by Clay Shirky
On some occasions the bargain with users is simple and elegantly balanced. For example, the basic bargain a wiki offers is that you can edit anyone else’s writing, and anyone else can edit yours. Most people who assume wikis will fail because of this freedom underestimate the value of the freedom being extended to everyone.
A few years ago a wiki travel site called WikiTravel.org launched; users were asked to describe various locales in terms that travelers would find useful. Seeing the announcement, I went to take a look. Though the site had been up for only a few days, I found that a basic entry for New York City had already been created. It began:
“Two for the Glory, Three for the Win” goes the old rallying crying in New York, New York. This former Portuguese colonial capital was a fur and mint-trading mecca in the 18th Century when the Wabash River was a major commercial thoroughfare. The city declined after the growth of railroads allowed travellers land passage from Ontario to Orlando.
This is, of course, all nonsense—not one of those things is true, and the entry went on in that vein for two more paragraphs. Seeing this, I immediately deleted the entry, then looked up the other entries by the same user. It turned out he or she had also created phony entries for Boston (“Boston, known as the ‘four-mile-high city,’ is perched atop a mountain of more than 20,000 feet in elevation”) and Massachusetts (“Massachusetts is technically not a state but a common-whelk”). I deleted those as well, then looked at the history of the various articles that that user had touched. It turned out that he or she had spent the better part of an hour lovingly crafting those three fake entries. I deleted all three in about a minute and a half, and that was that; the prankster never returned, presumably disappointed by the speed with which fake entries could be undone. Wikis take on one of the most basic questions of political philosophy: Who will guard the guardians? Their answer is, everyone. The basic bargain of a wiki means that people who care that the site not be used for that sort of prank have the edge, because it takes far longer to write a fake entry than to fix it.
Other times the bargain is far more one-sided. The bargain for the original flash mobs was that you would show up at the appointed place and time and do as you were told, and in turn you would astonish the people watching you perform these actions in a group. Almost all the power of the original flash mob, in other words, lay with “Bill from New York,” and his mobs were designed to mock the hipster willingness to subsume individual judgment in pursuit of confounding the bourgeoisie. The Belarusian flash mobs, by contrast, used the political context to change the bargain considerably (the bargain can never be completely embedded in any given tool), making those who chose to join the mob political actors rather than puppets. Like the choice of the -pedia suffix for Wikipedia, a flash mob is a kind of mental application that both creates and relies on shared awareness among its users. What the Belarusian kids did was to change the mental model of what participation in a flash mob meant.
The essential aspect of the bargain is that the users have to agree to it. It can’t be instantiated as a set of contractual rules, because users don’t read the fine print. (When was the last time you read through one of those “By clicking here, you agree to . . . ” pages on the Web?) Instead, the bargain has to be part of the lived experience of interaction.
Sometimes contracts are an essential part of the bargain, not because of the direct language of the contract but because of what it says about the service. Linus Torvalds offered Linux under the GPL because that was a way of assuring the developers that their work could never be taken away from them. This was an important way he communicated his bona fides years before Linux was valuable enough to appropriate; Torvalds took this step early on to specifically forgo any possibility in the future that he could change his mind and patent or sell Linux. It became valuable precisely because he offered a bargain that limited his future freedom; adoption of the GPL was a serious token of commitment. Wikipedia faced a similar challenge early on. In 2002 the Spanish-language version was growing quickly, but the Spanish users were concerned that Wikipedia might opt for a commercial, ad-driven model. They threatened to take all of their contributions and start an alternate version (a process known as “forking”). This was enough to convince Jimmy Wales to formally forgo any future commercial plans for Wikipedia, and to move the site from Wikipedia.com to Wikipedia.org, in keeping with its nonprofit status. Similarly, he decided to adopt the GNU Free Documentation License for Wikipedia’s content. As with Linus Torvalds’s adoption of a GNU license for Linux, the GFDL assured contributors that their contributions would remain freely available, making them likelier to contribute. Years later Wales would remark that Wikipedia was “worth billions,” but this claim rewrites history. Given the kind of concern among the various contributors over commercialization one alternate possibility is that the whole thing could have exploded into a dozen different versions, no one of which would be as successful as Wikipedia today. The creation of a formal guarantee that the site’s content could never be alienated from its creators helped create the trust necessary for users to commit to it long term, even as it meant forgoing turning Wikipedia into a commercial offering.
Wikipedia also arms its users with ways to help enforce the bargains that make the site work. Wikipedia lists a number of rules for the site, including writing from a neutral point of view and assuming good faith during disagreements. No direct enforcement mechanism is attached to these rules, but users periodically invoke them when they are arguing about the content of an article. This invocation has no formal effect, but it arms the user with a kind of moral suasion that is often enough to settle an argument.
The observations about how tightly the groups need to coordinate with one another also affect how these kinds of social bargains are constructed. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” In the physical domain cities tend to have more rules that address the vagaries of group life than rural areas do, simply because the number of ways urban life can create social intersections among people is much larger than in rural life. This connection between social density and complexity of bargain is true of technologically mediated groups as well; the more members have to interact with one another, and the more they have to agree to act in concert, the more complex the rules governing their relations have to be. Bargains for sharing can be quite simple while the bargains that have to be worked out for collaboration or collective action are necessarily more complex, because the frequency, complexity, and duration of user interaction are higher. In Holmes’s terms, the more integrated a group, the greater the risk of a virtual fist hitting a virtual nose.
The bargain for the group watching Evan Guttman try to retrieve Ivanna’s phone was simple—keep watching and talking. By contrast, the various bargains for Flickr can get quite complex. Many of its users are members of groups organized around specific themes (“Telling a Story in 5 Frames,” “Street Photography”), and these groups have their own internal expectations: the street photographers don’t like staged pictures, while the storytellers don’t want single photos. These bargains also involve ongoing negotiation—the basic tension in Flickr groups is a Tragedy of the Commons, where the presence of a potential audience tempts photographers to leave their photos for others to see while not looking at anyone else’s. Many of the rules in Flickr groups try to create the kind of mutual coercion that can solve a Tragedy of the Commons, as with this rule for Black and White Maniacs, for takers of black and white photos:
Post ONE photo, then immediately comment on the PREVIOUS TWO photos . . . Wait until two more photos have been posted before posting again. IF YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO COMMENT IMMEDIATELY, PLEASE WAIT TO POST YOUR PHOTO. It’s unfair to expect people to comment on your work when you’re not able to give them that same courtesy.
The point of such a rule is to make sure that all participants get their photos commented on equally. You may already have seen the bug in this rule: instead of failing to l
eave comments (a violation of the letter of the rule), people who want to take advantage of the assembled audience could leave nearly worthless comments (a violation of its spirit). Indeed, this is what happened in Black and White Maniacs, so they added a clarification:
(**NEW RULE: If you consistently leave one- or two-word comments like, “nice,” “good b+w,” “great catch,”. . . . etc. you’ll be removed from the group as well.)
This group prizes evenness of participation among all its members. This mode of participation is what UCLA anthropologist Alan Page Fiske calls “equality matching,” one of four basic modes of social participation that he has identified. (The other three are communal sharing, authority ranking, and market pricing.) The effect of such sharing, in this case of attention, is that the most talented members of the group don’t get much more attention than the least talented; whether this is good or bad depends on your taste. It would certainly be possible to have other modes of participation, where an authority determined which photos were worthy of attention, or where members were given play money to set up a market to value the photos, but those groups would be very different in feel from Black and White Maniacs. When you change the bargain, you change the group, even if all the members remain the same.
Complex Interactions
It’s easy enough to keep track of three things. If new forms of group action can be created with a plausible promise, tools fit to the task, and an acceptable bargain, why can’t people just put those things on a to-do list and whip up success? Why, in other words, does most proposed group effort fail?
First, because getting each of these elements right is actually quite challenging, while getting all of them right is essential. Second, as with groups themselves, the complexity comes not just from the elements but from their interactions. Remember Larry Sanger’s initial mail asking people to contribute to Wikipedia? “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” He presented it as a favor and as an experiment, and the emphasis was on how easy a wiki would make the process. The simplicity of the tool and the bargain were out front; the promise was little more than “you’ll be trying something new and doing me a favor.” Compare Jimmy Wales’s accounting for Wikipedia’s mission now: “Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” The breadth of the explicit promise has risen with the quality of the execution. This explicit promise is different from the implicit one, and it’s unlikely that the users making one change to one article once (the commonest case on Wikipedia) are motivated by the stirring language. The implicit promise is simpler: if you help, this will get better.
Tools are similarly complex. Indeed, there is a spectrum of group size even within single communities, since most large groups are sustained through the efforts of a small group embedded within the large one. Because groups often have different subgroups, the bargain is different for different users as well. You can see how complex these interlocking issues become by asking a simple question: Is Wikipedia a community? One obvious answer is: Yes; people work together to create and defend something they clearly love. Another, equally obvious answer is: No, because most contributors add a single item and never interact with anyone. Both answers are right. There is a core Wikipedia community, but it is made up of only a fraction of Wikipedia contributors. The community is drawn from the ranks of the contributors (indeed, moving from reading to contributing is the minimum case for membership), but the community is not the same as the contributors.
The core Wikipedia community could not create Wikipedia alone, because they could not generate enough raw material or take advantage of enough novel points of view. Similarly, the huge but relatively diffuse group of contributors who are not self-consciously part of the community could edit articles, but unless the most committed members of the community defended them, those edits would be destroyed by vandals. This is not just true of Wikipedia as a whole—it is also true of each individual article, from Asphalt to Zoroaster. Some contributors care about the quality of Wikipedia as a whole, and some care about the quality of any given article, while most just want to fix a typo or add some piece of information they have, and at every level the interaction of these groups holds the whole together. This is what is wrong with a lot of 80/20 optimizations—the belief that truncating the system at the head will optimize its effectiveness; in many cases it actually cuts off a critical piece of the overall ecosystem.
Some parts of a tool are used only by the core contributors. As Fernanda Viegas, the Wikipedia researcher at IBM, has pointed out, Wikipedia has over a dozen separate collections of pages, for functions like the history of specific articles and discussions of them, the administrative functions of Wikipedia itself, and so on. Only one of these collections is for the actual articles; the rest are all about running the site in one way or another. Wikipedia, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a community mainly given over to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, being the last thing anyone declined to disagree about. Most of the collections of pages other than the articles, however, are accessed by only the most committed users.
This kind of organization, where small groups form within the framework of a bigger, more diffuse group, is the norm for large collections of people (the Small World pattern at work again), and many large sites are actually designed to help this happen. MySpace, considered as a whole, looks like a tool for a large and long-lived group, but most users don’t consider it as a whole. Instead, starting from a “me first, then my friends, then their friends” view of the world, most users see MySpace as a tool for much smaller groups, and this kind of density among groups of friends can make the site a place for much quicker and more tightly organized interactions. The anti-anti-immigration protest in 2006 did not come from MySpace as a whole—News Corp could no more have sponsored such a thing than Meetup could have sponsored the Black Stay at Home Moms in Atlanta. Instead, the tightness of the network meant that users could advertise the walkout to one another, without ever broadcasting a message to the whole site.
Many groups forming today are using software that needs to be customized to a particular group. The groups using Meetup have highly variable rates of success—the Stay at Home Moms groups, which are so popular in the United States, are hardly replicated anywhere else in the world. This kind of customization of a software platform means that the question of promise, tool, and bargain takes place at multiple levels. The basic promise of any Meetup group is that you will be able to meet other people who live near you and share your interests. In addition, each group needs to offer its own specific promise—those of the Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Ping-Pong players will be quite different—and they need to decide what features of the software they will use: Is posting pictures of the Meetups encouraged or forbidden? Can potential members read the message boards, or only actual members? And so on.
Though groups tend first to coalesce around a particular tool, the group is free to adopt additional ones. Jessica Hammer, a researcher at Columbia University, followed the community that formed around the Web comic “Sluggy Freelance.” She found that the community used several different tools, including a discussion group on the Sluggy Freelance website and not one but two mailing lists to coordinate various activities. The group coalesced around one particular site of content, but the internal logic of group cohesion allowed them to expand the number of tools they used. Similarly, though Linux began as a proposal on a usenet discussion group, it has expanded over the years to include multiple mailing lists, websites, and even a custom-created tool for managing the source code itself.
Though a group writing a complex piece of software for itself is rare, customization of the environment to group life is quite common. The Buffy fans who commissioned Bronze: Beta also customized that tool for their community; the Black and White Maniacs on Flickr customized a set of rules for the social bargain they wanted to enforce. Sometimes this sor
t of customization becomes part of the culture. On alt.folklore .urban, a discussion group for urban folklore, long-time residents used the word “voracity” when they meant “veracity.” By doing so consistently, they were able to work newcomers into frenzies of linguistic rectitude; when the newcomers realized they’d been had, they either acquired a newfound respect for the tightness of the community, or they left in a huff. (Needless to say, the regulars viewed either outcome as positive.) This kind of hazing ritual, called “trolling,” was not a feature of the social tool alt.folklore.urban was using; it was a norm adopted and sustained by the community.
All Groups Have Social Dilemmas
In the mid-1960s, the Dutch anarchist group Provo launched its White Bicycle program in Amsterdam. Believing that the political systems of the time had grossly underestimated basic human goodness and had vested too much power in the hands of the state, Provo placed dozens of white bicycles on the streets of Amsterdam, free for all to use. The design of the program was simple: the Provos distributed the bicycles, unlocked and painted white, around the city. You could pick up a bicycle wherever you found it, ride it to your destination, and leave it there for the next person, who would then ride to their next destination and leave it, ad infinitum. In this way a novel communal infrastructure could be made available at low cost, creating a better world for Amsterdam’s residents while repudiating the market economy and the “traffic terrorism of a motorized minority.” As the Provos put it in their manifesto: “’The white bicycle symbolizes simplicity and healthy living, as opposed to the gaudiness and filth of the authoritarian automobile.”
