Taming Internet Flamers and Attracting Adults to Boot
New user sites find ways to add civility to the cacophony
The Internet used to look so promising for democracy, with cheaper high-speed access, recovery from the dot-com collapse, and, most important, the emergence of "citizen media"—content of the people, by the people, and for the people.
But that's the trouble with grand ideas: The reality never quite lives up to the hype. Increasingly, Web innovators and investors say they are worried that the structure of social media sites is turning off older audiences, who, according to polls and Internet traffic data, have a lower tolerance than younger users for the inanity of the blogosphere and the profanities of message boards.
This is a concern for social sites. While people between ages 30 and 49 are about as likely to be online as their younger counterparts, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Center, they are significantly less likely to read blogs or consult Wikipedia, the user-edited encyclopedia. As the Internet's base expands, this is a demographic that social sites will have to court.
In response, a new generation of sites is trying to improve on the egalitarian model of sites like Wikipedia and Digg.com, where readers vote for their favorite links. By valuing expertise over the consensus of the crowd, these sites hope to bring a little more civility to the cacophony—and entice a few more grown-ups along the way.
Wikipedia is considered remarkably accurate for a document that anyone can edit. But like other user-generated sites, it attracts "flamers," users who post incendiary comments, usually to provoke others. The George W. Bush entry, for example, is corrupted so often that administrators have had to restrict editing to established users. "The anonymity [of flaming] is the same as anonymity of vandalizing in real life," says Judith Donath, an associate professor at the Media Laboratory at MIT. "The Net just makes it easier to do."
Helium. How to solve the problem? One new model is Helium.com, the brainchild of Internet strategist Mark Ranalli. Unlike Wikipedia, in which authors collaborate on a document, the eight-month-old Helium solicits articles from individual writers and pits them against one another for prominence on the site. Users rank articles with one important catch: Only fellow contributors are allowed to vote.
The rationale, according to Ranalli, is that "people only choose to compete if they think they can compete." The rules are intended to reward expertise while discouraging vandals and marketers. Last month, Helium attracted about 12 million page views; it has around 300,000 articles on 44,000 subjects.
A challenge for social media sites is keeping up with shifting demographics as their popularity increases and attracting the right people. Says critic Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur:" I'm not convinced that normal people want to write and evaluate content. My sense is that it's a system that's likely to be taken over by activists." Instead, he argues, such sites should come from "an organization with a real anchor in authority," like universities or publications, even if readers still do the heavy lifting. One example is the new online encyclopedia, Citizendium.org, which mixes established experts with other contributors.
Helium, too, has a built-in answer to Keen's criticisms. Rather than letting contributors choose which entries they vote for, which could allow them to simply vote for all their friends, the site randomly assigns articles for peer review. "If you're willing to sit in front of the tube and rate 10,000 pairs of articles, you might get a chance to rate your friend's," Ranalli says. "It's just mathematically impossible to game the system."
In at least one way, Helium's model seems to work. Traffic monitoring site Hitwise says around 40 percent of the site's traffic comes from users 35 to 44—bucking a trend of user-generated-content sites being overrepresented by the young—and the less mature.
This story appears in the June 18, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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