The online community I am choosing to analyze is that of xanga. Xanga is an online blogging site that allows one to post thoughts and feelings, design a personal interface, make friends, and join groups as well as a variety of other tasks.
Bos et al. defines trust as “willingness to be vulnerable, based on positive expectations about the actions of others”. This idea can be shown in the xanga community in that new users are more likely to be trustworthy right away when faced with the successful journaling done by older members. The newer members are less hesitant in revealing secrets and private thoughts due to the existence and experience of the community. Trust matters in this community because you are essentially using the site as a journal. Virtual strangers may be reading your innermost thoughts and desired. One may think that this would cause many to shy away from making their posts public, but the effect is quite the opposite. Many bloggers feel safe in the xanga community.
Xanga is a reputation system since one can see how many subscribers, comments and recommended posts a blogger has and use that information to judge him/her. Also, as Resnick states, "an expectation that people will consider one another’s pasts in future interactions constrains behavior in the present." This statement is probably the driving force behind why people leave mostly nice and positive comments.
Desirable behaviors in this community include commenting, recommending, designing interfaces and subscribing to blogs. Commenting is usually rewarded with commenting or recommending or subscribing. For example, if person A comments on person B’s blog, then person B will comment back on person A’s blog. However, sometimes person B might go further and subscribe to person A’s blog and vice versa. There is somewhat of a hierarchy in rewarding. Comments are the easiest reward and desirable behavior. Next are recommendations, then subscribing to blogs. The design of interfaces is a behavior that can be custom made to a person’s personality (and thereby rewarded more directly) or can be left to the public by publishing codes for everyone to take.
Of course the main desirable behavior is to have interesting and appealing blog posts. And this behavior is rewarded by all which was mentioned above.
This scheme is often manipulated since people will comment haphazardly across blogs hoping to get others to comment back. Those who design interfaces often plead and beg people to subscribe, offering free personalized interfaces as an incentive. Even though this reputation system already had a scheme in plays that rewards desirable behaviors, it can and often is manipulated.
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I agree that it’s kind of surprising how most Xanga users do not shy away from blogging about their private thoughts even though any strangers could read them. I actually wonder if Xanga users even realize just how much they’re trusting the community with access to their blog entries. Since the reader base for a given blog is largely anonymous and definitely not salient, perhaps users feel as though they have a smaller audience than is actually the case. This could affect their blog entries by leading to greater self-disclosure.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how rigidly the Xanga commenting etiquette sticks for people who do not leave interesting useful comments. A reputation system starts to fall apart, in my opinion, when there is no incentive for the feedback to adhere to a certain level of quality. It becomes haphazard and meaningless... what kind of incentives does Xanga provide to encourage quality feedback, or is this convention an inherent part of the Xanga community reinforced by its users?
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