We’re all social creatures, and we thrive on the interactions of others, in fact, these interactions are the primary drivers for troublemakers in communities.
I’ve read stories about how babies that are given all the proper medical attention, food, shelter to deem them ‘healthy’ whither away to near death if they don’t get human contact and love and care. The same applies to prison, perhaps one of the more dreaded punishments is sending inmates to the ‘hole’ for isolation from all social contact. POWs can muster the strength to survive knowing that a series of Morse code taps can signal to fellow inmates that they’re ok and cared about. How does this apply to online communities?
[The ‘Bozo’ Feature renders the troublemakers’ activities invisible to everyone else, naturally severing what they most crave from others –attention and reactions]
One of my primary coverage areas is on community platforms (also known as white label social networks) that are used by brands to deploy their own social features on their corporate domain. I’ve come across both Mzinga and Pluck that offer this feature, leave a comment below if you also have this feature.
Community managers have a few options when dealing with troublemakers, the first is to take them on head on, either in private or public, sometimes it leads them to banning them. Banning them (removing their account) often doesn’t solve many issues, instead they may choose to create new accounts, or figure out how to cause additional trouble in subvert ways.
Some community managers who can’t deal any further with these troublemakers are left to only one option, by rendering the troublemaker as a “Bozo” using the communtiy software. What’s the “Bozo” feature? It renders the troublemaker invisible to everyone else.
Troublemakers thrive on the attention they get from others and enjoy stirring up fights, but they won’t know that no one else can see them, and therefore assume everyone is ignoring them, or their ploys hold no weight. As a result, they’ll slowly move away, sometimes never realizing that they’ve been labeled a “Bozo”. This gives the community manager a way to defuse the situation, in a non-confrontational manner, allowing for the troublemaker to quietly move on their own.
Depends on your view of troublemakers. Often the contrary voice builds a community, if only in opposition to that ‘troublemaker’. At first blush, this approach seems like a passive-aggressive way of handling the situation, esp if it is an informal community.
In the case of brands, where marketers need sanitized communities to ensure funding for their social media initiative, a bozo feature wld be helpful for a short-term, knee-jerk response from a spineless community manager lacking the wit, experience or confidence to deal with troublemakers effectively.
But longer term: who wants to participate in a vanilla-bland-boring community? Might there be ‘Lord of the Flies’ response where the dissenting voice — the troublemaker — starts a negative brand community…or communities?
I’ve managed and moderated a few community boards, and this seems like a really smart feature.
I think most community managers (if unbiased and actively tuned into their community) would easily distinguish the appropriate use of such a feature. If a user is disruptive, versus simply vocal, or constantly posting the same argument/position/articles over and over again versus moving the conversation forward, then Bozo-ing them would be appropriate.
Although I will say, the feature could eventually be just as ineffective as Banning if the user is still able to Private Message or, use email to reach out to other community members to ask why he/she is being ignored or not being answered.
Most community members establish sub-networks that allow them to circumvent the established community platform. The user would then establish another account, starting the process all over again.
vBulletin has this feature, and it’s called Tachy Goes to Coventry. It allows an admin to put a user on every other user’s ignore list without the user knowing it. So they just blather on without disturbing anyone.
Although vBulletin is a very popular forum software, it’s not widely used by brands looking for social networking or community features.
When a brand is investing marketing dollars to build a community and the quality traffic (e.g. owners/users/evangelists) is diminishing due to ‘troublemakers’.
Connie —
Usually when an account is banned, the user knows about it right away, either because they are notified or because they are obviously denied the right to login or post. When a user is bozofiltered (put into Coventry, etc), they do not know that nobody can see their posts. Everything looks totally normal to them, but nobody is responding. Eventually, most trolls get tired of not getting a response and stop posting.
To answer your question more directly, there is nothing preventing them from creating new accounts to cause more issues. However, this feature prevents that from happening less often as they don’t see any change, and it can take a long time before they realize that nobody can see their posts. This slows them down, at the very least.
Hi, Jeremiah–
Your post reached me through Techmeme and piqued my interest in how directly it touches the dissonance between community and market.
I’m a member of several unbranded online communities and co-mod of another. One of the things that frequently comes into play both day to day and in terms of the quality of overall community participation is the two-way visibility between mods and members.
The balance of power favors the mods, of course, when it comes to a question of who stays and who goes, but the check on that absolute power is simple: whatever the mod does when she perceives a problem with a member, her action is visible to every member. Not only visible, in fact, but comment-worthy. A community known for capricious or self-interested moderation tends over time to attract commenters more focused on pointing and laughing than on the site’s stated purpose.
Silencing a member is a pretty radical move. When a mod perceives the necessity for it, any social networking community worth the name will operate on the norm that both the individual and the community should know what’s happening and why. Otherwise what you’ve got isn’t a community, and the people who joined thinking otherwise are likely to be unhappy when they find out otherwise.
I suspect that mods who represent the interests of a company or a brand, rather than the interests of the community whose members they moderate, need to be more transparent in their decisions and the reasons behind them, not less — unless the brand-owner wants to end up either preaching to the choir or painting a “Mock Me” target on itself.
Jane J.
This is interesting,
http://SavingTheInternetWithHate.com/
Rajesh Duggal
I don’t recall precisely how I landed on this Blog but the topic is most interesting; I remember I was searching for white label SN solutions. Anyway, my take is that a community should be largely self-policing: Should (for instance)three members find the post offensive the post automatically goes Bozo ::::shrugs::::
Guy joins local newspaper with social networking environment, mainly for local sports team networking and forum commentary. Gains popularity with insightful and colorful commentary, gains many friends and during the off season is bored.The Local Newspapers union endorses a national political candidate. Think news media aren™t consistently biased against any political party… Ha haha! Average Guy continues to represent his personal opinions with factual commentary, insightful opinion and funny syndicated cartoon posts,forum is flooded union with representation to sway conversation to public opinion toward their favor. Average guy is “Bozoed” off social networking sight, 1 year and 50 friends later… what a waste!
Anyone that thinks newspapers are Fair and Balanced and are bastions of Free Speech that benefits all is wildly mistaken.
Newspaper will not even return an email,no TOS violation, Blacklisting and Whitelisting members is common practice. Mass lockouts for members with viewpoints contrary to newspapers political opinions.
This is what happens when the moderator is the bad apple.
This is a slight side-step on a human interaction topic I’ve enjoyed reading. The role of moderator can be identical in part to “sales” in that, the sales person must overcome a series of objections to make closure. Believe me, I have grey hairs from 10 years in hi-stress enterprise sales and the process was slow learning. When I finally learned to “moderate” client issues, complaints, bitches, grinds, etc…I managed to turn around more than a few Bozo clients. But, I strongly recommend Dan Hill’s book, Emotionomics. He’ll take you inside human motivations that lead to emotions that interact with behaviors; and you’ll see a side of the Bozo you’ve maybe never seen: what motivates this behavior and why.
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Can we install this feature in broadcasting and deal the all the left and right-wing nut jobs out there?
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