Pretty much every modern online community that hosts end user content has various systems in place to encourage good (“desirable”) behavior and deter naughty acts. I’ve been polling various friends with online community experience about this recently, to glean their experience on what they thought worked best. Their advice:

Rewarding the Good Stuff:

1) Public recognition goes a long way. Give glory for good deeds done.

2) Increased access to community resources can be a much-desired reward for good behavior. See how Slashdot uses karma, for instance.

3) Point systems / artificial currencies work wonderfully in some environments, and fail miserably in others. There was no consensus opinion on this… it seems to be partially an issue of design (does the notion of currency suit a given app, for instance), and partially an issue of customer culture.

4) Never reward people with money, unless they’re your employees. A.K.A. “money can’t buy love”.  It sounds obvious, but… it has to be said.

Deterring the Bad Stuff:

1) Moderation is effective in correcting bad behavior once it has occurred. It’s not generally effective at preventing bad behavior in the first place (like jails, with crime). Moderation can be costly to scale up due to people-intensity.  See Craigslist and Slashdot for examples of moderation systems that work by employing the user community. Slashdot’s is particularly intricate.. see How does moderation work and How did the moderation system develop in the Slashdot FAQ.

2) You need monitoring systems in place so you can lock out user accounts and/or IP addresses of really naughty people. Increasingly, laws in various countries are requiring that you build in this capability.

3) Reserve lawsuits for the wickedest of them all. But you really don’t want to go there unless you absolutely have to.

Wednesday Oct 10 is Ontario’s next provincial election. This is a particularly important vote, since it includes a referendum on the newly proposed MMP (mixed-member proportional) system.

I believe MMP has the potential to make our electoral system a great deal healthier. The old system forces you to compromise between the quality of your local candidate and the party who you believe will do the best job for the province, because you can only have one vote. The newly proposed MMP allows you to separate those judgements by voting for a candidate and then also voting for the party you believe in. MMP should lead to more diversity in our political representatives, and it promises every citizen an equal chance to be heard and to change the status quo.

You can read more about it on wikipedia, on the official MMP website, or on voteforMMP.ca. 

The referendum needs a 60% majority to pass, so high voter turnout is particularly important. British Columbia recently had a similar referendum and fell just short with 58% approval. So pass on the word, and get out and vote!

I’ve been thinking lately about how to scale up software services on the web in a cheap and incremental way. Every web startup faces this problem. In the bad old days (1993?) your only choice was to go buy a bunch of machines and build out your own server farm. The next wave was the ability to lease resources within a web hoster’s web farm, likely starting with shared machines and then stepping up to dedicated servers. The third wave is what I call “computing as a utility”. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are all working on this, and so far Amazon seems to have the most interesting capabilities: web services that let you outsource computing and storage in a very incremental way: Mechanical Turk (human task outsourcing), S3 (storage), Elastic Compute Cloud, aka EC2 (computing), and several others related to payment and commerce.

Computing utilities are a significant innovation. They provide a way to incrementally tap into computing power, network capability, storage, and all the expertise and staffing it takes to build out and manage a heavy duty server farm with worldwide reach.  From a financial standpoint you are shifting from big chunks of up-front capital expenses (and commensurate fund-raising) to smaller chunks of pay-as-you-go operational expense. From a staffing standpoint you are leasing expert help on operations, which is great, because you can then focus more of your staff and energy on building a great customer experience.

In theory, you can bootstrap a startup much more cheaply this way. It’s the moral equivalent of tapping into the electricity grid versus buying and wiring up your own generator or building a power source from scratch.

I’m really eager to see services like this mature, and curious to see how they get wired into developer tools and business models.

More reading:

(1) There are several slide shows now that tell the stories of various startup companies experiences with S3 and EC2. These are quick reads: http://www.slideshare.net/group/the-startup-project-aws and http://www.slideshare.net/group/webapps-scalability.

(2) In CNet last week Elinor Mills described her efforts to make money via Mechanical Turk. It sounds like it’s still hard to make significant cash there. 

(3) About a year ago I mused about the Mechanical Turk and things people can do better than computers.