Today, a fellow columnist at BlogHerald, David Krug, bemoans the latest downtime at Dreamhosts — but more importantly, how the folks over a the dreamhost board have started deleting posts, out of what seems like frustration.
Sure, its outrageous that a company would start censoring its own members who have legitimate concerns, but I couldn’t help but marvel at yet another example of what happens after the manager of a large social network gets large.
They can start shoving people around.
They can start bullying members they don’t agree with.
They can out anonymous posters.
They can also ignore members that annoy them.
And, they can delete accounts of members at a seeming whim.
How can they do this?
Because in many circumstances — be it forums, social content sites with an active community, or even blogs with an active community, when a social group gets large enough, with some exceptions, there is a peculiar phenomena that allows for these abuses to happen.
In some cases, it is the inertia of people moving to find a better place to congregate; in others, its because there is enough social capital that exists in that group that leaving poses a bigger loss than staying. And in some cases, particularly popular social networks, there is such a strong desire to “be” someone on that site, even if there’s no direct gain to do so that if accounts are deleted, people will rush into that vacuum to replace them. Its particularly true if you send the biggest, oldest, or most popular contributers to the chopping block.
A great example is my favourite social content site, Digg.
Most recently after a post of mine was Dugg, the comment section was flooded with people claiming I was a (to paraphrase) a whiny turdburglar. Well, that may or may not be the case.
But every time Kevin Rose, or whoever is running Digg, makes unilateral changes that affect everyone without acknowleding the community that drives Digg, he is snubbing everyone who contributes, large and small. And sends a message, as Markus of Plentyoffish.com points out, that he can do what he wants, when he wants, and whomever he wants to do it too — and that’s his prerogative. He can (and should) delete, at will, the very core of the People that have built the community that Digg runs on — regardless of what they think, if Kev thinks it best.
The irony?
That when people are trying to build a critical mass of members or contributors — something that every social *anything* site needs — the builders of said site will do anything they can — including, begging, borrowing and stealing — to get those members. The prevailing business model, after all, is to give away something for free, be it a service or product (shareware lives on!) to get people through the door. Only in some (most?) cases, its not enough.
What recourse do people who use these social networks have?
Not much.
Change occurs only when there is a real impetus to leave. Consistent *sshat-ery and ongoing abuses are one thing, but real shifts occur when there is something dramatically different or better than the current offering; it might be completely free, it might offer better features, or there might just be a ‘paradigm’ shift which encourages a mass exodus (read: friendster).
Sometimes, in the case of certain forums, unless an entire category of opinion and thought is rendered useless, there’s not much room for change. But in most circumstances, most social managers find that there is some impetus to keep up and on top of things to prevent such a mass exodus from happening.
In which, much like the circle of life, they become beggars again.
November 11th, 2006 at 9:18 am | Permalink
[...] If you run a forum for your customers, are you a business or a social network? [...]
November 13th, 2006 at 5:08 pm | Permalink
Just a clarification - we’ve been accused of censoring our _own_ weblog’s comments, something which (as far as I can tell) is not true and has not been substantiated. In any case it’s definitely not normal company policy to do that (as evidenced by the number of critical comments which are left alone whenever an outage occurs - some of which are clearly advertisements for our competitors). A quick look at our status weblog in particular will show a number of such comments any time a server/service goes down. That comes along with the territory when you host tens of thousands of web sites that people depend on.
While it’s not clear that any insidious censorship was occurring, just in case a rogue employee was deleting weblog comments we’ve sent out a “hey, if you’re doing it, cut it out” message to our internal employee list.
That said, it’s not clear to me how this ties into any sort of ’social network’. It’s just a weblog - our own - with a comment section. Censoring critical posts is lame, calling it ‘tyrany’ is a bit much. Fact is that most hosts maintain a firm grip on their image (even going so far as to sue critical speakers for alleged libel/defamation), but us - not so much.
On the whole we appreciate being held to such a higher standard than the other guys, but… :)
- Jeff C. @ DreamHost
November 13th, 2006 at 5:21 pm | Permalink
Just a follow-up: It does look like the post in question may have been removed (as someone apparently quoted it later), though it’s not clear why or how.
We’ve left much more critical (and pretty unreasonable) posts in place, so why someone here would bother to remove it is hard to say.
- Jeff C. @ DreamHost
November 13th, 2006 at 5:31 pm | Permalink
Thanks for stopping by Jeff.
I was using “Social Network” in the broadest sense to be honest — and noticing what happens when any community gets large, whether it be forums, readership to blogs, or what have you.
And I use “tyranny” to mean just that: when owners or authors throw their weight around to the community that drove them there. Deleting posts might be on one of that spectrum, but I’ve also seen some very prominent blogs, for example, “out” their posters anonymity.
Otherwise, thanks for clearing the Dreamhost comments thing up. I’m glad it was a ‘rogue’ thing, as I’ve noticed you’ve had much more vitriolic comments when there were similar problems earlier this year.
Cheers
t @ dji
November 13th, 2006 at 7:15 pm | Permalink
Hi Tony -
Another update. :)
Turns out that Mr. Krug’s comments were eaten by a WordPress plug-in we use called SpamKarma - apparently it thought his comments were spam and retroactively removed them.
No DreamHost employee was involved in selectively censoring his comments. It was an automated removal.
I’ve posted a comment to this effect to his site, though it’s stuck in moderation until his approves it. We’ve explained the situation and have asked that if he has similar concerns in the future he contact us for an explanation before posting such accusations to his weblog.
Either way, we do prefer to “lay it all out there” - we’re confident in the services we offer and feel that in the end a reasonable comparison of us versus our competitors will show us in a good light (warts and all!).
- Jeff C. @ DreamHost Web Hosting
November 14th, 2006 at 1:51 pm | Permalink
[...] Blog Herald News Nov 14 at 1:54 pm by Tony Hung -So, a few days ago one of our more senior columnists, Dave Krug, noticed that Dreamhost seemed to be deleting comments on their own blog after their most recent service issues. I also blogged about it tangentially over on my own blog, and after a few days one of the Dreamhost employees got back to me and clarified things. [...]