scholarly journals Admins, mods, and benevolent dictators for life: The implicit feudalism of online communities

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482098655
Author(s):  
Nathan Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Community Management ◽  
Alternative Management ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Primary Mechanism ◽  
Rules Set ◽  
Interface Designs

Online platforms train users to interact with each other through certain widespread interface designs. This article argues that an “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community management on the dominant platforms for online communities. It is a pattern that grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, typically under rules set by platform companies. Implicit feudalism emerged from technical conditions dating to early online networks. In light of alternative management mechanisms with more democratic features, it becomes all the more clear that implicit feudalism is not a necessary condition.

scholarly journals Admins, Mods, and Benevolent Dictators for Life: The Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Quality Control ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Community Management ◽  
Alternative Management ◽  
Primary Mechanism ◽  
Rules Set ◽  
Interface Designs

This essay considers how social networks train users to interact with each other through certain widespread interface designs. I argue that an “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community management on the Internet’s most popular platforms for online communities. This pattern grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, under rules set by the meta-absolutism of platform companies. Through experience in communities so constituted, users may be learning to trust effective absolutism, even if it is relatively rare, and distrust their own capacity for self-governance. In light of alternative management mechanisms with more democratic features, it becomes all the more clear that implicit feudalism is not a necessary condition.

Improving the Statistical Power and Reliability of Research Using Amazon Mechanical Turk

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremiah W Bentley
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Statistical Power ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Online Platforms

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular source of experimental participants due to its convenience and low cost (relative to traditional laboratories). However, MTurk presents challenges related to statistical power and reliability. These challenges are not unique to MTurk, but are more prevalent than in research conducted with other participant pools. In this paper I discuss several reasons why research conducted with MTurk may face additional power and reliability challenges. I then present suggestions for dealing with these challenges, taking advantage of the comparative strengths of MTurk. The discussion should be of interest to PhD students and other researchers considering using MTurk or other online platforms as a source of experimental participants as well as to reviewers and editors who are considering quality control standards for research conducted with this participant pool.

scholarly journals Hidden youth? A new perspective on the sociality of young people ‘withdrawn’ in the bedroom in a digital age

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1227-1244
Author(s):  
Mark Wong
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Young People ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Uk

The complexities and changing experiences of human connections have long been debated. In the digital age, technology becomes an increasingly crucial dimension of sociality. This article critically discusses the sociality of ‘hidden’ young people who shut themselves in the bedroom and are typically assumed to be socially withdrawn. This article challenges this reclusive depiction and presents qualitative evidence from the first study of this phenomenon in the UK/Scottish context, while studying this comparatively across two sites. Thirty-two interviews were conducted with Hong Kong and Scottish youth ‘withdrawn’ in the bedroom for 3 to 48 months; hidden youth’s sociality was found to be more nuanced and interconnected than previously assumed. This article argues that young people can become especially attached to online communities to seek solace and solidarity as they experience social marginalisation. Technology and online networks play an important role in enabling marginalised young people to feel connected in the digital age.

scholarly journals A Comparative Study of Online Depression Communities in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (14) ◽  
pp. 5023
Author(s):  
Jingyun Tang ◽  
Guang Yu ◽  
Xiaoxu Yao
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Operation Mode ◽  
Community Management ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Support Providers ◽  
Lack Of Information ◽  
Treatment Of Depression

Online communities have become a tool for researchers to understand and help individuals with depression. According to their operation mode in terms of management, communities can be divided into management depression communities (MDCs) and lacking-management depression communities (LDCs). This study aimed to investigate the characteristics and impact of LDCs in comparison with MDCs. All postings from the previous year were collected from the LDC and MDC. Keywords were extracted and coded to identify the themes, and a text classifier was built to identify the type of emotions and social support expressed in the postings. Community members were then clustered to explore their different participation patterns. We found that in the LDC, the expression of negative emotions was the most popular theme, there was a lack of information about the treatment of depression and a lack of social support providers, the level of engagement of providers was low, and support seekers did not receive attention. These results reveal the need for community management and can be used to develop more effective measures to support members of online depression communities.

scholarly journals Toward spreadable entertainment-education: leveraging social influence in online networks

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 1241-1250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roel O Lutkenhaus ◽  
Jeroen Jansz ◽  
Martine P A Bouman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Media ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Social Tolerance ◽  
Entertainment Education ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
New Ideas

Abstract Entertainment-education (EE) is a communication strategy that uses popular media to engage with audiences on prosocial topics such as health, social tolerance and sustainability. The purpose of EE serials on radio, television or the internet is to introduce new ideas, norms and practices by means of storytelling, as well as to offer points of engagement for audiences to talk about the themes raised by the intervention. However, in today’s media landscape, it has become increasingly difficult to captivate audiences as they have fragmented across channels and have started to create and circulate content themselves. The concept of spreadable media allows us to deal with fragmentation and user-generated content in productive ways, as it recognizes the role of autonomous audience members in shaping the flows of media content in the online networks that underlie today’s media landscape. In this article, we introduce spreadable EE: an innovative approach that builds on transmedia storytelling strategies to reach and captivate target audiences for a longer period of time, and that entails collaboration with online platforms, communities and social influencers to stimulate meaningful conversations. We enhance EE's theoretical, empirical and practical traditions with insights about how today’s audiences have come to engage with media and propose strategic approaches to create and evaluate spreadable EE.

scholarly journals Tailoring in the digital era: Stimulating dialogues on health topics in collaboration with social media influencers

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 205520761882152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roel O Lutkenhaus ◽  
Jeroen Jansz ◽  
Martine PA Bouman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Exchange Information ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Potential Collaboration ◽  
Specific Health

In today’s media landscape, audiences increasingly turn to online communities for media consumption and to exchange information about specific niche interests such as health-related topics. This calls for a segmented approach in which interventions are targeted at online communities, tailored to their specific cultures and health-related perceptions, and leverage the dynamics of conversation and social influence in online networks. Strategies drawn from the field of influencer marketing provide interesting opportunities to reach and engage with audiences in a personally relevant manner, including with those who may disagree with an intervention’s message. This article reflects on what health communicators might learn from influencer strategies and proposes digital methods to target and tailor health communication in the digital era. More concretely, we present methods to: (a) identify online communities engaging on a specific health issue; (b) map community specific cultures and health-related perceptions; and (c) identify influencers as potential collaboration partners. As such, we adopt a slightly different take on tailoring by putting the creative and cultural competences of social influencers central, and by aligning our methods with a media mapping protocol to create influencer strategies that are tailored to the cultures and health-related perceptions of multiple online audience segments. We illustrate the potential of these methods with a study of how vaccination is discussed among Dutch Twitter users.

scholarly journals Development of a Dynamic Model of Quality Control Circles: A Case of ABC Packaging Company

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-323
Author(s):  
Ijaz Yusuf ◽  
Tahsfeen Mehmood Azhar
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Production Efficiency ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Bottom Line ◽  
Real Life Setting ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Operational Processes ◽  
Generic Structures

Quality control circles are considered an effective tool in the organization to best utilize the potential of the workforce. The objective behind using quality control circles is to use employees’ brains to generate savings and create an impact on the bottom-line of the company. The framework of the quality control circles shown in Table 2 proposed the structured seven steps strategy to use the workforce's potential for continuous improvement in the organization. Companies confront multi-faceted issues and challenges in the operational processes and corporate excellence thus mainly depends upon the effective and efficient quality controls to overcome the product, process, machine, and material related issues that hamper the production efficiency, quality of the product, and overall productivity of the company. This paper attempts to develop the system dynamics model of quality control circles based on normalized data of the case company. Participation in quality control circles is voluntary in nature and passion to learn and improve is the intrinsic motivation for employees and organizations to join these circles. Employee involvement to participate and produce creative ideas in these circles is the key to the success of these quality-enhancing programs (Jerman et al. 2019) and model outcome depicts the same story. The quality control circle model indicates that a set of inter-related and interdependent skills and behaviors are a necessary condition to increase participation in the quality control circles and productivity of projects under consideration. The computer-based software STELLA is used for programming the model of quality control circles using the generic structures of the company under study. Underlying feedback structures and interactions among various variables makes the model closer to the real-life setting.

scholarly journals Re-thinking feminism and democratic politics: the potential of online networks for social change and gender equality in Brazil

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Carolina Matos
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Gender Development ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

This article provides a critical summary of feminist theoretical perspectives on the potential of online communications for women’s rights, further sketching abrief case study of contemporary Brazilian feminism and the mobilization around women’s rights, particularly in the year 2015. This is done through a discussion of the discursive online practices of websites like Blogueiras Feministas and the NGO Think Olga, part of a wider project (Matos, 2017). Questions asked include how the media can better contribute to assist in gender development, and how online platforms can make a difference. I argue that despite constraints and setbacks, the seeds of a wider transformative influence in the offline world are slowly being planted in a highly fragmented, heterogeneous and erratic blogosphere.

Elements of the management of norms and their effects on the sense of virtual community

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregor Petrič ◽  
Andraž Petrovčič
Keyword(s):  
Online Communities ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
System Level ◽  
Community Management ◽  
Web Survey ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Content Type

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how decisions of managers and administrators of online communities on norms and rules affect the sense of virtual community (SOVC), which is an important factor of the quality of online information. Design/methodology/approach – The study followed a two-level research design based on 970 online community members, nested within 36 online communities. Data collection consisted of two stages: first a web survey of a sample of online community members was conducted, followed by a web survey of administrators of the same online communities. A two-level hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. Findings – The empirical results suggest that prominence of rules under the condition of members’ participation in their creation, presence of reputation mechanisms, and content moderation contribute significantly to the SOVC , while presence of lighter sanctions and interactive moderation do not. Research limitations/implications – Since this study is based on web forums, the validity of the proposed hypotheses for other types of online communities cannot be firmly established. Additional elements of online community management could be considered for a stronger system-level explanation of the SOVC. Practical implications – The study demonstrates that online community administrators need to be considerate in creating and enforcing norms, as their decisions have an impact on the SOVC and consequently on the quality of online information. Originality/value – The literature considers many factors of the SOVC but none of the previous studies have considered how community management is associated with this phenomenon.

scholarly journals DRUG MARKETS AND ANONYMIZING TECHNOLOGIES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meropi Tzanetakis ◽  
David Décary-Hétu ◽  
Silje Bakken ◽  
Rasmus Munksgaard ◽  
Christian Katzenbach ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Drug Markets ◽  
Drug Dealing ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Online Networks ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Technical Innovations ◽  
New Research

Online drug markets taking advantage of social media and encryption software (e.g. Tor network) and cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin, Monero) to conceal the identity and physical location of their users are a relatively new area of internet research. Yet, a range of socio-technical innovations have contributed to the proliferation of drug markets on the Internet. Due to the illegality of drugs and drug dealing are anonymizing technologies regarded as important socio-technical practices among its participants allowing to mitigate risks of vendors and customers when exchanging drugs. This panel draws together a number of leading scholars in this emerging area of research to explore questions and issues associated with online platforms enabling illicit transactions. The collection of papers in this panel contribute empirical data and theoretical insight on a range of relevant topics in the study of online drug markets, including methodological challenges, social embeddedness, trust production and governance on cryptomarkets. Various papers in this panel propose new concepts for understanding cryptomarkets as social phenomena where relationships enable economic transactions. It also pluralizes trust building on online platforms and, expanding it from merely institution-based mechanisms to include social relations such as interpreting signs and signals or previous interactions between buyers and sellers. They also expand on reliability of data gathered via anonymous online interviews, drawing attention to participation of marginalized communities. The aim of this panel is to bring together new research to further our understanding of the overall impact of online platform emergence upon global drug markets and to better model their impact on drug dealing, online networks and society in general.

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