The much blogged choice by George Michael to shut down the message boards on his site.
As many of you will know, much of my reasoning for the future is to stay away from the negativity of the media. I think that it is bad for me and for music in general, so I find it really sad to see the forums so packed full of negative comment, and that so many genuinely positive fans find themselves defending me… constantly against attack. How pointless. […] Those of you that want to carry on the media’s work will have to do it somewhere else. […] Sorry guys, but that’s the way it goes… Peace and Love… or nothing at all.
Let us stipulate, as the lawyers say, that Michael is an idiot. Giving people tools for uncensored communications and then expecting them to engage in “Peace and Love… or nothing at all” puts him in Radio 4 territory. (I also love the implication that people posting negative posts are doing “the media’s work”.) But this is an old story — the real interest, I think, lies elsewhere.
The open question, I think, is this: when does a board turn nasty like this? Cory Doctorow made the observation that the comments at boingboing were extremely positive, even when critical, during the early days of the site, but later, as the site grew, they turned nasty and vitriolic. My hypothesis is that two effects are at work here:
1. The community/audience threshold is critical — when a site is large enough that it reaches an ‘audience’ (which is to say a group of users too large to be communal) it loses communal self-regulation and becomes an attractive nuisance for people who want to use comments as a collateral way of reaching the same audience.
2. Fame makes people angry. Fame is an imbalance of attention — more people want your time than you have time to give. In practice, this means that interactions with famous people almost always involve you getting dissed. Intellectually, you know this is situational and beyond remedy, but emotionally, it still feels bad. (The closest most people get to feeling famous is at their wedding reception. You gather a room full of people you could talk to for hours, then talk to most of them for just a few minutes each before running on to the next conversation.)
Here’s how I think those two forces interact: The satisfactions of addressing a community vs. addressing an audience are different. In a community, speech is often used to form, cement or re-affirm social bonds, whereas in addressing an audience, you work for maximum effect. When you get people angry, possibly sub-conciously angry, about fame, and they are given a forum on a famous person’s site, acting out is one sure way to maximize attention.
So if I’m right about the effects and their interaction, what I want to know is “Are there clear thresholds where these effects start to manifest themselves, or is it different in ever situation, other than order-of-magnitude calculations?”
1. Caroline on July 19, 2004 10:02 AM writes...
20 years in music (and more recently TV-) fandom have taught me that, yes, sheer numbers play a big part in the health of (online) fan communities, but there are other factors such as age group, nationality and sheer 'luck'.
Cult artists can have either the sweetest or the bitchiest communities. Mega-stars (like U2) have a very broad fanbase which are often divided by religion or politics, which can cause problems.
The larger the fanbase, the more 'ringleaders' there are - who often war between themselves. Jealousies play a part, particularly when the artist is accessible.
In my experience with running mailing lists and forums, you will hardly ever have problems with groups up to 20 to 30 people. More than that, anything can happen.
It helps a lot when fans meet in person early on in the history of the community - for obvious reasons.
Permalink to Comment2. Caroline on July 19, 2004 10:10 AM writes...
As far as the 'fame makes people angry' bit, you'll get one or two 'angry fans' every once in a while, but it's rare for them to dominate the community. They do not differ much from other trolls and thus can disrupt the community, but I've not experienced them being the cause of a community break down.
Larger communities need moderating and often need strict fules and heavy moderating. I'm not too familiar with George Michael's forum, but perhaps he expected the board to run itself. Artists who want to run fan boards should look into appointing some of the more level headed users moderators. The right personality can do wonders.
Permalink to Comment3. Caroline on July 19, 2004 10:10 AM writes...
As far as the 'fame makes people angry' bit, you'll get one or two 'angry fans' every once in a while, but it's rare for them to dominate the community. They do not differ much from other trolls and thus can disrupt the community, but I've not experienced them being the cause of a community break down.
Larger communities need strict rules and heavy moderating. I'm not too familiar with George Michael's forum, but perhaps he expected the board to run itself. Artists who want to run fan boards should look into appointing some of the more level headed users moderators. The right personality can do wonders.
Permalink to Comment4. Stephan Mosel on July 19, 2004 11:42 AM writes...
I wonder if there's a difference whether it's a board like G.Michael's or a blog like boingboing?
Permalink to Commentfurthermore, I don't really see the two distinct effects you describe. Isn't it actually just one? Where's the difference between "community/audience threshold" and "fame"?
5. Abe on July 19, 2004 12:14 PM writes...
The "George Michael is an idiot" bit is lost on me. Its his boards, he has the right to dictate the terms of continued existence of the board, no? And given that he's shutting them down he seems to understand that they won't just magically be like he wishes...
As for thresholds, its hard to quantify as online communities are a constantly evolving form. But I think its pretty clear now that there are both thresholds and cycles within these communities. Size is clearly a big one. So too I think is the issue of repetition. At a certain point in time the same topics begin to repeat themselves. And this process begins to try the patience of the older members, the very ones best suited to moderate the community. There is frequently a point where a community will appear to be rerunning old stories, and it tends to push out more mature members. If this process occurs with sufficient velocity the entire community can destabilize, and a phase change into "negativity" or perhaps just immaturity can occur.
Permalink to Comment6. Raph Koster on July 19, 2004 4:37 PM writes...
At Sony Online, we intentionally removed the broad topic discussion forums and replaced them with more tightly focused topic discussion areas. This resulted in smaller audiences per forum, and this readically reduced the amountof acting out. We also created an expectation of periodic info, which reduces the odds of acting out in order to get attention. Lastly, we simply do not reply to those who act out.
My personal observation of the threshold is that it not dissimilar to most other thresholds--all based on Dunbar's number, though in this case, I'd say *regular posters* must exceed Dunbar's number before breakdown occurs.
Permalink to Comment7. Francis Hwang on July 20, 2004 12:48 AM writes...
I'm going to assume that Clay Shirky is calling George Michael an idiot based on the fact that Mr. Michael opened up an online bulletin board and then expected the conversation to go in a way he could control. And then based on that assumption, I'm going to say that Mr. Shirky is being a narrow-minded prick.
Certainly Clay is fairly brilliant at what he does (Hell, I cite him all the time), but such a comment betrays more than a little tunnel vision. A fine-tuned understanding of social software is not the sine qua non of all knowledge; George Michael is probably fairly unversed in it but that only makes him ignorant in one area, not generally idiotic. I'd like to hear Clay Shirky's next dance-pop single so we can pass judgement on his overall intelligence based on that.
Anyway. More specifically to Clay's broader point, I'd amend "Fame makes people angry" to "Fame makes people crazy". When you're a consumer of celebrity culture, you're subjected to an overwhelming array of media intended to make you feel like you actually know the person. If you're into, say, Will Smith, you can read magazine interviews and watch his movies and watch his sitcom and listen to his records and buy his various biographies at the Barnes & Noble ... You could surround yourself with nothing but Will Smith memorabilia if you wanted to. Which is what the engine of celebrity wants: If you think you and Will are good buds then you're a lot less likely to notice if his new movie is crap.
But this illusion of intimacy makes people do wierd things. If you're really unbalanced it makes you obsessive and scary--the LAPD has a special division devoted to celebrity stalkers--but even for relatively normal folks it can make you feel like that celebrity should have some sort of loyalty to you, the way a real friend would. Mostly the celebrities play along ("It's great to be here, rocking out in Tallahassee!") but if they have ideas of their own, then fans often turn against them, with a venom that implies not just aesthetic disapproval, but a sense of betrayal. Fans hated Woody Allen for making serious films; they hated Prince for releasing long, meandering jam sessions in the '90s; they hated John Lennon because he refused to reunite with the other chaps to flog that dead horse one more time.
(I think this dynamic gets worse the bigger you get, I suppose because as if you have a smaller audience they're more likely to be the sort who respect you to make your aesthetic mistakes. I don't imagine that, say, Jim Jarmusch or Frank Black have to put up with as many raving unreasonable fans.)
In the real world, of course, celebrities do not move in the same circles as us, and while much of that is motivated by simple status-seeking among the famous, it also serves the function of buffering them from the wierdness or just plain old boring chatter of the fans. (Can you imagine hearing "Oh my God, I can't believe it's you, your music means so much to me" twenty times a day for the rest of your life? I'd ride around in a limo, too.) Online spaces find those sorts of buffers (bouncers, private parties, etc.) anathema, so celebrities are oddly exposed when they go online.
So you've got George Michael, who's past his prime and certainly vulnerable to a nasty ex-fan, hanging out online, and of course that sort of animosity is going to happen eventually. It would happen in real life, too, if he gave it a chance. Imagine George Michael deciding to hang out at the Virgin Megastore for a whole week, talking to everybody who came by. Maybe it would be all pleasant for the first day, but eventually you'd get some ponce shouting at him, calling an old fat has-been. And you'd know what he'd do? He'd clear up out of there and go have dinner at some fancy restaurant where the people at least have the etiquette not to say that to his face.
Permalink to Comment8. Maya on July 22, 2004 5:58 PM writes...
I never graced George's boards, so I have no way of knowing a)if it was actually nasty or if the man just has the thinnest skin ever measured b)if it was nasty, exactly what sort of nastiness was it.
Was it the sort of nastiness that is basically classic graffiti? Making a passing, ugly mark in a public place and enjoying having made it and created the resulting disturbance and reaction? We used to see a lot of this in the Buffy communities. We were never moderated, and only in extreme circumstances could we get a post removed. So we had our own form of "painting over" the graffiti, we'd all post extra to force the comment out of sight, or at least off of center stage.
It didn't help solve the problem of bezoars/ trolls, those people who stay a bit longer in the community and enjoy causing fights. The least sophisticated form of a troll attack is to go someplace where everyone basically likes something, and then attack that thing. Most people think you just shouldn't "feed" trolls. Some try to get the troll to listen to reason. Others launch complicated counter-attacks. A few try to build higher castle walls to keep out the trolls. In the end, the less popular the show got, the less important our community was, the smaller the audience for such a thing, and the fewer bezoars/trolls dropped by. But they have never completely disappeared. I think there is a kind of antisocial person who doesn't so much need an audience, they enjoy causing discord in a community.
Or was George's Board's negativity the kind that came from within the community? (was there even a community?) If so, it was probably just a time in the community's life-cycle when it was bored or legitimately had to work some things out. Maybe George Michael's board had actually become a community of people who hated George Michael. In which case, who can really blame him for pulling the plug?
I spend time in a group of reader communities where, strangely enough, it is considered basically unacceptable to criticize. One isn't to criticize another poster, one isn't to criticize a book, one isn't to criticize authors. This is especially true at official author sites, but it even bleeds over to community sites that are not tied to any author. Enough of the "caretaker" posters feel that negative or critical posts hurt feelings that the community just doesn't accept those sorts of comments. You can make them, but you will be called on the carpet by an overwhelming number of people, and possibly deleted. I actually find this barrage of "positivity" much more disturbing than the negativity one usually finds in big communities or high-profile targets. It's so Stepford.
Permalink to Comment~Maya
9. Scott Moore on July 22, 2004 8:11 PM writes...
I'd like to highlight a key factor in message board breakdown that has been alluded to here; setting the tone and modeling behavior as a means of moderation and stalling breakdown.
Raph mentioned that Sony participates by posting information regularly and ignoring instigators (yes, that would be a form of participation). Maya mentions the use (by the community, not the host) of pushing offensive messages away from immediate view. I have used, to good effect, active participation modeling the behavior I wanted to see eventually take hold (welcoming newbies, taking the time to answer the same questions over and over, diffusing aggressive posts instead of reacting to them). Without these, groups can reach breakdown at sizes lower then Dunbar's number.
I'm less sure that there is a quantifiable critical mass for the fission of breakdown than there is the right mixture of volatile chemicals: tone set by the host (or dominant group), behavior of the same, level of moderation all seem in inverse proportion to the group size where breakdown triggers.
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