Powazek, Derek M (2002). Entry Barriers. In Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places (chap. 8). Indianapolis, New Riders.
Hmm, I'm starting to get a little self-conscious about being the first person to post again, but here goes.
This was an incredibly fun and informative chapter, full of applicable advice and design goals and alternatives. In particular the Nerve interview in the final pages was not only entertaining (who doesn't appreciate discussions about sex in a graduate class?) but also full of design goals. Specifically, one of the goals highlighted there was addressing how to maintain a peaceful and self-policiing community online. Among the suggestions, I thought the moderator/hosts' visible presence was the most intersting and relevant as an alternative. Emma Taylor thought it was important that she was a visible presence with photos and a personality, and not just an anonymous censor (189). At first I found this a bit counterintuitive because in some ways it models a top-down approach to regulation and maintaining that we've be warned against in previous readings. However, she laid out another design alternative in the next page when she advises to give examples and roll the community features out slowly (190). Her general theory is that if proper procedures are portrayed, members will naturally take care of themselves and follow the models.
But of course this chapter was about barriers, which Powazek enumerated from low to high. So as not to discuss everything this chapter covered (and so leave room for posters after me!) here is just a quick guide to the barriers he describes and one design goal from each:
Informal Barriers to Entry: Design Goal (DG): To have only members who are interested in the community participate. Design Alternative/Strategy (DA): "Move the community functionality to the end of the content, bury the post button, and let the content do the filtering for you" (170).
Formal Barriers to Entry: (DG): To create a loyal, well-behaved, consistent, and passionate user group. (DA): Create, among other things, a log-in account to prove that, "when users feel strong ties from their virutal world to their real life they're more likely to behave" or feel loyal (173).
Extreme Barriers to Entry: (DG): To maintain "content you really need to guard...[an] established community spinning out of control, growing too fast, or becoming hard to manage" (177). (DA): Allow barriers to change over time, perhaps changing requirements (new pass codes), raising the barriers (require payment), or burn the entire thing down (change URLs, etc.)
I found it very interesting that each example--including the interview at the end of the chapter--dealt with "behaving well" almost in that exact language. So this chapter wasn't just about gatekeeping, but having a bouncer at the door warning you with either a handshake or a pat-down.
Great introduction and summary to this article. I also found it very enjoyable to read, and full of practical advice and design goals for community builders to follow.
Perhaps my favorite advice came at the very end, where Powazek said "Listen to your members!" Reward the loyal members with privileges. To create a scalable community, give the members as much control as possible while still maintaining the kind of voice you want." The advice also says to highlight and focus on the bringing the BEST elements of your site to the surface, rather than keeping the bad ones down. I think this is a good perspective to have, one that has also been mentioned in previous reading this semester. It's a much more optimistic outlook to take - to have a 'benevolent dictatorship' to keep the bad stuff out, but only when necessary.
I now see how this reading applies to the Google SEO reading this week. Google was forced to create guidelines to enforce around negative SEO practices, since these were bringing down the quality of the results. I don't know if this would qualify as a formal or informal barrier to entry, but I do think it's an example of how, as Powazek says, the barriers to entry can and should change over time in response to the needs of the community. "Once a critical mass of users has arrived, it may make sense to raise the bar."
Submitted by John Blair on Wed, 02/13/2008 - 22:10.
0
points
John Blair
Very informative chapter with excellent examples of the levels of barriers and how they can be utilized. The thing I found most interesting is the examples of two communties that felt their growth was out of control and so they killed or burned the community. I thought this was an excellent means of "re-purposeing" the membership while at the same time getting them to collectively share a common experience by having to find the path to the new site. By having shared the experience of first being dis-barred, then discovering where the secret to hurdling the new barrier of where the community had moved, serves to really bond the "more interested" members together. Whether this was the intent or not, it's obvious that the results are to the liking of the 2nd generation community members.
Submitted by Matt Adamo on Wed, 02/13/2008 - 22:58.
0
points
A lot of design ideas/alternatives were mentioned above, so I just want to point out one other thing I noticed while reading this chapter. It seems like a lot of the techniques Emma Taylor (a host at NerveCenter) attributes to NerveCenter's success have been covered by our previous readings, especially the Kim chapters. The importance of listening to community members, giving members ways to to do their own things, regular/hosted events, and having the right kind of top-down moderating are all ideas Kim covered and NerveCenter practices. It was interesting having those ideas reinforced by a different voice in a community that functions well despite being fraught with potential for abuse.
Powazek's chapter on barriers to entry was pretty light and lively reading. I suppose most of us will agree that finding a balance between implementing too much or too few barriers is something community developers must think about. However, seeing as Powazek first published this in 2001 (or 2002), I feel that some of the concepts/examples were a little dated. Namely, Powazek's idea that content itself is a respectably robust informal barrier to entry. While this is generally true, I would say that there is enough similar sites out there now that content alone might not be significant enough. Similarly, the author gives examples of site designs and requirements (such as requiring users to download certain plug-ins) that function as informal barriers, suggesting that sometimes content itself is enough to encourage users to go through such processes. However, nowadays, sites that have less than simple log-in processes
may likely turn-off more potential users than Powazek describes. During the reading I found it interesting to look up the example sites that Powazek talks about. Surely enough, thirdage has a lot more ads and a lot more complex look to it now, and nytimes obviously removed its login requirement for reading articles.
Powazek then continues to discuss some forms of more direct barriers to entry, which included asking for email addresses, credit card information, and etc. Personally, I can't seem to remember any forum or online community that does not ask for an email address. As for credit card information, sites that do ask for credit card information are typically the ecommerce sites. However, if you take a look at Amazon, you immediately realize that while you do need to enter financial information in order to make purchases, Amazon definitely is not foolish enough to make everyone enter credit card information, let alone log in, just to access the site. Indeed, if the site has multiple uses (personally, I sometimes use amazon.com to check out a product's price, then go on ebay to get it cheaper), then creating multiple "userships/memberships" that has varying levels of entry barriers is a reasonable strategy.
Submitted by Tracy Liu on Thu, 02/14/2008 - 11:39.
0
points
This chapter first claims that communities are not always
open to all, and barriers are not always bad. There are three kinds of barriers
to entry: informal barriers, formal barriers and extreme barriers. Further,
barriers are not static but always
changing in a dynamic process.
In my opinion, the key element to build barriers well is to
understand the purpose of your specific purpose. Purpose is always changing in different stage
of communities, therefore, barriers are also transformed, which is important
for designers to track.
I think informal barriers can be used in large communities that deal with broad topics like: 43things, library thing, etc. Formal and extreme communities can be used only in niche communities.
Interestingly all online communities have a common informal barrier: internet access. It is not sufficient to have just computer, but the members also need a Internet access to participate in any online community. This will be an important barrier if we are considering the barriers for an community of sailors, African wildlife researchers, etc.
How about restricting the size of the community as a formal restriction? If the community owner knows what is a manageable community size, then the owner can restrict the size of the community. This will also make the existing members value their membership. I don't know of any community that has this policy. But I think it will be interesting to try it in cohesive and niche communities - like Dustin's MUD.
Informal Barriers to Entry
Focused communities will automatically create a barrier to entry by way of a clear statement of interest. These barriers are effective ways to communicate base levels of expected knowledge to participate without possibly offending prospective members by more formal screening procedures.
Example Barrier: Topic
Reddit - The 2nd most popular social news site is known for its politically-charged community and liberal-themed front-page stories. As I write this, 14 out of 25 front-page stories are about Washington politics. Interested newcomers will quickly catch on that stories about politics probably won't be voted to the front page nor will they likely attract discussion.
Formal Barriers to Entry
These usually take the form of mandatory member accounts or screen prospective members for some kind of required base level of knowledge or profile. Higher barriers require prospective members to signal higher motivation to join. Further, a higher percentage of members will likely be active contributors, but raising barriers too high might turn away people who are curious to observe what goes on inside.
Example Barrier: Accountability
Engadget - This gadget blog requires that all commenters supply an e-mail address with their posts and will only publish their content upon e-mail address confirmation. This reduces the likelihood for vandalism because people 1) have to be willing to share their e-mail address, 2) spend time confirming their identity, and 3) assume responsibility for their words. If a message is deemed inappropriate, future posts from that e-mail address could be suspended or banned
Extreme Barriers to Entry
I thought Powazek's definition was vague, lacking standard criteria: basically measures taken to protect sensitive content, or protect community focus. In practice, extreme barriers appear to play out as formal barriers, but edge cases.
Barrier: Financial, Achievement
TED - This renowned idea sharing community offers tiered membership privileges, based on achievement and financial success. (the latter probably, usually, hopefully correlates with the former) Anyone can sign up for a ted.com membership, which provides access privileges for commenting on lecture videos, but TED Conference members must apply for and be offered membership. Annual cost: $6000, annual discounted memberships for the financially disadvantaged: $2000.
Nice summary. I agree with you too about the extreme barriers. I felt that it didn't really make any explicit claims about this barrier. One commonality that may have been a coincidence is that the examples he choose all required a viral spread of access to the community. That is an extreme measure to choose to restrict access, but if you agree with the viral marketing reading it may not be an effective one either.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Powazek points out that “it all comes down to the goals of
the community”(173) …and on what types of barriers to entering one should have
or whether or not you should even have barriers. He has pointed out several barriers throughout
his article that have worked but I am curious to know of any barriers that a
site owner might have thought were appropriate only to find out the
opposite. He clearly states that this is
an ever evolving process and while I agree there is a fine line between
changing and “tweaking”, I also believe
that you have to step with caution.
NYTimes: A point of
clarification where someone posted that the NYT no longer requires a log in
process to read their articles(i.e. membership). Not exactly! I have been an avid reader of
nyt.com for some years now and I have always gotten so annoyed at how random it
seems that they require sign- in for certain articles. Their barrier to entry is an interesting one
that has not been explored in any of our articles thus far. I consider myself an avid reader of the NYT
and part of the readership(community) that they have established through
journalistic integrity(?), writing tone and sophistication(this can mean a lot
of things, i.e. Sunday Times magazine). However I didn’t actually make myself a
full fledged member until last night. As
I was reading Powazek, I recalled the annoyance of reading many a cover story
on their lead in page only to click the “full story” link and find out I have
to sign in to read the rest of the article.
As I was reading I thought, Powazek’s article is somewhat dated and
despite the fact that I read NYT daily it has been months(6+) since I’ve
clicked on an article and not been able to read it in its entirety because of a
their log in feature. Until
yesterday. I chose and article at random
and voila! IT happened. I finally gave
in and became a member. Then signed backed in and finished my article. Bastards.
The barriers they place on you.
However, I have always felt a part of the NYT community. And they facilitated my feeling this way
because 60% of the NYT articles I read online don’t require my signing in. This
is a strange one to pin point because they have the barrier but it is not a cut
and dry barrier. As I stated, it seems
they are very haphazard. There must be
some science to their madness because the NYT company does not do anything
haphazardly.
Reality Check example(177):
I wasn’t convinced by this model of barrier to entry. Though limiting 15 participants to a topic
may seem centered and focused it is still very “limiting”. What if you don’t have the right 15
people. What if the 15 people just
happen to all agree in unison on a topic.
There will be little debate and this lack of argumentation could really
weaken the effectiveness of placing such a barrier not to mention the integrity
of the topic itself?
Metafilter example(pp.32):
Great barrier- you want to be part of this community. Sign the dotted line. Be a member for 24 hours. Then proceed to post “at least” 3 comments to
a thread. Welcome to Metafilter. You are now one of us. Slick.
As for Nerve, its off the hook! Great examples and a true
community in every sense of the word.
I think for the purpose of online community design we need to consider what tools we have at our disposal when designing barriers. The barrier itself may be a continuum, but realistically a designer gets to choose from a few options.
Some of the barriers that powazek describes (like Davis' posting a login link in HTML comments) are novel, but not particularly useful as design tools. Informal barriers aside, I would break it out broadly into:
- Allowing anonymous contributions (ie anyone can post, the lowest cost for users, but also easy for abusers)
- Informal validation thru captchas or unvalidated account creation -- some minimal effort required, really just enough to foil crapflooders or spammers.
- require validated email address user account -- this is probably the most common "barrier", and isn't foolproof, and generally leads to account/password proliferation
- use of a centralized authentication authority -- openID has made a decent run at this, but it's also used in our university with cosign
- proof of identity (usually through CC#) -- useful for validating adult status or for market type situations where there is a higher risk of fraud. I would also include the site for doctors Paul has been working with where they check your medical license in this tier
- minimum level of investment/activity -- open parts of the site (or certain features) only to users who (like perlmonks) have recieved a certain number of upvotes or (in p2p networks) have a positive share/leech ratio
- redistributable invite-only, or "any active user can invite" -- similar to how the "punch code hot tub" worked in powazek's example worked. People can give out their invites to others but risk having their access pulled if it is abused. Popular for darknets and p2p rings.
- non-redistributable invitations -- this is how, for instance, SourceForge.net projects work when they allow project members to have write access to a source code repository.
I'm sure there are probably more, but I think these are something like notches on the access dial from "anything goes" to "only the chosen few".
"I often joke that the one and only way to make sure that a virtual community is always peaceful and flame-free is to require a valid credit card number to join. Now that's a barrier to entry!" - Powazek
This quote was particularly amusing to me, seeing as how all the major MMORPGs and many of the smaller ones (including my MUD) require a credit card and monthly subscriptions. This does serve as a real (and quite useful) barrier to entry. A subscription fee excludes some of the riff-raff, but it's not the super solution that Powazek claims. Peaceful? Flame-free? Hardly. If you impose subscription fees, watch out for the sense of entitlement that $15 buys.
With that said, credit card validation is a great technique if you want a strong but arbitrary barrier to entry. Though it is a significant barrier to entry, it doesn't discriminate along lines that are likely to be of value to your community (aside from showing commitment), unless you want to include only the credit-worthy. I think that credit cards are more valuable as a means of enforcement. It's much easier to ban someone who has been 'de-anonymized' through a credit card.
I am interested though in other ways that barriers could be imposed that would prevent flaming. I have thought that people should be able to vote other users out of online communities. If you thought that your flaming would get you rejected from a community it might help prevent the behavior. Also, knowing that a community had this feature could act as a form of screening to people who were inclined to start flame wars in the first place.
One of the most insightful design claims in this reading, I though, was the discussion of evolving barriers. Basically, formal or extreme barriers can be deadly to a start-up community. It is best to use the informal barrier of simple interest.
But as the community evolves, it will often be necessary to implement new barriers to entry, in order to keep the community manageable and on-topic.
One question to add to this is how you can create barriers to entry when people are already in the community - because often the time you realize that you need stronger barriers is the time that you see people who are part of the community who shouldn't be. Is there a way to side-step the monarchy approach of just kicking them out, and instead get them to kick themselves out?
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Thu, 02/14/2008 - 22:54.
0
points
A really good question, Erin. What it made me think of was my old hotmail account. I had e-mail since, oh, I don't know, 5th grade. And then sometime in middle school, Hotmail gets this fancy-smancy passport crap and tells me that I have to prove that I have an adult's approval for having an e-mail account, since I was still under 18. Unfortunately, my parents needed a better reason than "my e-mail account broke" for me to get their credit card number out of them for use on the internet. (Sometimes I hate MS, and yet, I have an interview with them on Monday... ack!)
So anyhow, my point is, you can make certain types of barries to entry that are implemented retrospectively be barriers to re-entry - they don't get kicked out, all of their data is still there, they just have to surpass this barrier to re-enter the site.
I was too honest as a kid. But if you're curious, I did lie about my birthdate to sign up for a new account. ;-) Not such an effective barrier to entry after all...
I've mentioned about the entry barriers to my high school alumni community in my blog. Here I would like to reflect on Powacek "a well-placed barrier to entry ... result in ... well-behaved community". A case in point is the Intranet of my employer. While there is barrier in terms of internal IP addresses, and only employees can login and participate, behavior whether it's good or not depends also on level of anonymity. But this is only for the online forum which was open to staff - but they didnt have to put in their names (although we the admins knew who posted what).
Talking about credit cards, I remember that Yahoo and Disney require minors to key in their dad's credit card account number before they can register.. why this barrier? After all, Yahooligans and Disney are for kids. But then again, I haven't checked whether such requirement is still valid now.
And it's interesting to learn that the nerve.com community is well behaved. I guess coz it's run by ladies. there are plenty of other choices if u don't like their rules.
Powazek points out that barrier to entry may be good for a community to keep undesired people out, and keep desired people inside. Then, Powazek mentioned different types of barriers to entry, such as interest-level, and registration requirement.
I enjoyed reading the conversation in the end of this chapter. I especially like some tips Emma shared:
Give the members as much control as possible
Reward the loyal members with privileges.
Focus on bring the best elements of the community to the surface, rather than on keeping the bad elements down.
Make sure new comers see example discussions that you want them to see.
First, I really like this article and Powazek in general. He has extremely good points and he knows how to get them accross even better. Kim for example is OK to read as well, but her content is often a little shallow. And Wenger and some other people might be really onto something but it's just a torture to read them (at least for me). I'm really thankful for something that can score on both scales!
Example for an extreem entry barrier
One example for an extreme entry barrier is the hoodwink.d community. It is a web annotation tool/community that is really secretive but at the same time in principle open to everybody. It was real fun trying to get in and feeling your way around. It felt really special. I'm not going to tell all the secrets, you can try it out yourself at http://hoodwinkd.hobix.com/
In any case this entry barrier seems to be really selective only letting users with a certain level of technical expertise in.
There was a time that Facebook was only open to college students. Users knew that their fellow friends were all academics! Networks were pretty obvious and people weren't really allowed to be anonymous.
When Facebook lowered the barriers and allowed anyone to join the site, users fought it. They thought it would become Myspace. Maybe they were right.
Just this week, I am having my resilience tested. My family found Facebook. I am NOT adding them as my friends. But I don't know how long I can refuse their requests.
Sometimes barriers to entry are very good. Barriers that keep my nosy family out of my social networks!
I need to get an internship at Facebook so I can implement some more atomic privacy controls. Seriously.
I might be in the minority here but I didn't find this reading particularly insightful or interesting. Yes, it provides examples of sites that employ different barriers to entry – as a bonus, he even partitions the barriers into informal, formal, and extreme. And, yes, it even includes a full 8 page interview with a lady that helps run a sex site for sophisticates. But in the end, it seems like mostly empty calories.
I actually have similar feelings with Greg. Though I still agree with all the points the author tried to make. Barriers defiitely exist everywhere and it is important that we realize and fully understand them. The three kinds of barriers the author mentioned make some sense to me and since a number of summaries have already been made, I am not going to duplicate this work again here. The last interview part is kind of interesting as well as those examples and stories, but again, I don't feel I get much out of it at the end.
This is a pretty straightforward chapter talking about how to manipulate community boundary. However, it is not so insightful as Greg observed. In my opinion, boundary is much more complicated than those we can see explicitly, like a request for email address. In fact, there are many more boundaries which exist implicit and even the administrators are unaware of. The boundaries talked in this chapter is basically the boundaries for entering the space rather than the real community per se. For example, I have added myself on a badminton mailing list and always been informed with the gathering information and some other things related to the members. However, since there were already a group a people who know each other long ago, they often talked in the context i am not familiar with. I feel like I AM NOT in the community. The actual boundary between me and them is the fact that they don't really know me and I don't know them either. To be really involved into it I think I need make great effort to make me known by them.
In essence, there are varying levels of barriers existing in and between communities and participation. Most barriers are emerging and evolving over time and hard to manipulate: not like as easy as "raising the bar." However, I believed that there is still some intervention we can adopt to adjust those more implicit barriers. Unfortunately this chapter did not mention this...maybe awaiting for advanced studies to reveal it.
Submitted by Daniel Zhou on Sat, 02/16/2008 - 00:54.
0
points
A few points I'd like to add here:
There might be a causal relationship between he barrier of entry and community identity. If so, we can increase the barrier of entry in order to enhance community identity and loyalty. "A well-placed barrier to entry will develop your site's identity and filter your audience to those with the most knowledge and passion for the subject."
There might be different levels of barriers of entry in a single community for different levels of membership.
Submitted by Sean Munson on Sun, 02/17/2008 - 00:07.
0
points
Overall, this chapter seems to be a nice tour of some of the reasons that one would want to create a barrier to entry and some of the ways to do that. I guess I'm not so comfortable with the Powazek's general description of the landscape of of barriers. Rather than laying out barriers soley on a low-barrier-to-extreme-barrier axis, it seems more worthwhile to explore some alternative groupings. Some categories might be (1) barriers just designed to prevent malicious use (CAPTCHAs, etc); (2) barriers meant to establish credentials (e.g. are you a pilot? are you an alumni? are you a real doctor?); (3) barriers meant to slow new users down long enough to be socialized (e.g. the Metafilter example). We could identity other categories too, but I think that this sort of categorization is more useful for me to think about as a designer, where the type of barrier is matched with the esign goal.
The burning the village example was an interesting story, but hardly seems to be a useful example for designers (and even Powazek admits that it is an extreme example), unless the point is to be prepared to grow your community. Otherwise, it seems like a risky and unfair test for users' loyalty / connectedness to the community's core.
Powazek mentions that it may be good for communities to lower their barriers over time. He provides one speculative (and not very well supported) example, and so I tried to think of better examples. One example that comes to mind is communities that launch in beta (to limit the initial strain as software bugs get worked out, but also to start with a small number of users who may have some other common ground / shared understanding of the community's goals). Can anyone think of others?
------------
I also found it interesting to take a look at Powazek's new project, Pixish. It's sort of a business-with-community features or principles site, but the community-like features are present enough that it could be an example of how Powazek would implement some of the principles in the chapters we have been reading.
Barriers, Behavior, & Sex
Hmm, I'm starting to get a little self-conscious about being the first person to post again, but here goes.
This was an incredibly fun and informative chapter, full of applicable advice and design goals and alternatives. In particular the Nerve interview in the final pages was not only entertaining (who doesn't appreciate discussions about sex in a graduate class?) but also full of design goals. Specifically, one of the goals highlighted there was addressing how to maintain a peaceful and self-policiing community online. Among the suggestions, I thought the moderator/hosts' visible presence was the most intersting and relevant as an alternative. Emma Taylor thought it was important that she was a visible presence with photos and a personality, and not just an anonymous censor (189). At first I found this a bit counterintuitive because in some ways it models a top-down approach to regulation and maintaining that we've be warned against in previous readings. However, she laid out another design alternative in the next page when she advises to give examples and roll the community features out slowly (190). Her general theory is that if proper procedures are portrayed, members will naturally take care of themselves and follow the models.
But of course this chapter was about barriers, which Powazek enumerated from low to high. So as not to discuss everything this chapter covered (and so leave room for posters after me!) here is just a quick guide to the barriers he describes and one design goal from each:
I found it very interesting that each example--including the interview at the end of the chapter--dealt with "behaving well" almost in that exact language. So this chapter wasn't just about gatekeeping, but having a bouncer at the door warning you with either a handshake or a pat-down.
Thoughts
Great introduction and summary to this article. I also found it very enjoyable to read, and full of practical advice and design goals for community builders to follow.
Perhaps my favorite advice came at the very end, where Powazek said "Listen to your members!" Reward the loyal members with privileges. To create a scalable community, give the members as much control as possible while still maintaining the kind of voice you want." The advice also says to highlight and focus on the bringing the BEST elements of your site to the surface, rather than keeping the bad ones down. I think this is a good perspective to have, one that has also been mentioned in previous reading this semester. It's a much more optimistic outlook to take - to have a 'benevolent dictatorship' to keep the bad stuff out, but only when necessary.
I now see how this reading applies to the Google SEO reading this week. Google was forced to create guidelines to enforce around negative SEO practices, since these were bringing down the quality of the results. I don't know if this would qualify as a formal or informal barrier to entry, but I do think it's an example of how, as Powazek says, the barriers to entry can and should change over time in response to the needs of the community. "Once a critical mass of users has arrived, it may make sense to raise the bar."
Barriers 101
John Blair
Very informative chapter with excellent examples of the levels of barriers and how they can be utilized. The thing I found most interesting is the examples of two communties that felt their growth was out of control and so they killed or burned the community. I thought this was an excellent means of "re-purposeing" the membership while at the same time getting them to collectively share a common experience by having to find the path to the new site. By having shared the experience of first being dis-barred, then discovering where the secret to hurdling the new barrier of where the community had moved, serves to really bond the "more interested" members together. Whether this was the intent or not, it's obvious that the results are to the liking of the 2nd generation community members.
NerveCenter and earlier readings
A lot of design ideas/alternatives were mentioned above, so I just want to point out one other thing I noticed while reading this chapter. It seems like a lot of the techniques Emma Taylor (a host at NerveCenter) attributes to NerveCenter's success have been covered by our previous readings, especially the Kim chapters. The importance of listening to community members, giving members ways to to do their own things, regular/hosted events, and having the right kind of top-down moderating are all ideas Kim covered and NerveCenter practices. It was interesting having those ideas reinforced by a different voice in a community that functions well despite being fraught with potential for abuse.
nerve.com
nervecenter.com doesn't seem to be alive. I think it's merged into nerve.com
Some thoughts on Powazek reading
Powazek's chapter on barriers to entry was pretty light and lively reading. I suppose most of us will agree that finding a balance between implementing too much or too few barriers is something community developers must think about. However, seeing as Powazek first published this in 2001 (or 2002), I feel that some of the concepts/examples were a little dated. Namely, Powazek's idea that content itself is a respectably robust informal barrier to entry. While this is generally true, I would say that there is enough similar sites out there now that content alone might not be significant enough. Similarly, the author gives examples of site designs and requirements (such as requiring users to download certain plug-ins) that function as informal barriers, suggesting that sometimes content itself is enough to encourage users to go through such processes. However, nowadays, sites that have less than simple log-in processes
may likely turn-off more potential users than Powazek describes. During the reading I found it interesting to look up the example sites that Powazek talks about. Surely enough, thirdage has a lot more ads and a lot more complex look to it now, and nytimes obviously removed its login requirement for reading articles.
Powazek then continues to discuss some forms of more direct barriers to entry, which included asking for email addresses, credit card information, and etc. Personally, I can't seem to remember any forum or online community that does not ask for an email address. As for credit card information, sites that do ask for credit card information are typically the ecommerce sites. However, if you take a look at Amazon, you immediately realize that while you do need to enter financial information in order to make purchases, Amazon definitely is not foolish enough to make everyone enter credit card information, let alone log in, just to access the site. Indeed, if the site has multiple uses (personally, I sometimes use amazon.com to check out a product's price, then go on ebay to get it cheaper), then creating multiple "userships/memberships" that has varying levels of entry barriers is a reasonable strategy.
Purpose and Barriers
This chapter first claims that communities are not always
open to all, and barriers are not always bad. There are three kinds of barriers
to entry: informal barriers, formal barriers and extreme barriers. Further,
barriers are not static but always
changing in a dynamic process.
In my opinion, the key element to build barriers well is to
understand the purpose of your specific purpose. Purpose is always changing in different stage
of communities, therefore, barriers are also transformed, which is important
for designers to track.
Barriers are what separates us from them
I think informal barriers can be used in large communities that deal with broad topics like: 43things, library thing, etc. Formal and extreme communities can be used only in niche communities.
Interestingly all online communities have a common informal barrier: internet access. It is not sufficient to have just computer, but the members also need a Internet access to participate in any online community. This will be an important barrier if we are considering the barriers for an community of sailors, African wildlife researchers, etc.
How about restricting the size of the community as a formal restriction? If the community owner knows what is a manageable community size, then the owner can restrict the size of the community. This will also make the existing members value their membership. I don't know of any community that has this policy. But I think it will be interesting to try it in cohesive and niche communities - like Dustin's MUD.
Barriers to Zaadz
I thought this article was the most practical to apply to design
ideas. It reminded me of my experience on the former e-community
zaadz.com, now bought out by Gaia. Zaadz was advertised in
conscious consumer magazines like "PLENTY" as a social networking site
for "people who want to change the world," similar to idealist, but
with an incredibly unmanageable scope of networking features.
To join the community, you needed to send an email to
"Brian" the site founder, telling him how you would like to change the wold.
Although I thought this was kind of ridiculous, I did it and it
took me a couple shots to get through.....in any event, I agree with the
notion put forth in the article that "the more energy you expend to join a
community, the more it means to you." Once a member a zaadz.com, there
were opportunities to become a zaadz "ambassador," after
reaching a certain quota of contributions to the site. To become
an ambassador, you also had to apply. I was eventually
accepted (but had lost interest in the site by that time), and
I received a box of zaadz flyers in the mail and a zaadz t-shirt
Although I think they had some good ideas and design features in the
community, they bit off more than they could chew and were
consistently sending apology messages suggesting they were having
difficulty scaling the site.....I left before they were sold to Gaia, but learned
a lot in the process about the dynamics of tiered access to entry that can
make or break an e-community
Lisa McLaughlin
Example Barriers
Informal Barriers to Entry
Focused communities will automatically create a barrier to entry by way of a clear statement of interest. These barriers are effective ways to communicate base levels of expected knowledge to participate without possibly offending prospective members by more formal screening procedures.
Example Barrier: Topic
Reddit - The 2nd most popular social news site is known for its politically-charged community and liberal-themed front-page stories. As I write this, 14 out of 25 front-page stories are about Washington politics. Interested newcomers will quickly catch on that stories about politics probably won't be voted to the front page nor will they likely attract discussion.
Formal Barriers to Entry
These usually take the form of mandatory member accounts or screen prospective members for some kind of required base level of knowledge or profile. Higher barriers require prospective members to signal higher motivation to join. Further, a higher percentage of members will likely be active contributors, but raising barriers too high might turn away people who are curious to observe what goes on inside.
Example Barrier: Accountability
Engadget - This gadget blog requires that all commenters supply an e-mail address with their posts and will only publish their content upon e-mail address confirmation. This reduces the likelihood for vandalism because people 1) have to be willing to share their e-mail address, 2) spend time confirming their identity, and 3) assume responsibility for their words. If a message is deemed inappropriate, future posts from that e-mail address could be suspended or banned
Extreme Barriers to Entry
I thought Powazek's definition was vague, lacking standard criteria: basically measures taken to protect sensitive content, or protect community focus. In practice, extreme barriers appear to play out as formal barriers, but edge cases.
Barrier: Financial, Achievement
TED - This renowned idea sharing community offers tiered membership privileges, based on achievement and financial success. (the latter probably, usually, hopefully correlates with the former) Anyone can sign up for a ted.com membership, which provides access privileges for commenting on lecture videos, but TED Conference members must apply for and be offered membership. Annual cost: $6000, annual discounted memberships for the financially disadvantaged: $2000.
Viral barriers?
Nice summary. I agree with you too about the extreme barriers. I felt that it didn't really make any explicit claims about this barrier. One commonality that may have been a coincidence is that the examples he choose all required a viral spread of access to the community. That is an extreme measure to choose to restrict access, but if you agree with the viral marketing reading it may not be an effective one either.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Give me my Powazek back. Thank you.
Several points.
Powazek points out that “it all comes down to the goals of
the community”(173) …and on what types of barriers to entering one should have
or whether or not you should even have barriers. He has pointed out several barriers throughout
his article that have worked but I am curious to know of any barriers that a
site owner might have thought were appropriate only to find out the
opposite. He clearly states that this is
an ever evolving process and while I agree there is a fine line between
changing and “tweaking”, I also believe
that you have to step with caution.
NYTimes: A point of
clarification where someone posted that the NYT no longer requires a log in
process to read their articles(i.e. membership). Not exactly! I have been an avid reader of
nyt.com for some years now and I have always gotten so annoyed at how random it
seems that they require sign- in for certain articles. Their barrier to entry is an interesting one
that has not been explored in any of our articles thus far. I consider myself an avid reader of the NYT
and part of the readership(community) that they have established through
journalistic integrity(?), writing tone and sophistication(this can mean a lot
of things, i.e. Sunday Times magazine). However I didn’t actually make myself a
full fledged member until last night. As
I was reading Powazek, I recalled the annoyance of reading many a cover story
on their lead in page only to click the “full story” link and find out I have
to sign in to read the rest of the article.
As I was reading I thought, Powazek’s article is somewhat dated and
despite the fact that I read NYT daily it has been months(6+) since I’ve
clicked on an article and not been able to read it in its entirety because of a
their log in feature. Until
yesterday. I chose and article at random
and voila! IT happened. I finally gave
in and became a member. Then signed backed in and finished my article. Bastards.
The barriers they place on you.
However, I have always felt a part of the NYT community. And they facilitated my feeling this way
because 60% of the NYT articles I read online don’t require my signing in. This
is a strange one to pin point because they have the barrier but it is not a cut
and dry barrier. As I stated, it seems
they are very haphazard. There must be
some science to their madness because the NYT company does not do anything
haphazardly.
Reality Check example(177):
I wasn’t convinced by this model of barrier to entry. Though limiting 15 participants to a topic
may seem centered and focused it is still very “limiting”. What if you don’t have the right 15
people. What if the 15 people just
happen to all agree in unison on a topic.
There will be little debate and this lack of argumentation could really
weaken the effectiveness of placing such a barrier not to mention the integrity
of the topic itself?
Metafilter example(pp.32):
Great barrier- you want to be part of this community. Sign the dotted line. Be a member for 24 hours. Then proceed to post “at least” 3 comments to
a thread. Welcome to Metafilter. You are now one of us. Slick.
As for Nerve, its off the hook! Great examples and a true
community in every sense of the word.
a menu of barriers
I think for the purpose of online community design we need to consider what tools we have at our disposal when designing barriers. The barrier itself may be a continuum, but realistically a designer gets to choose from a few options.
Some of the barriers that powazek describes (like Davis' posting a login link in HTML comments) are novel, but not particularly useful as design tools. Informal barriers aside, I would break it out broadly into:
- Allowing anonymous contributions (ie anyone can post, the lowest cost for users, but also easy for abusers)
- Informal validation thru captchas or unvalidated account creation -- some minimal effort required, really just enough to foil crapflooders or spammers.
- require validated email address user account -- this is probably the most common "barrier", and isn't foolproof, and generally leads to account/password proliferation
- use of a centralized authentication authority -- openID has made a decent run at this, but it's also used in our university with cosign
- proof of identity (usually through CC#) -- useful for validating adult status or for market type situations where there is a higher risk of fraud. I would also include the site for doctors Paul has been working with where they check your medical license in this tier
- minimum level of investment/activity -- open parts of the site (or certain features) only to users who (like perlmonks) have recieved a certain number of upvotes or (in p2p networks) have a positive share/leech ratio
- redistributable invite-only, or "any active user can invite" -- similar to how the "punch code hot tub" worked in powazek's example worked. People can give out their invites to others but risk having their access pulled if it is abused. Popular for darknets and p2p rings.
- non-redistributable invitations -- this is how, for instance, SourceForge.net projects work when they allow project members to have write access to a source code repository.
I'm sure there are probably more, but I think these are something like notches on the access dial from "anything goes" to "only the chosen few".
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oostendo@umich.edu
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Credit Cards - Strong Barriers
"I often joke that the one and only way to make sure that a virtual community is always peaceful and flame-free is to require a valid credit card number to join. Now that's a barrier to entry!" - Powazek
This quote was particularly amusing to me, seeing as how all the major MMORPGs and many of the smaller ones (including my MUD) require a credit card and monthly subscriptions. This does serve as a real (and quite useful) barrier to entry. A subscription fee excludes some of the riff-raff, but it's not the super solution that Powazek claims. Peaceful? Flame-free? Hardly. If you impose subscription fees, watch out for the sense of entitlement that $15 buys.
With that said, credit card validation is a great technique if you want a strong but arbitrary barrier to entry. Though it is a significant barrier to entry, it doesn't discriminate along lines that are likely to be of value to your community (aside from showing commitment), unless you want to include only the credit-worthy. I think that credit cards are more valuable as a means of enforcement. It's much easier to ban someone who has been 'de-anonymized' through a credit card.
Can we build a barrier for jerks?
Agreed, money can't stop the flame.
I am interested though in other ways that barriers could be imposed that would prevent flaming. I have thought that people should be able to vote other users out of online communities. If you thought that your flaming would get you rejected from a community it might help prevent the behavior. Also, knowing that a community had this feature could act as a form of screening to people who were inclined to start flame wars in the first place.
Evolving barriers
One of the most insightful design claims in this reading, I though, was the discussion of evolving barriers. Basically, formal or extreme barriers can be deadly to a start-up community. It is best to use the informal barrier of simple interest.
But as the community evolves, it will often be necessary to implement new barriers to entry, in order to keep the community manageable and on-topic.
One question to add to this is how you can create barriers to entry when people are already in the community - because often the time you realize that you need stronger barriers is the time that you see people who are part of the community who shouldn't be. Is there a way to side-step the monarchy approach of just kicking them out, and instead get them to kick themselves out?
good question
A really good question, Erin. What it made me think of was my old hotmail account. I had e-mail since, oh, I don't know, 5th grade. And then sometime in middle school, Hotmail gets this fancy-smancy passport crap and tells me that I have to prove that I have an adult's approval for having an e-mail account, since I was still under 18. Unfortunately, my parents needed a better reason than "my e-mail account broke" for me to get their credit card number out of them for use on the internet. (Sometimes I hate MS, and yet, I have an interview with them on Monday... ack!)
So anyhow, my point is, you can make certain types of barries to entry that are implemented retrospectively be barriers to re-entry - they don't get kicked out, all of their data is still there, they just have to surpass this barrier to re-enter the site.
I was too honest as a kid. But if you're curious, I did lie about my birthdate to sign up for a new account. ;-) Not such an effective barrier to entry after all...
Once inside, the anons misbehave
I've mentioned about the entry barriers to my high school alumni community in my blog. Here I would like to reflect on Powacek "a well-placed barrier to entry ... result in ... well-behaved community". A case in point is the Intranet of my employer. While there is barrier in terms of internal IP addresses, and only employees can login and participate, behavior whether it's good or not depends also on level of anonymity. But this is only for the online forum which was open to staff - but they didnt have to put in their names (although we the admins knew who posted what).
Talking about credit cards, I remember that Yahoo and Disney require minors to key in their dad's credit card account number before they can register.. why this barrier? After all, Yahooligans and Disney are for kids. But then again, I haven't checked whether such requirement is still valid now.
And it's interesting to learn that the nerve.com community is well behaved. I guess coz it's run by ladies. there are plenty of other choices if u don't like their rules.
Useful
Powazek points out that barrier to entry may be good for a community to keep undesired people out, and keep desired people inside. Then, Powazek mentioned different types of barriers to entry, such as interest-level, and registration requirement.
I enjoyed reading the conversation in the end of this chapter. I especially like some tips Emma shared:
Give the members as much control as possible
Reward the loyal members with privileges.
Focus on bring the best elements of the community to the surface, rather than on keeping the bad elements down.
Make sure new comers see example discussions that you want them to see.
great article & example for an extreme entry barrier
First, I really like this article and Powazek in general. He has extremely good points and he knows how to get them accross even better. Kim for example is OK to read as well, but her content is often a little shallow. And Wenger and some other people might be really onto something but it's just a torture to read them (at least for me). I'm really thankful for something that can score on both scales!
Example for an extreem entry barrier
One example for an extreme entry barrier is the hoodwink.d community. It is a web annotation tool/community that is really secretive but at the same time in principle open to everybody. It was real fun trying to get in and feeling your way around. It felt really special. I'm not going to tell all the secrets, you can try it out yourself at http://hoodwinkd.hobix.com/
In any case this entry barrier seems to be really selective only letting users with a certain level of technical expertise in.
Barriers to entry are good. Case Study:
There was a time that Facebook was only open to college students. Users knew that their fellow friends were all academics! Networks were pretty obvious and people weren't really allowed to be anonymous.
When Facebook lowered the barriers and allowed anyone to join the site, users fought it. They thought it would become Myspace. Maybe they were right.
Just this week, I am having my resilience tested. My family found Facebook. I am NOT adding them as my friends. But I don't know how long I can refuse their requests.
Sometimes barriers to entry are very good. Barriers that keep my nosy family out of my social networks!
I need to get an internship at Facebook so I can implement some more atomic privacy controls. Seriously.
Codifying the obvious
I might be in the minority here but I didn't find this reading particularly insightful or interesting. Yes, it provides examples of sites that employ different barriers to entry – as a bonus, he even partitions the barriers into informal, formal, and extreme. And, yes, it even includes a full 8 page interview with a lady that helps run a sex site for sophisticates. But in the end, it seems like mostly empty calories.
I actually have similar
I actually have similar feelings with Greg. Though I still agree with all the points the author tried to make. Barriers defiitely exist everywhere and it is important that we realize and fully understand them. The three kinds of barriers the author mentioned make some sense to me and since a number of summaries have already been made, I am not going to duplicate this work again here. The last interview part is kind of interesting as well as those examples and stories, but again, I don't feel I get much out of it at the end.
Barriers: more than what can be manipulated
This is a pretty straightforward chapter talking about how to manipulate community boundary. However, it is not so insightful as Greg observed. In my opinion, boundary is much more complicated than those we can see explicitly, like a request for email address. In fact, there are many more boundaries which exist implicit and even the administrators are unaware of. The boundaries talked in this chapter is basically the boundaries for entering the space rather than the real community per se. For example, I have added myself on a badminton mailing list and always been informed with the gathering information and some other things related to the members. However, since there were already a group a people who know each other long ago, they often talked in the context i am not familiar with. I feel like I AM NOT in the community. The actual boundary between me and them is the fact that they don't really know me and I don't know them either. To be really involved into it I think I need make great effort to make me known by them.
In essence, there are varying levels of barriers existing in and between communities and participation. Most barriers are emerging and evolving over time and hard to manipulate: not like as easy as "raising the bar." However, I believed that there is still some intervention we can adopt to adjust those more implicit barriers. Unfortunately this chapter did not mention this...maybe awaiting for advanced studies to reveal it.
a few points
A few points I'd like to add here:
how to think of barriers, going beyond Powazek
Overall, this chapter seems to be a nice tour of some of the reasons that one would want to create a barrier to entry and some of the ways to do that. I guess I'm not so comfortable with the Powazek's general description of the landscape of of barriers. Rather than laying out barriers soley on a low-barrier-to-extreme-barrier axis, it seems more worthwhile to explore some alternative groupings. Some categories might be (1) barriers just designed to prevent malicious use (CAPTCHAs, etc); (2) barriers meant to establish credentials (e.g. are you a pilot? are you an alumni? are you a real doctor?); (3) barriers meant to slow new users down long enough to be socialized (e.g. the Metafilter example). We could identity other categories too, but I think that this sort of categorization is more useful for me to think about as a designer, where the type of barrier is matched with the esign goal.
The burning the village example was an interesting story, but hardly seems to be a useful example for designers (and even Powazek admits that it is an extreme example), unless the point is to be prepared to grow your community. Otherwise, it seems like a risky and unfair test for users' loyalty / connectedness to the community's core.
Powazek mentions that it may be good for communities to lower their barriers over time. He provides one speculative (and not very well supported) example, and so I tried to think of better examples. One example that comes to mind is communities that launch in beta (to limit the initial strain as software bugs get worked out, but also to start with a small number of users who may have some other common ground / shared understanding of the community's goals). Can anyone think of others?
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I also found it interesting to take a look at Powazek's new project, Pixish. It's sort of a business-with-community features or principles site, but the community-like features are present enough that it could be an example of how Powazek would implement some of the principles in the chapters we have been reading.