In my design and thinking around online communities, I am constantly entrenched and talking to other designers about abuse risk and mitigation. Any product or service which presents opportunity for public reward also opens itself to a number of pitfalls, including gaming the system, abusing the system, abusing other people that use the system, and so on.
Some recent examples I can think of are:
The Flickr Flashr
A guy was going around Flickr introducing himself to women on Flickr, telling them how much he enjoyed their photos, and that they should also come check out his photos. When the unsuspecting women would arrive at his photostream, BLAMMO: they got flashed!
The Yahoo Answers gamer
I was talking to Randy Farmer about Yahoo Answers, and he mentioned something about a guy from Nova Scotia who, early on with Answers, gamed the system so that he would by far be the person with the highest score on the leader board. I believe he did something like write a little app that would troll questions, scrape them for keywords, conduct an internet search looking for said keywords, and provide answers that were maybe close enough to being right so that he would get even more points. I can’t remember the exact scenario, but it was something ridiculous like that. And what was his motivation? Nothing other than being acknowledged in a high-traffic public space on the web.
Anyway, the list goes on and on. The more involved I become with online communities, and more importantly designing online communities, the more I think about mitigating the risk of lowlifes abusing things. Which finally brings me around to the point of this post:
An Italian Interaction Designer has designed what she calls Electric Cinderella. As Gizmag points out:
The Electric Cinderella shoes idea began as part of Simona Brusa Pasque’s thesis at the Interaction Design Institute in 2002 and was inspired by a beautiful woman who Simona interviewed for her thesis who wanted to be able to “intimidate her intimidators.” She wanted to be empowered without losing her femininity, to have the freedom to be sexy without fear. The shoes certainly achieve that, offering 100,000 volts of high fashion stun gun power which can be activated by a control on the matching necklace.
Now maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this sound like a recipe for disaster? How does a designer 1) justify creating such a product beyond it being a joke and 2) mitigate the risk of someone abusing (or maybe killing) the recipient of the product’s intended use? Or are Italian men that aggressive?
I guess on the one hand designing that sort of product is much more exciting - especially the usability testing part of the process… On the other hand, I don’t believe I would want to put myself into a situation where the fruits of my labor could also land me in a courtroom, which, we all know is where everything that is any fun ends up these days. Oh, and be sure to check out the photos, which bare an uncanny resemblance to something from the Austin Powers series.
There’s that line where you want people who are extreme and loyal users of the system to be able to become experts, and if possible provide their workarounds for it, for others to use. Then on the other side of the line, there are the abusers.
I find it funny that there is a smutty underbelly to Flickr for all its fuzzy, friendly and family positioning.
Many communities couldn’t be built so quickly without the early adopters being able to quickly tailor or establish themselves, without too much regulation.
So I would pitch that in some cases adaptable uses is tolerable if not encouraged to build loyalty and commitment from community members. Which can be minimized if it is user-generated content I suppose.
Two essays that I’m sure were inspirational to me back when I read them (though I no longer recall much of them now) are:
Shirky’s: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy &
May 11th, 2006 at 3:38 pmSocial Software and the Politics of Groups.
So I was, for no apparent reason, reading up on eBay and it the question arose (in my mind) of how much abuse is conducted through adapting the technology, and prevented using technology. In the case of eBay, it seems a lot of misuse and fraudulent behaviour comes from physical actions - like not shipping merchandise or selling broken stuff. So technology isn’t able to capture and prevent that easily.
In the case you describe, someone actually creates an app to game the system. Can stuff like this be caught and managed through technology and designing the product?
Perhaps that’s the question you’re asking.
May 12th, 2006 at 9:01 am