Scotts Business Blog

Anonymous Speech & The Future of Internet Trolls

Yesterday, a friend was complaining about Internet Trolls, those annoying occasional inhabitants of message boards, blog comments and so forth, that exist merely to incite and inflame rather than participate or inform.

The Irony

Oddly enough, it’s quite possible trolls may help hasten the demise of some venues for anonymous speech and become not only their own undoing, but help promote new segments of various online communities. For most day-to-day blog, message forum or other activities, nothing even approaching full anonymity is required. There’s just not that much so deeply controversial going on most of the time. As a result, the primary impetus to using a pseudo-anonymous screen name is to keep your real life identity somewhat private for reasons of simple prudence, even if there’s relatively little risk of identity theft and such from such online places. Being pseudo-anonymous, however, does imply that there’s some degree of real world tie-in at some level. Just what form this may take is difficult to say. Possibly digital signatures, verified by trusted agents, or who knows. The end result would be that certain blog comment features, social sites, forums and more would have recourse for truly blocking users. The issue today is that we are in a nether world of transition. The full ecosystem to allow users to easily acquire and use such tools does not exist.

"Trusted" Members

Once easy to use verification tools exist allowing for both authentication and pseudo-anonymity, there are two concomitant pieces that can result in more tightly managed communities. The first is add-ons to community software to verify members' identities. And the second might be the ability to tier software filters such that users may choose their level of participation. In this way, blog owners, forum owners and others could choose what participation levels they’ll allow for different classes of user. (This exists now to some degree, but based on the most simplistic concepts of identity in most cases.) Once there's some kind of real identity tag, product administrators could choose whether or not there would be any participation at all for fully anonymous or blocked users. Or they could simply allow such anonymous and blocked users to do as they wish given that those who are verified have a choice as to what they view. Some verified participants may look at everything. Others may look poorly upon those who don’t choose to publicly own their words and choose to ignore them. This way, one can have a fully non-censored product if desired, yet allow for user choice to block out the noise, most likely to come from non-verified accounts.

Online Community Evolution: A Quick Look Back

Going back in online history to the early major consumer services, CompuServe, Prodigy and the still in the mix America Online, we see they were all overrun by the amazing benefits of the open standards various Internet technologies offered. But as much as early and current Internet communities provide in terms of features and benefits, something was also lost. These companies had a direct billing relationship with their customers. By virtue of this, they all had a reasonably high degree of assurance of with whom they were dealing. Or minimally, they and their users had recourse to seek out those who went below and beyond in terms of behavior. As a result, whether some liked it or not, agreed or disagree with policies, their communities were inherently more manageable then what’s possible now.

And What of the Purists?

There are those who would say that practically any verification or identification or classification of speech based on identity is bad. That is squelches. That it risks stifling voices. They may be right. Unfortunately, they're also wrong. Without any controls at all, there seems to be a tendency towards the "tragedy of the commons." The still existing USENET Newsgroup system is a perfect example of a spam-ridden wasteland where the signal-to-noise ratio is so low the place is effectively worthless for any discourse. Hardly a place amenable to speech.

And what of reputation? Collectively, we've always made judgments about the veracity and value of content to some degree based on its source.

Going Forward

As we go forward and online community becomes even more a part of all things, it’s more likely than not that moderation tools will be needed. The cliché about the lone bad apple spoiling the bunch is perfectly apropos here. Just a little bit of trouble can cause site owners and moderators inordinate amounts of time. There are certainly free speech purists who would look upon some of what’s suggested here with great concern. And they’d perhaps be partially right. But the thing is, any right to speech does not guarantee the right that others will listen. And certainly not that they’d have to listen. In any case, the tools described here would allow for choice among the listeners, which is as important. Just as the voices of the speakers are important. It’s a balance. It's easy enough to see this is the case should one happen to join an online community with a fully verified user base. For example, various professional organizations have online forums, but their user base actually pays subscription charges. Such forums seem to rarely suffer the same level of difficulty of more open forums, even those requiring some form of registration. (Which is most communities, at least to do anything more than read.)

So while one-off communities may exercise greater controls than more open spaces, more generic across the 'net tools don’t fully exist yet. Individual communities may choose to put up certain walls or attempt to use billing mechanisms, but this won't quite work for everyone. It's too cumbersome for users, (who may just be passing through a community for at time), and too expensive for some community producers. Some of the pieces do exist now and more are forming. It's just a matter of time before features get more sophisticated to allow for the kind of granularity I've discussed here. Just for fun I'll throw a dart and say such tools will begin gaining traction sometime from late 2008 through 2009. That will be enough time, (over the course of 2007 through mid 2008), for enough new online communication products to have clogged up some common areas with crap to the point that users will demand some controls or they'll abandon such products.

MySpace Advertising: All that is Old is New Again

Bambi Francisco, who's one of the better, (yes, just my opinion), net watchers/bloggers/writers out there did an article on MySpace and talked breifly about their opportunity to target ads by category. However, the thing is, like so much else I'm personally seeing these days, a lot of these concepts are not very new. It's just great that 'net technologies may be catching up to early ideas such that these ideas can maybe be actually implemented. But - I think anyway - historical context is important. So here's my thoughts...

The original article is here: MySpace-Engine Article
Bambi's Blog 

From the original article: "If that's the case, I'd argue that on the Web, global communities based on shared interests are actually the newest forms of clustering audiences for advertisers."

There's nothing new about it. It's just never been done well. Geocities had the capability to target ads by community in the mid-90s, (albeit just banners, not text mapped contextually via keyword matching). About.com certainly used and uses the ability to target communities of interest. These were early efforts, though they were hard to sell to advertisers. (Way back in the day, media budgets for online were still coming out of small r&d test budgets rather than media budgets as they are now. They didn't see online as formidable, much less "get" the idea of context. Nor were there good contextual mataching tools and to this day they're arguably not nearly what they could be. E.g. the oftentimes click through difference between search keyword matched ads vs. broadmatch/site matached ads. Not to mention the lack of meta data for banners, which are essentially most often targeted by hand via ad network traffic tools.)

To be sure, there may be some value to ad targeting based on general categories in which pages happen to fall. It's perhaps weaker context than keyword matching. However, that's hard to say for sure since no one's done clear enough research on the category level to definitevely say just how much better. (At least not that I've seen.) How to do this will take some thought. The challenge in doing so in a MySpace type network is the same as it ever was for the seminal online services and anything that's out there now; the pages are generally not focused enough to do so. And even keyword contextual mapping will be questionable due to the disparate content on a page. Behavorial targeting of ads may work a bit better in this environment. One benefit advertisers MAY have in such a network is potentially a higher click-though rate regardless of context. Why? Because often the content is so lame that there's less user engagement and a higher propensity to click away. In fact, the point made above that the Hitwise data may indicate people jumping away to Google to continue to search may lend some admittedly small validity to this idea. (Plus, some old usage data I'd once had about an early personal web page publishing platform seemed to bear out the idea as well.)

So just for the sake of argument, say the communities of interest do have higher advertising value over a run of site. That means the pages would have to be attached to one or more taxonomic categories. No small trick. (Yes, I know. Various semantic search companies will claim to be able to automate this. And this may be somewhat true. It's still some effort to get right.)

Bottom line: Sheer volume may allow MySpace to generate piles of ad revenue. But as yet, there doesn't seem to be much category-wise that would command a higher cost per thousand ad rate based on better context via category.

Link rot, Meet Approt

If you thought link rot was bad, you'll love app rot. (Or approt for short.) It's coming. And if you're creating or using so-called "mash-up" features, (described later), you should be thinking about approt and ways to mitigate its effect.

Just what is "approt?" It's a new Web 2.0 word I've made up to describe what I believe will be the next annoyance on the web. In short, approt stands for "application rot." Or alternatively, you could say, "API Rot." (API is Application Programming Interface.) Approt happens when a web page owner has created a feature that depends on applications created using various features of several services. Many - if not most times - the source data or programming code or both comes from organizations outside the control of the new feature creator. The new feature creator may have a business relationship with the source providers. In fact, this will likely become a business model for companies currently providing souce data for free. In any case, if one or more of the technologies being used as a source disappears or changes form, it's likely the newly created feature will break. It may break hard and obviously, (such as just not being there), or insidously, (where something is maybe missing, but since it's missing you don't even see that something's missing).

Of course, in many ways none of this is new. As with so many "Things Web," all that is old is new again. Data from encyclopedias to phonebooks to whatever has been licensed to software and service vendors for years. What's different now is the increasing variety of data and applications services that are available to so many feature developers in openly usable formats.

Nontheless, approt will happen. There's several reasons why this will happen.

• Some shared source material will become unavailable. This may be by accident due to a service outage, or intentionally by a company that chooses to no longer provide the data or feature set for free. (Possibly because it  can no longer affod to.)
• Data formats or source applications will be updated. Again, one of at least two things may happen... First the data/application owner may not send out an alert to those using their feature set, (possibly because they either never collected registrations or not having required registration by users, they have no means to send such an alert). Alternatively, the source organization does send alerts, but the creator of the new feature doesn't have time or interest in updating their feature by the time the source organization changes it's material.

Webheads probably already "get" this as they say, and can maybe stop here. For anyone else who's still curious, I should probably go back briefly and define some terms.

• Link rot: Link rot is when a hyperlink, (i.e. the stuff you click on to go places on the web), no longer goes to where it was supposed to. You've likely seen the occasional 404 Not Found page. Some web sites try to mitigate this problem by re-directing you to someplace less user hostile, but the bottom line is, the link has gone bad. Whether it's due to a page no longer being available, moving web locations or whatever, the link is either gone or going to a place different than the expectation set by the link text. Hence, "link rot."
• Web 2.0: According to Wikipedia, "Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate, and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages"
• Mashup: Again, we go to Wikipedia, "A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience."

What can be done about approt?

• Producers or mashups should register with a source data provider if registration is provided.
• Users of mashups should take care to avoid making a mashup part of any key business process until or unless they can be sure of confidence in the ongoing availability of the service in question. Due dilligence here may require going past the feature provider alone and making sure that the upstream source material, (be it data or code), appears to be stable in its ongoing availability.
• There may not yet exist any best practices yet, but companies providing data or applications that they know they are going to used in such ways should maintain registration and communications with users.

Bottom line? Beware. Approt is coming to a web site near you. Just make sure it's not your company's site!