Building Web Reputation Systems- P13

Building Web Reputation Systems- P13:Today’s Web is the product of over a billion hands and minds. Around the clock andaround the globe, people are pumping out contributions small and large: full-lengthfeatures on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, comments on Blogger, discussions onYahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled Del.icio.us bookmarks. User-generated contentand robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web 2.0.
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Building Web Reputation Systems- P13Figure 6-13. The video responses on YouTube certainly indicate users’ desire to be associated withpopular videos. However, they may not actually indicate any logical thread of association.Constraining ScopeWhen you’re considering all the objects that your system will interact with, and all theinteractions between those objects and your users, it’s critical to take into account anidea that we have been reinforcing throughout this book: all reputation exists within alimited context, which is always specific to your audience and application. Try to de-termine the correct scope, or restrictive context, for the reputations in your system.Resist the temptation to lump all reputation-generating interactions into one score—the score will be diluted to the point of meaninglessness. The following example fromYahoo! makes our point perfectly.Context Is KingThis story tells how Yahoo! Sports unsuccessfully tried to integrate social media intoits top-tier website. Even seasoned product managers and designers can fall into thetrap of making the scope of an application’s objects and interactions much broaderthan it should be.Yahoo!’s Sports product managers believed that they should integrate user-generatedcontent quickly across their entire site. They did an audit of their offering, and startedto identify candidate objects, reputable entities, and some potential inputs.The site had sports news articles, and the product team knew that it could tell a lotabout what was in each article: the recognized team names, sport names, player names,146 | Chapter 6: Objects, Inputs, Scope, and Mechanismcities, countries, and other important game-specific terms—in other words, the objects.It knew that users liked to respond to the articles by leaving text comments—the inputs.It proposed an obvious intersection of the objects and the inputs: every comment on anews article would be a blog post, tagged with the keywords from the article, andoptionally by user-generated tags, too. Whenever a tag appeared on another page, suchas a different article mentioning the same city, the user’s comment on the original articlecould be displayed.At the same time, those comments would be displayed on the team- and player-detailpages for each tag attached to the comment. The product managers even had aspira-tions to surface comments on the sports portal, not just for the specific sport, but forall sports.Seems very social, clever, and efficient, right?No. It’s a horrible design mistake. Consider the following detailed example from Britishfootball.An article reports that a prominent player, Mike Brolly, who plays for the Chelsea team,has been injured and may not be able to play in an upcoming championship footballmatch with Manchester United. Users comment on the article, and their comments aretagged with Manchester United, Chelsea, and Brolly.Those comments would be surfaced—news feed–style—on the article page itself, thesports home page, the football home page, the team pages, and the player page. Onepost, six destination pages, each with a different context of use, different social norms,and different communities that they’ve attracted.Nearly all these contexts are wrong, and the correct contexts aren’t even considered: • There is no all-of-Yahoo! Sports community context. At least, there’s not one with any great cohesion—American tennis fans, for example, don’t care about British football. When an American tennis fan is greeted on the Yahoo! Sports home page with comments about British football, they regard that about as highly as spam. • The team pages are the wrong context for the comments because the fans of dif- ferent teams don’t mix. At a European football game, the fans for each team are kept on opposite sides of the field, divided by a chain link fence, with police wield- ing billy clubs alongside. The police are there to keep the fan communities apart. Online, the cross-posting of the comments on the team pages encourages conflict between fans of the opposing teams. Fans of opposing teams have completely op- posite reactions to the injury of a star player, and intermixing those conversations would yield anti-social (if sometimes hilarious) results. • The comments may or may not be relevant on the player page. It depends on whether the user actually responded to the article in the player-centric context— an input that this design didn’t account for. Constraining Scope | 147 • Even the context of the article itself is poor, at least on Yahoo!. Its deal with the news feed companies, AP and Reuters, limits the amount of time an article may appear on the site to less than 10 days. Attaching comments (and reputation) to such transient objects tells users that their contributions don’t matter in the long ...