The Challenge of Policing Online Communities

Online communities can be chaotic places. The anonymity and instant communications sometimes add up to situations where decorum gets thrown out the window. But of course, the internet is all about sharing information and freedom of communication. When you run a community, it can be tough to decide where to become the police, and where to let people express themselves.

The San Francisco Chronicle gives us a look inside the inner workings of online community management, with a profile of Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr.com.

SFGate reports:

Thirty million members have posted 2.8 billion images (and now videos) from their lives, but more importantly the Yahoo-owned company has let them seize on the social nature of photography. Strangers convene to comment on each others’ images, form groups based on common interests and share the project of documenting and categorizing the visible universe. To roam Flickr is to wander through crooked teeth, local politics, nesting osprey, birth, spaghetti, divorce and every other aspect of existence. If photos reflect life itself, so too does a Web site containing billions of them.

At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image of our own. But in truth it’s more like a Photoshopped image — the nice parts accentuated, the inappropriate bits cropped away. So it goes with any online community, of course. Behavior must be moderated and a communal ethos must be preserved; Wild West cliches aside, total freedom at any entity like this would sink it in a storm of lawsuits, flame wars and gridlocked cacophony. So directors of community exist.

SFGATE: “Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com”

photo by striatic