmmmm…graded peering based on authority…interesting idea there) but non blog owning users would jump through more hoops.
Another thought is around graded intimacy layers…maybe there are ways of affording privileges to frequent users (eg no capchas required)…I’m sure a bit of creative thought would yield some ideas.
Interesting post! To me, it seemed rather obvious that quality should be ahead of quantity (no side tone intended). However, I hadn’t considered the barriers to entry being linked to the close-ness of the community, although it certainly makes sense.
Something aweful requires you not just to sign up, but to pay, and they have a very large community as well as tight-knit cliques.
The question that comes to mind for me is how to create appropriate barriers to entry to give a greater community feel without alienating too many people. Some alienation is okay, I think. You don’t want everyone to be a fan, nor do you want everyone in your community, because at that point it’s no longer special. Perfect example is how Facebook is slowly losing its luster.
Excellent. You’ve definitely adjusted my thinking a little - and… got my mind spinning with idea.
FINALLY!
It has been a long time since you’ve written such a good article about community. I’ve been waiting.
That Kathy Sierra thing really dampened your innovative writing. Don’t let the buggers get you down!
Alan,
I’m like you regarding blogs… there are a few I’ll signup to comment on, but very few… 2 or 3 I think.
But I think Tara’s point is wider than just blogs and I fully agree with her. If someone will not fill in very basic info (name, email, password) then they’re unlikely to really be that interested in being a member of a community. This trend is, I think, driven by the desire to have a large ‘community’ - that is, by size of community as measure of success. The new pageview, if you will. Of course drive-by commenter are nowhere near as valuable to the community or to the business behind the community as committed participants, but you get to report big numbers and all too often, that’s what satisfies board members and investors. 500,000 commenters is just so much more IMPRESSIVE than 50,000 active community members. Isn’t it?
I am in 100% agreement with you on quality vs. quantity. I own a social network in a small niche. (www.happyposts.com) We’re just a few months old and you can already see the differentiation between passionate team members and contributors. In retrospect, I’m very thankful for this…all the content is user generated (or provided).
I have noted (and been told about) the entry barriers; you do have to register to post or comment. The idea of a member having no committment to the community just wouldn’t work for me. I believe in what the community stands for, and think everyone involved should as well. I’d rather have a few thousand committed people than 20,000 non-committed ones.
@ Rick…you are right, there is clearly some tipping point - some promise of value in the community - that will make a user prepared to go through the hassle of a sign in process. I was using blogs as an example where the value is by and large not enough, and the insistence of the blogger on sign-in will just lead to them being passsed on the roadside
I think the underlying issue is that its an asymmetric market - ie as a potential user I can’t tell which communities are great or cr*p from outside before signup (unless they are very well known), so to an extent I discount them all - and there are now a lot of them - so those with too stringent an entry barrier compared to the visible benefit (and the rest) will just get walked past in the main.
Quality vs quantity is certainly a tough balance when it comes to communities. A strong focus on quality will lead to a tight-knit community. In many cases, elitist would be a good description. For example, a site like YouTube would never be able to go viral if they focussed on the quality of the submissions (through barriers of entry past the sign-up, such as moderation). In a long-tail world, I think the challenge is allowing for quantity while enabling the quality to rise to the top, and even allowing the user to decide on what quality is based on their interests. YouTube does this through channels, related videos, tracking other users’ favorites, etc.
Also, what is “co-friending”? It must be obvious but I don’t have a clue.
“I don’t know if there has been a study done, but I’d expect that the closer knit communities have higher barriers to entry. I had to have a phone conversation to get on The Well! It made it feel way more substantial.”
Totally agree. And because of this I’ve been noticing something very strange. If you remember reading Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger mentions the Web being able to bend and break time and space. Well what I’m noticing is that some of the best ways to create a real “feeling” of online community is by re-establishing these “barriers” of time and space.
BTW you might also find iA Design’s access rights diagram interesting in their article on Newspaper Wiki Schematics. I think it’s a good way to increase a users access rights the more committed they become in helping the community.
Tara,
Good thoughts but I’m not on quite the same page concerning site registration… I’ve gone to comment in places before and then just not bothered because of registration requirements. Do I really need one more login for a site I may only use twice, or which promise “benefits” I don’t want? BugMeNot, here I come. Like your blog, mine, and 2 million others, I’m asked to leave my name and email address to comment… but I don’t have to sign up for anything. It’s impersonal only if I insist upon spoofing it.
For my part, referring to your first diagram, I think the visitor-to-customer shift needs to be made as easy as possible, and the customer-to-contributor shift only a bit less so. If the “difficulty” in moving from left to right in your diagram increases as you progress, I think it retains the value that you describe but means it’s easy to play in the sandbox and move on if you decide not to dig deeper. End result, higher quality membership in the passionate team members because you started with a larger sample. Quality and quantity are not always exclusive… sometimes it’s just a false dichotomy. The real insight is in the process of extracting quality from quantity.
I do agree that an increased barrier to entry tends to increase perceived value… to the point where based on your comments, I promptly headed off to The Well to see what that was all about. Still, this should happen farther to the right, not at first contact.
“Do I really need one more login for a site I may only use twice, or which promise “benefits†I don’t want?”
This is exactly what proves my point.
Certainly, lower the barriers to entry if you want ‘drop in’ comments and casual fly-bys, but if you are looking for a ‘community’, this is not the way to go.
Oh…and I don’t think there are many blogs we can actually call ‘communities’…unless they are dictatorial ones.
I think perhaps we aren’t presupposing the same type of community. Specific objectives exist for the establishing a community — if you want a small community of highly-participatory members, I think what you’re saying makes total sense. If you want a larger community and are willing to have semi-active members as well as highly involved ones, then you probably need to accept a longer timeframe in which to build it or cast a wider net. One way to do that is by allowing some version of guest membership so that the marginal involvement can draw in those most suited to the community. Even The Well does this. The guest membership barriers are set very low, with incentive to proceed to full membership if the community experience is a positive one.
Blogs, fwiw, could be considered a kind of community, but not the full-bore version of one as we’d like to imagine it. ;^) I only reference them as an example of (in most cases) low barriers to participation.
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