in which I finally make a post which doesn't reference internet-based revolution

This week’s readings focused on humans’ innate mental tendencies and how to create a site or a community system that appeals to those tendencies and keeps the site running functionally. Neuro Web Design described the “three brains” we each have: the old brain, which governs basic functions, fight or flight responses, etc.; the middle brain, which rules emotions; and the new brain, which is basically the conscious mind as it is commonly imagined. Like every philosophy class I’ve ever taken (admittedly just two, but both have been during this academic year, so I feel a little inundated), the book establishes early on that the sense that the mind and body are two separate things is completely false. Weinschenk does share a lot of interesting information on studies showing subconscious thinking and its influence over behavior, and she correlates that to how websites should optimally present information, especially in commercial situations. Much of the focus is on how people make choices subliminally based on either what they themselves will get out of the decision, how much they feel they belong to a certain group, or how much they feel they owe someone. Design to Thrive takes a similar approach in this chapter, examining the same principles in regards to setting up a social network or community. Dr. Howard provides a list of twelve techniques which involve using renumeration and a sense of community belonging to get lurkers involved and maximize the community experience for everyone:
1. Make the text editor fun; add emoticons
2. Use a subscription application form
3. Mentors teach
4. Seed the discussion
5. Use stars to show membership contribution levels
6. Rank the value of members’ messages
7. Remove the fear factor by providing examples of how to participate
8. Create a safe environment by sending out “tickle” messages
9. Create a regular event
10. Don’t automatically archive
11. Discourage attempts to send conversations to other blogs, web sites, or discussion groups
12. Ban redistribution servers and cross-postings

This last bit with the listed techniques really reverberated with me, as I could think of specific examples for each applying to (mostly successful) online communities I have personally been part of, specifically on livejournal and reddit. Aside from the F7U12 subreddit, I haven’t had much experience with in-text emoticons, aside from most of my livejournal community experience which tends to somewhat substitute emoticons with gifs showing users’ mood, tone, or reaction to another comment or post. Several livejournal communities I’ve been part of have required an application or at least a pre-screening process involving moderators looking at an incoming user’s profile to ensure that an incoming user is active on livejournal (examining comments left/received, etc.) and that their interests line up with that of the community. I’ve experienced some mentoring on livejournal, although most of mine occurred by happenstance. Discussion-seeding is common among moderators of both sites, and reddit particularly employs the next methods, granting users karma or taking it away based on how much other users upvote or downvote comments and submissions. Sample posting is common in both, and livejournal uses “tickle” messages about once a week. Reddit opts for posting on the reddit blog, a defaulted subreddit for all users. Regular events are more common in the livejournal groups I’ve been a part of; some users posted identical “how was your day?” posts each day, and for a time users would be encouraged to create themed “mixtapes” and post a list of songs each Tuesday which fit the week’s theme. I’ve never really been part of a group which didn’t automatically archive, but I certainly see the appeal. The issue present in cross-posting or taking an issue to another site has been a huge one during my livejournal experience; communities like sf_drama exist just to highlight dramatic arguments, generally making the entire original community look bad. Sitewide, livejournal had an issue recently when it implemented a connect-to-facebook sort of feature which would automatically post user comments (and the entries which they commented on) to facebook; the userbase was outraged, not wanting their private entries being automatically posted on some commenter’s facebook page for the entire world to see. Based on this outrage, livejournal eventually disabled the feature in favor of continuing to maintain the notion that internet users have some amount of privacy on the web.