Openness creates growth which creates value which creates incentive which creates system-gaming which damages openness.
This social pattern has now hit LinkedIn. I got this from them a couple days ago:
Dear Clay,
As more professionals are actively adopting LinkedIn, you may have noticed that you are also getting more emails from people inviting you to be their connection.
While this is the easiest way to build your network and a testament to your reputation as a professional, we recommend you only accept invitations from people you know and who you are willing and able to recommend to other professionals you know...
Three themes in one! First, scale in social systems creates a pressure to introduce membranes that shield individual participants from the effects of scale.
Second, society is a public good, unowned and unownable, which sets it up for a tragedy of the commons. The tortured phrase "While this is the easiest way to build your network and a testament to your reputation as a professional..." speaks to the tension between rapid growth and long-term value.
(As an aside: is it really 2004 and people are _still_ retro-fitting sites to deal with the almost universal results of rapid social growth? People people people, this _always_ happens -- community software is unlike, say, audio editing tools in that success is much harder to deal with than failure. If you plan to succeed, plan to deal with success...)
And the third theme, of course, is the persistent tension between the goals of LinkedIn Inc., of the users of LinkedIn, and of those gaming the system. Here LinkedIn is recommending that I take additional steps most of whose value accrues to them, not me. To get a
LinkedIn whitelist I have to upload my address book first.
It's the standard YASNS plea -- "Do more work to help us bother you less!®" I assume they are in terror that I not figure out that simply ignoring all LinkedIn mail once the S/N ratio falls too far is much easier.
On a related note, Stowe Boyd tells an interesting story about
a guy _selling_ one degree connections to him (scroll to "SNA jacking"), on the grounds that he has
snammed enough people to act as a valuable bridge. The snammer in question
...is making contacts with folks on the LinkedIn network under false pretenses: We all presume that he is like us, and that his network is made up of people like our own business and personal contacts, not clients paying for access. Don't get me wrong, I think that his model — pay to play — is potentially a good one, so long as everyone involved is operating under the same set of rules. However, that's not the set of rules I was operating under when I joined LinkedIn, and it wasn't what I thought was going on when I accepted his request to become a contact. I don't want him to make money on my reputation and contacts, and I especially don't want him to do so without my knowing about it.
It's interesting to me that Stowe invokes the 'rules' he joined under, when no such things existed. What he means is "I made certain assumptions about the social fabric that this guy is violating, and as in real society, I expect my assumptions to be both shared and actionable."
That they are not comes as a surprise, and this tension between what we expect vs. what the terms of service say and the software allows is a lot of what makes the currently clunky YASNS world so interesting to watch.
1. Peter Caputa IV on May 5, 2004 11:48 AM writes...
The judgement that Stowe rendered on the guy that 'sold' connections is interesting to me.
It shows a bit of a bias on his part. His reputation is obviously 'earned' by delivering valuable insights to people in his writing. His insights are excellent and he deserves his reputation.
However, there are many people that earn their reputation by being able sell people things. In fact, I'd say that most successful business owners are also successful salespeople. This guy is simply selling something that others find valuable (connections to other people). The network that this guy has built may be no less valuable than his or mine.
In fact, he is not much different than a realtor, investment banker, concierge, recruiter/staffer. He is simply selling access to his network like they are.
I'd assume that this is guy is also smart enough to deliver value to both people when he makes a connection. In other words, when he links you up with someone, he makes sure that you both have something that each other want.
In that regard, he [could] be providing a very valuable service.
Permalink to Comment2. Konstantin on May 5, 2004 2:04 PM writes...
Quick clarification:
Unless our design changed last minute, you do not have to upload your address book to turn on invitation blocking. If you don't upload your address book and block invitations from people who may have you in *their* address book, but who are not in *your* in your address book, then you are essentially blocking all invitation messages from reaching you.
Our initial design was a simple radio button to block all invitation notifications. However, many people felt that they would not be able to use this feature since they wanted to be notified by invitations from some people, but not from others. They wanted mroe granular controls.
I hope we achieved a good design--if not, we'll tune it over time.
Please note that unlike systems that by default publish all contacts your upload, LinkedIn's address book is private. Your contacts only become searchable once you send them an invitation to connect and they opt in and provide the information they want to publish.
So, this feature is not in any way intended as a way to "get more people into the system," but to solve a problem stemming from a small group of users who invite far more people than they know and trust.
When we launched LinkedIn a year from today, we required the use of the email address to invite existing members to connect, which was widely criticized as too stringent because people felt they couldn't invite people they knew well, but for whom they didn't have a current email address. And they thought it would limit utiltiy of LinkedIn for them because we would never gain the critical mass and density to be useful if we didn't make inviting easier.
So, we tend to receive advice on both sides and try to make the most intelligent deicisions we can. Sometimes we fail, but I think our progress is showing that we have in most areas struck a balance that works for most of the people most of the time. But things will evolve I'm sure, and so will LinkedIn.
The motivation behind the invitation-blocking feature:
Based on the feedback we receive, our "referral-only" design (changable if people want to be accessible without referral) appears to have worked well so far in terms of keeping the signal to noise ratio high for prominent users (CEOs, hiring managers, journalists, VCs, etc.) who get flooded on a daily basis with business rpoposals, resumes, story pitches and busienss plans. While these people join for many reasons, they stay in LinkdIn because their connections are their filter and they have full control over who the connect with (again our design is opt-in vs. the opt-out approach of automated connections based on email correspondence).
However, we did not anticipate how many invitations even 1% of users (that is 5,500 at our current size of 550,000 active users) can send if they disregard the advice to only invite people they know and trust.
While I believe 80% of people will learn over time that their reputation is not enhanced by indiscriminantly inviting (more likely to hurt their reputation with some), we decided to put this solution in place now to protect the group of users above.
They, also, are just a small group, but they are an important part of a a large, diverse and high-quality professional network.
Permalink to Comment3. Gregory Narain on May 5, 2004 5:00 PM writes...
I tend to agree with Peter on the assertion that relationships are collateral, in the monetary sense as well as the social one.
The notion of "Monetizing the Rolodex" is certainly not new and will likely exist for a great while to come. The most difficult aspect, is petitioning the usage of my reputation, identity, etc. in a manner that is compliant with both parties needs and expectations.
With the brief exception of hermits that abstain from societal "obligations", what real protection do we actually have from others that wish to monetize us, for good, evil or otherwise?
I've posted some more thoughts here:
Permalink to Commenthttp://socialtwister.com/archives/000159.html
4. Craig Hubley on May 30, 2004 4:14 PM writes...
These problems are predictable, and inevitable, as long as the operators refuse to put users in direct control of the social contract itself. A commitment to a sort of democracy in defining the constitution or social expectations of such services is what is required, to avoid these issues of false pretences and false advertising. The users should be the ones authoring the disclaimers and stating what is and isn't allowed, and if that doesn't fit what was written in a VC's business plan, well, that's just tough. Once social software takes root it will in general move things in its own direction, and fighting that just makes the service fail.
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