Reddit - Community Design Critique - Case Study Example

Community Design Critique COMMUNITY DESIGN CRITIQUE Is Reddit really the “front-page of the internet” as it styles itself? It seems that it is since, just as our parents would once have their breakfast as they perused the morning paper, millions of internet users rely on reddit to receive their daily dose of current events each morning. Registered reddit members are allowed to vote on submissions to organize different posts, as well as to determine the position of posts on the reddit’s pages (Turner, 2011). As a bulletin system, the site is made up of entries submitted by registered community members with entries organized according to the area of interest, also referred to as subreddits. For non-registered members and those browsing reddit without an account, there are fifty categories known as default subreddits that can be viewed on reddit’s front page. Reddit is a source of what is popular and new on the web, enabling the users to check out trending, hot topics from newspapers, blogs, and other sources of information from around the world. The site has several strengths, including the fact that it is everywhere on websites and blogs and enables users to share information links with followers and friends (Turner, 2011). However, it also has weaknesses in that the user has to generate a lot of votes and traffic to appear on the screen, while there are many other platforms that offer similar functionality. One of reddit’s strengths is that the site organizes entries into areas of interest, which they refer to as subreddits. The site has numerous default subreddits that cover diverse topics like television, books, and music. According to Kraut et al (2011), clustering or recruiting people with similar interests into homogenous groups fosters community commitment based on identity. Users who join the reddit community, for instance, can join the subreddits that most interest them, which enhances their wider connection with the reddit community. The reddit community designers are able to encourage its users to identify with their community and its sub-communities by highlighting the common social characteristics shared by the users, as well as through the creation of boundaries around these sub-categories. Most traditional online communities and their sub-groups are categorized according to political beliefs and values, leisure interests, employment and career, religion, and gender (Cannon & Thomas, 2012). The social categories on reddit induce identification with the community by seeking to appeal to smaller sub-groups and sub-populations, rather than entire populations. Any registered user in the community can create a subreddit, although this only appears on the site after thirty days. This links to another claim by Kraut et al (2011) that forcing potential new members to wait for verification will result in only those members who value the community being more likely to join. The ability of users to customize what appears on their front-page through subscription to subreddits is an advatage of the reddit online community. Indeed, Kraut et al (2011) state that creating subgroups within the larger community will lead to increased commitment from members to these subgroups. In majority of cases, attachment to subgroups on the basis of identity complements commitment to the entire community. Creating subreddits has enabled reddit to increase their users’ self-reported commitment to the site, while also increasing the number of visitors on a monthly basis. There are times, however, when the identity of the subreddit may become more salient compared to identity with the overall reddit group, which normally results in identity to the subreddit or subgroup prevailing (Cannon & Thomas, 2012). This is because users are able to customize their frontpages, which are accessible using a link to all personal front-pages at the top of each users front page. Moreover, the approach by reddit is to give the curators and moderators of the site as much control over the site’s activities as they can, enabling them to cultivate their desired type of online community. As posited by Kraut et al (2011), this enables old-timers to formally mentor new members, which increases their commitment and enhances their ability to contribute more. Another strength possessed by reddit is that users are able to create personal subreddits as they choose, enabling users interested in a particular subreddit to add it to their frontpage through subscription. Personalized collections of content that users find relevant will enhance value, although it may also reduce the shared context within the community (Kraut et al, 2011). To counter the latter point, Reddit began by only providing one space where users could interact. Although such form of interaction in a single space may deal with a wide range of subjects, leading to the risk that content may not entirely match the interests of individual visitors; it acted to limit separate costs that visitors would require to examine the site’s content. However, as reddit began to generate sufficient activity in its overall space, it was able to split these spaces into several related spaces with adequate activity to keep them going. Reddit’s community designers also benefited from this strategy by observing topics that occur naturally during normal conversation, creating additional spaces on the basis of topics that are of interest to the site’s users (Tu, 2013). Reddit also enjoys an advantage and strength due to the ability of redditors to befriend each other on the site, allowing them faster access when commenting and posting on lists generated by their friends. As per Kraut et al (2011), the combination of contributions with social contact between contributors enhances the level of contribution from users. The friend system and the commenting system, coupled with the reddit ethos, enable reddit to acquire important aspects of social networking sites, although this does not measure up to the extent of Google+ or FaceBook. Moreover, reddit also enables its community to socialize in bars and local parks across the globe by creating several localized subreddits aimed at encouraging local meetings. When the users are engaged socially with each other, they are more likely to be in a positive mood since most people have positive moods when carrying out activities and talking with their friends and people whom they share interests with (Tu, 2013). The intrinsic interest that users have when interacting socially is responsible for making online forum discussions appealing. Creating immersive experiences for users that possess clear objectives and feedback, while challenging them to use their social skills to the maximum and ensuring they are in control, leads to intrinsically interesting experiences (Kraut et al, 2011). Reddit has found a way to make tedious tasks more engaging, specifically through the combination of these tasks with social interaction. The success that sites like reddit have is reliant on the social aspect to increase the users’ willingness to participate and make contributions on the site (Kendig & Keast, 2010). However, reddit also has several weaknesses, one of which is that users could game the system to gain additional status on the site. As stated by Kraut et al (2011), task-contingent rewards, rather than performance-contingent rewards result in gaming as users perform tasks that require the least effort. Reddit faces this problem because they offer status cues, privileges, and other rewards on the basis of the number of posts made by the user. Some users may decide to increase their contributions to the reddit list by contributing posts that are not very informative, as well as some that are irrelevant to the list. Still, because reddit only offers status, this danger is not as salient as for other sites that give more substantial rewards like money. Moreover, such users may gain a reputation of making low-level contributions to the lists among other users of the site. On reddit, users earn “comment karma” and “link karma” if they submit popular comments and links among the group or sub-group, which are then displayed on their user profiles as point values (Kendig & Keast, 2010). Users may also receive the “reddit gold” reward when other users make positive comments about their links or comments, mostly as a result of the content’s high quality or humorous nature. As a result, the users may attempt to gain these rewards by providing numerous sub-standard links and comments. Reddit also has a weakness regarding the extremely diverse nature of its members, their backgrounds, and their views. As Kraut et al (2011) argue large communities with vast volumes of communication lead to a reduction in bonds-based commitment. Reddit’s popularity has enabled participants to take advantage of the large nature of its community at unprecedented levels. Most people will feel safe if the membership of an online community is homogenous in nature, compared to communities made up of heterogeneous members and views. Such kind of diversity could result in users feeling that the purpose of the community is less coherent than they prefer, resulting in fractured communications between users. Reddit’s exponential growth in the past few years has increased the diversity of users as evidenced by the more than 5,400 subreddits currently active on the site. As younger cohorts join the online community with different interests and values to initial members of reddit, the sense of common identity on reddit is threatened, causing increased turnover of users on the site (Kendig & Keast, 2010). The motivation and attributes of new and younger users may differ from those of the original user-group on reddit, resulting in the older group joining other similar sites like Delicious and Digg. Reddit also faces a challenge regarding its inherent free speech culture, as well as insufficient rules on what users can post on the site. While bans and gags could limit the continuing bad behaviour of users (Kraut et al, 2011), reddit has shied away from using these tools, resulting in the creation of subreddits that are offensive to other users, such as pictures of mutilated corpses and forums that focus on jailbait. In addition, reddit only explicitly banned the posting of sexual or suggestive content that involves minors in early 2012, despite having been active since 2005. Users will only acquiesce to bans and gags willingly if they perceive the presence of procedural justice. Failure by reddit to punish redditors by banning them from specific subreddits or from the site altogether has encouraged deviant behaviour, such as the sale of weapons on the site to exploit federal law loopholes (Massanari, 2014). Finally, reddit also has a weakness in that its site design is difficult for newcomers to navigate. Although this may be a tactic to ensure that only those newcomers with motivation to join the site actually do so, it contradicts Kraut et al (2001) who claim that professional site design increases the users’ expectations about the site’s probability of success. The capabilities of any online community’s convenors are often signalled by their professional site design, which works to demonstrate ongoing commitment from the site’s owners. If the new user feels that the owners of the site are not committed to further invest in their community by improving their professional site design, they may negatively judge the site’s ability to give them what they want. To conclude, although reddit does have some weaknesses, such as its extensive diversity of users that threatens bonds-based commitment, its lack of sufficient rules on posting, and a poor professional site design that makes navigation for new users difficult, the online community still lives up to its “front-page of the internet” moniker. By making it possible for users to create their own sub-groups known as subreddits, create and join groups of their choosing, enabling customization of users’ front pages, and enhancing social contact between the users, reddit offers users the chance to be a part of groups with other users who share similar interests. Coupled to the ease with which long term members can post links and comments that most interest them, reddit users can keep up-to-date with current affairs posted by peers, while also contributing to issues that most interest them. References Cannon, J., & Thomas, T. (2012). Get more fans: The DIY guide to the new music business : everything you need to know about Twitter, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud, Tumblr, getting fans excited, Kickstarter, using free music to make you money, getting on blogs, YouTube, going viral, licensing your music, booking shows, getting more fans at shows, TopSpin, Next Big Sound, getting publicity, Hype Machine, Rdio, selling more merch, Pandora, Instragram, Turntable FM, Last.FM, using torrent sites to your advantage, Headliner.FM, managing your band, Amazon, Pinterest, targeting potential fans, CD Baby, TuneCore, ArtistGrowth, maintaining a mailing list, FanBridge, WordPress, running a street team, Artist.MTV, making a great website, ASCAP, BMI or SESAC, ReverbNation, SoundExchange, marketing ideas, direct-to-fan, Reddit, choosing a record producer, PledgeMusic, thousands of creative ideas on how to promote your music : thousands of tips for every musician of every size whether they have 0 fans or 1,000,000 : a detailed look at how to have more people hear your music and build a fanbase. Union City, NJ: Musformation Retrieved from: www.musformation.com/the-diy-guide-to-the-new-music-landscape/ Kendig, L., & Keast, B. C. (2010). Community character: Principles for design and planning. Washington, DC: Island Press. Retrieved from: http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=prgx2M6H2IMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Community+character:+Principles+for+design+and+planning&hl=en&sa=X&ei=I9B8VIKBAcqR7AbBzIDwCQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Community%20character%3A%20Principles%20for%20design%20and%20planning&f=false Kraut, R. E., Resnick, P., & Kiesler, S. (2011). Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Massanari, A. L. (2014). Participatory culture, community, and play: Learning from reddit. New York: Peter Lang Retrieved from: spir.aoir.org/index.php/spir/article/viewFile/803/pdf Tu, C. (2013). Online collaborative learning communities: Twenty-one designs to building an online collaborative learning community. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited. Retrieved from: http://thejournal.com/articles/2005/04/01/online-collaborative-learning-communities-twentyone-designs-to-building-an-online-collaborative-lear.aspx Turner, J., & Shah, R. (2011). How to make money with social media: An insiders guide on using new and emerging media to grow your business. Upper Saddle River, N.J: FT Press. Retrieved from: http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=3f8PBAAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&dq=How+to+make+money+with+social+media:+An+insider%27s+guide+on+using+new+and+emerging+media+to+grow+your+business&hl=en&sa=X&ei=W9F8VKTFO-Xd7gaqr4CYAQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=How%20to%20make%20money%20with%20social%20media%3A%20An%20insider%27s%20guide%20on%20using%20new%20and%20emerging%20media%20to%20grow%20your%20business&f=false Read More