Online Communities: Fight The Real Enemy
A post on Freshnetworks by Holly Seddon reminded me to write about what I think - beyond even trolls - is the number one menace on online communities.
Bores.
Here are the reasons why bores are the bane of a community.
1. They come in many forms: Depending on how your community works your bores might include verbose bores, bores who trot out received wisdom, “me too” bores, “First!” bores, bores who flog in-jokes to death, list bores, bores who ask obvious questions, and many many more.
2. They often appear to contribute signal: That said it’s hard to actually fault bores. Aside from off-topic bores (there’s another kind!) they tend to stick resolutely to their mundane point and you can’t really categorise it as “noise”, it’s just useless signal.
3. It takes less effort to make a boring contribution than a non-boring one: Thinking of something interesting to say takes time. Thinking of something someone else said and parroting it takes less. Saying the same thing you always say takes even less.
4. It’s hard to legislate around them: Because they’re not strictly speaking doing anything wrong, it’s very hard to kick bores out without damaging the fabric of your community (see point 7 below). User-rating of content might do the trick for some types of bore, but risks encouraging others (and carries its own set of problems). All you can really do is try and stop them arriving in the first place. Which isn’t easy. Partly because…
5. They attract other bores while putting off non-bores: People with dull ideas may or may not react well to people with interesting ones. But people with interesting ideas aren’t likely to want to hang out with people who have dull ones. So the more bores your community has, the harder it gets to recruit new non-bores.
6. Unlike trolls, they don’t realise they’re bores: Of course, almost nobody comes to a community and thinks “I’m too boring for this place”. Every bore thinks they have plenty to contribute. In fact, you might be a bore. So might I.* The definition is highly fluid and subjective, after all!
7. Even raising the problem makes you look like an arsehole: The ethos of most social media is highly participatory and built around welcoming people and being nice to them. When you start talking about bores being a problem, you open yourself up to looking conceited, elitist, bullying, envious, etc. And in a way you are, since it’s quite possible for bores to get less so.
So what can you do? If you throw up your hands and do nothing, the community reverts gradually to the mean. On the communities I’ve been on solutions have ranged from “ban them” (not fair or workable), “set a good example” (good idea but problematic because of point #6), limit contributions per person in some way (risky). Limiting or sidelining topics which are boredom red-flags - by pointing people to FAQs, setting up sub-boards for list threads, and so on - can be helpful, as can promoting and featuring interesting things.The best way forward is probably gentle encouragement.
*it’s worth noting that boring-ness is only an issue on communities, not social networks. Unless you’re related to my son I am an extremely boring Flickr user, but my boringness would only become more problematic if I joined groups: as an unconnected node in the netork I’m harming nobody’s experience.
(Thanks to Frank Kogan for raising some of these issues.)
