Closer To The Ideal

Our biggest project of the last 8 months has been The Second Road. This site is built on top of the framework that I started developing back at Category4.com (which they released as open source). We had a big roll-out on May 29th, which we completed and clarified much of the functionality. The site just got a nice write up in the local paper:

Often it is late at night, when there is neither a 12-step meeting to attend nor anyone awake to phone, that the craving for a drink is strongest.

And it is times like these when Ginger Bauler goes online to reach out to others recovering from addiction, finding solace in their tales of success and providing encouragement for those trying to break the shackles of dependency.

Bauler, who used to manage a research laboratory in Charlottesville, writes a blog about her struggles with alcoholism and her quest for sobriety on The Second Road — a new online support community for drug and alcohol addicts started by Charlottesville residents.

Writing about her battles enables Bauler to become “accountable” for her recovery, she says. And meeting and keeping in touch with those dealing with similar experiences gives her strength.

“I develop these relationships with total strangers, but with whom I’m completely connected because of this disease,” said Bauler, who has become a managing editor of the site.

The Second Road is the brainchild of local documentary filmmaker Melissa Shore, who partnered with Chip Ransler, owner of a digital publishing firm, to launch the site in November. By late May the social networking site had 225 members and more than 1,400 different people had visited it in a recent 10-day stretch.

Each member of The Second Road has his or her own profile page, similar to sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where they can post information and display customized features. The site also includes a series of blogs, chat groups, a “sharing wall” for inspirational quotes and testimonial videos from recovering addicts.

Shore, who grew up watching family members battle addictions, noticed that there was a gap in services for people in recovery and a need for round-the-clock services.

People in recovery do not always have access to meetings or counseling services, and some may have no one to turn to in times of crisis, Shore realized. That is especially true in rural communities, where social services either might not be readily available or are far away.

“There are hours of the day when you can’t or don’t feel comfortable reaching out for help,” Shore said. “The beauty of the Internet, of course, is that it’s 24-7.”

The site has won praise from many in the local mental health community as a vital tool to help round out recovery services.

“The concept is absolutely brilliant,” said Jeff Gould, administrator of the Charlottesville/Albemarle Drug Court. “This type of online recovery network is just perfect for people who can’t get to meetings.”

Beth Elliott, a retired social worker who advises the site’s creators, says that members are using The Second Road to implement the treatment plans they develop with counselors, through making lists and blogging about their successes and missteps.

I’ll link to this article because I know I’ll want to refer to it later. I very much enjoy its dicussion of the negative effects of “network effects”. Like credit in a stock market, “network effects” exaggerate both the upward and downward swings.

You see this happen all the time at dinner parties or events. Things are great until one or two people announce the intention to leave. If those folks are fun and entertaining, there’s an immediate realization that the quality of the experience is about to go down. And yet more people announce their intention to leave, and so on, until you are left with the party hosts and a big mess ;-)

Advanced discussion: Social Network Death Spiral
Now let’s do a more advanced discussion using the concepts above - for some new readers, this discussion might completely be incoherent ;-)

Let’s consider a specific scenario where a social network could easily start to “Death Spiral” - here’s some set up on the scenario:

• You have a bunch of users, let’s call the total number N
• The total number of users in the ecosystem, called the carrying capacity, is variable C
• These users all individually require some utility value on a site, let’s call this V_required
• Then there’s a retention %, called R, which depends on two factors:
  • If the utility value for users is satisfied, that is, V > V_required, then R close to 100%
  • If the utility value drops under V_required, then R is crappy, closer to 0%
• And to borrow Metcalfe’s Law, the value of the network is calculated at V = N^2

So the scenario is that as the total users for the application reaches the carrying capacity, you basically hit a point of maximum saturation - this is defined by the ratio N/C. Sometimes this ratio can also be referred to as the “efficiency” of a user acquisition process, which relays how many people you actually acquire versus the universe of all users. (Obviously you want this to be as large as possible)

Once you hit the carrying capacity and acquire all possible users, N is at the highest point, and thus the network value is also at its highest point, V = N_max^2. Similarly, because the network value V is at its highest, the retention reaches its highest point as well.

The question in this scenario is, at any point during the growth of the network, does the network value V exceed the required value of the site, which we call V_required? Does the network break through the critical mass of value?

If so, retention should be great, as defined by the explanation above. In fact, maybe you reach V_required early on during the growth of the site, which makes the acquisition process much more efficient. Early on, maybe the userbase wasn’t sticking, but a critical mass threshold is met, and suddenly the entire userbase sticks, which creates a long-term creation of ad impressions and company value.

However, if you don’t reach the required value in the network, then you’re pretty much screwed. Then the retention sucks, since the users aren’t finding value, and some percentage of them will leave. This will then remove more value from the system, causing yet another round of users to leave. This continual loss of users is a death spiral that collapses your network in fine Eflactem’s Law style.

A very interesting variation of this is when you apply Metcalfe’s Law not to the entire network of users, but rather think of a social network as a loosely grouped set of connections. In that case, some local networks might have achieved critical mass, and if they are big enough, they will be retained. However, if the smaller networks around any given group start collapsing, then sometimes even the large networks will get pulled down with them.

This is an important story to read, for anyone who uses an online service. Steve Portigal had thousands of images, tags, and comments on his Flickr account, and they all got erased when his account was hacked.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others in is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.

I’ve previously linked to danah boyd’s controversial essay about social class on MySpace and Facebook. A month later, boyd has taken the time to respond to her critics:

Qualitative research has data. Typically, written ethnographies and other qualitative-driven findings show that data through individual accounts, quotes by people that are contextualized, and detailed descriptions of people or situations. I have that data but I did not include it in my blog essay. I intentionally save data for my academic works so that I can flesh it out and situate it in the depth that needs to happen. The decision to not reveal data has to do with separating the academic writing from the blog writing, but it also has to do with what I’m trying to accomplish with each. Writing a case study of someone or using data requires a lot more fleshing out than I typically do in my blog. Thus, I didn’t show data in that essay but that is not because I don’t have it. This is another way in which this is not a formal article - leaps of faith are fine when you’re having a conversation, but not when you are trying to document something for posterity.

I’m mildly uneasy with “leaps of faith are fine when you’re having a conversation”. I know one thing my friends appreciate about me is my precision, and that when I quote something I often recall exactly where I read it. That is, I can offer cites. I think people are willing to tolerate uncited material in a conversation because none of us have the kind of memory that would allow us to remember where we learned every fact in our head. Nevertheless, I think it is the kind of thing that people indulge for the sake of friendship (and the knowledge that they will need to be indulged the same way, that is, reciprocity), but they are never really happy about it. And if you speak to someone who is not a friend of yours, and especially if they disagree with what you are saying, then assumptions of goodwill, indulgence and reciprocity cease to exist. Even among people I’ve known ten years, when we have a conversation where we disagree sharply about a political issues, they ask me to cite where I am getting my facts, and I’m often curious where they are getting theirs.

However, I have no reservations with anything boyd writes about the difficulty of defining social class in America. This is really one of the aspects of her writing that I enjoy most:

At the top of the essay, I snarkily wrote “I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness…” The issue is not just that I don’t have quantitative data; it’s that quantitative data does not have the nuance to show what’s going on. It gets us part way there, but there are problems with it. Class is not simply a matter of what income bracket you’re at. When we use income level as a marker, we get the Marxist cafe worker and the immigrant janitor in the same bucket, but they are not living the same lifestyle at all. Another approximation that is often used for class is parental education. Post-graduate degrees are often helpful at pointing to upper class activity, but there’s still a huge difference between a Stanford Law degree and a master’s in special ed from the local night college. There’s also a big difference between dropping out of Harvard after 2 years and getting a 2-year community college degree. Surveys usually ask what the last degree one got was. Do we really put Bill Gates in the same bucket with other just-finished-HS individuals? (Gates was not just an average dropout… His parents were powerful and he dropped out of Harvard.) Marking teens’ class is even more sticky because we use their parents as proxies. Many children replicate their parents class norms, but not all. This is why parents complain that one kid is doing “OK” and the other is not; this means that one kid is living up to parental class expectations and the other is not.

Also:

I chose the term subaltern to refer to subculturally-identified and non-hegemonic teens because their expressions are often interpreted by hegemonic mass media in a way that they are always seen as failure. I wanted to choose a term that did not simply place them as second-tier citizens, but as powerful voices in discourse. Too many people who read my article assumed that the group that I talked about as subalterns are somehow inferior or less valuable than hegemonic teens. Perhaps that’s hegemony speaking, but I find it frustrating. I think that they are equally powerful forces in society (and they are certainly equally powerful in the market) but I think that they have different views on the construction and maintenance of society as we know it.

The terms are extremely problematic but I used them with a smile on my face because I thought that they would evoke an image and make people think. Many have been outraged that I appear biased towards one or the other (although no one seems to know which - I’ve been accused of being condescending towards subaltern teens and I’ve also been accused of fetishizing them). Perhaps I should’ve located myself. As a teen, I would’ve been caught in between - a smart kid whose friends and world were very much in the subaltern camps (geeks and burnouts primarily). As an adult, I have more privilege than I ever thought possible and my world is extremely hegemonic and I’m always trying to fight against that. Thus, I probably have more sympathy with subaltern teens but my friends are all raising hegemonic ones who I adore. Thus, I’m definitely caught in the middle.

It is amazing to me how many people will criticize an essay before they’ve read it:

Unfortunately, misinterpretations were made worse by the mainstream media, and namely the initial BBC article that talked about this essay as a formal report of a six month study. (The article was corrected a few days later.) I realized very quickly that people read the BBC article or the Slashdot coverage or their friends’ blog posts and decided to critique from there. I have been astonished at how lazy people have been. My article is not that inaccessible and it’s not even that long. What was even funnier was that when I wrote a response to the BBC article on my blog, people then took that to say that I saw the essay as based on no data and otherwise meaningless. The essay is based on data; it is rooted in a very long ethnographic study; but it is just not a formal report of my findings.

I especially like this, utopia is dead:

We used to have this utopian view that the Internet would solve all of our societal divisions. On the Internet, no one would know you’re a dog, right? The reality is that all of society’s issues are simply perpetuated online. And that’s frustrating. I liked the utopian dream better, even if it’s not real. But if we accept the reality - that the Internet mirrors and magnifies offline values and views - we must start to think of what the implications of this are. Society is in a dangerous position when people who are different do not interact. This is how intolerance breeds and we definitely have enough of that in this country.

boyd describes the criticism of her as absolutely brutal:

I couldn’t help but wonder if the academics I know could’ve handled some of what I received this month. Not all of it was what we would call a review. I’ve had to practice deep breathing as I went through detailed discussions of whether or not I was cute enough to fuck or look through bulletins that had decided to gather photos of me for analysis (they concluded that my arm bracelets prove that I’m a cutter). I know the Slashdot/Metafilter community well enough to not take the personal threats on my life or body seriously, but that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. Emails from parents accusing me of destroying their children’s lives suck. PR campaigns to discredit me suck. In general, being mocked isn’t any fun. Many of my dearest friends can’t stand even the slightest personal attack online; I’ve learned to take it for granted while being continuously disappointed by it. If online peer review is going to be this personal, few are going to be masochistic enough to want it.

For all that was written about Kathy Sierra and the attempts to silence women online, this strikes me as a more common example of the forces at work that might limit women’s careers, especially careers that depend on some kind of online presence.

When I log into MySpace, I’m told that I’m part of my extended network:

This is idiotic. I’m me, my friends are my network, and their friends are my extended network. Yes, because I am one of my friend’s friends, I can see why the code might initially think of me as part of my own extended network. However, it is confusing, and it speaks to really poor programming. After all these years, with all their money, can’t they get something so obvious fixed?

A very interesting take on the Facebook platform:

Translation: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it — networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. — and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition.

This is a “success kills” scenario — the good news is you’re successful, the bad news is you’re flat on your back from what amounts to a self-inflicted denial of service attack, unless you have the money and time and knowledge to tackle the resulting scale challenges.

Will every Facebook application go through this?

No, of course not. The ones that nobody uses will not have this problem.

But the successful ones all will.

The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.

Last year I signed up for an account on Couchsurfing.com. Mostly the people who’ve come to visit have been friends of mine from outside of the network. But sometimes someone comes through who knows me only from reading my profile. Some of the folks are unforgetably interesting, like Phil Erner, a grad student studying physics, who stopped by and explained to me exactly why dark matter is needed to explain observed anomalies in the rotation of galaxies. Some of the visitors seem sent by mysterious but caring forces, just to help me out. For instance, last month I was wrestling with the issue of how to proceed with a very large web client of mine. I asked myself, should I write their software from scratch, or should I take an existing CMS like WordPress or Joomla and customize it? Just then some fellow named Andy called up. He said he was biking across America, and he was wondering if he could crash at my place for a night. Turned out it was Andy Skelton, who is on the core team of WordPress. So he stopped by and we spent some time talking about the client and talking about how to customize WordPress. What are the chances of such a thing?

danah boyd has a new essay about class dynamics and how they divide the people who use MySpace from the people who use Facebook. Everyone has linked to this essay, including such major media outlets as the BBC. One thing that jumped out at me was her idea that even the design of the site, the look and feel, were reflecting cultural values that arose from class divisions. (In the following excerpt, she uses the word “hegemonic” when referring to culturally middle class people, and “subaltern” when referring to culturally working class people.)

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds. The aesthetics issue is also one of the forces that drives some longer-term users away from MySpace.

In their book “Aggression, Antisocial Behavior, and Violence Among Girls”, the researchers Putallaz and Bierman argue that females avoid physical aggression but instead use social aggression as their outlet for rage. Deborah Giorgi-Guarnieri summarizes the argument as “boys are good at physical aggression and girls prefer social aggression. Social aggression means, ‘acts intended to inflict damage on a victim’s social relationships or social status,’ (p 15) such as gossip.”

Ten years ago, when a lot of this gossip was still verbal, and offline, it was difficult for outsiders to see these kinds of attacks. Gossip, after all, could be delivered to specific audiences, and anyone outside of that audience might only hear a garbled version of the attack. If you were inclined to think of the aggressor as kind, and if the gossip was especially vicious, then you were free to believe that the aggressor never really said the things that 3rd parties might later tell you that she did indeed say.

MySpace, and other online social networking sites, helps make the gossip visible. This, for instance, was recently posted by a woman that I know, and it is about another woman that I know:

A Message to Older Women: This has been a long time coming…

Dear Older Women (in the +30 range),

DON’T HATE.

Stop reminding me that I’m younger than you, I can SEE the difference and I’m quite pleased with the view.

One day I’ll be as old as you and I know that I certainly won’t be as (if at all) bitter- There are plenty of other women who are not that way who are your age and are mature about it. You may be older, but grow the fuck up and be proud your dents, wrinkles, and knowledge. Stop being so fucking vain. Don’t blame the young ones for your inadequacies in life or your inadequacies in your relationships.

Thank you.

Love,

26 year old, unsagging, virgin uterus & stomach, and well rested.

(The “virgin uterus” bit is potentially confusing - it is meant to say “I have not had a baby”, not that she is a virgin.)

There is a certain irony to a post so full of venom starting off with the words “Don’t Hate”.

The advantage, I think, to posting this on MySpace, is that the poster gets to potentially shame her target in front of a much larger audience than if the communication was done verbally.

A lot of articles have focused on how MySpace is changing relations among teenagers. Yet, with little effort, I could find a dozen such incidents occurring in my adult social network.