There's a story almost every day where that happens on social networking sites though, from pedophiles, to harrassment, to people just wanting to sell porn, or post embarrasing, petty stuff. I think the ability for harm through anonymity is greater on a social networking site than on a run of the mill forum about fixing cars, video games, or computers.
I've met several people from here in real life. Several underaged forumers here have met people from here in real life.
I made pizza for a forumer I met here. A bunch of people ElJeffe only knows through the forums bought him and his wife a tandem-stroller for their new baby. I know of at least two forumers who met here who are engaged to eachother now.
And every year, massive numbers of people here buy Xmas presents for each other.
I also forged a friendship through a newsgroup with someone who wound up introducing me to my future wife.
Does your current wife know about your future wife? Or are you just a scam so that you can sell tandem-strollers for crack-moneys?
Right now, the Internet is fundamentally anonymous and it's up to particular sites to do whatever they can to verify identity. It should be the other way around.
I'm not so sure of that. I think that, absent a compelling reason to the contrary, the default anonymity on the internet is an incredible asset. It allows for a freer exchange of ideas by divorcing people from the possible repercussions of being identified. I wouldn't have said half the shit I did about my last company if I was posting under my real name, because a quick Google search could get me in deep shit.
I think the simplicity of info mining on the internet is a very compelling argument for anonymity. People can't spend five minutes and find a detailed log of everything I've ever said to someone in person ever over the course of my life. If you abolish anonymity on the net, though, people would be able to do exactly that for online communication. In that sort of environment, who the hell would ever say anything even remote controversial?
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
There's a story almost every day where that happens on social networking sites though, from pedophiles, to harrassment, to people just wanting to sell porn, or post embarrasing, petty stuff. I think the ability for harm through anonymity is greater on a social networking site than on a run of the mill forum about fixing cars, video games, or computers.
I've met several people from here in real life. Several underaged forumers here have met people from here in real life.
I made pizza for a forumer I met here. A bunch of people ElJeffe only knows through the forums bought him and his wife a tandem-stroller for their new baby. I know of at least two forumers who met here who are engaged to eachother now.
And every year, massive numbers of people here buy Xmas presents for each other.
I also forged a friendship through a newsgroup with someone who wound up introducing me to my future wife.
Does your current wife know about your future wife? Or are you just a scam so that you can sell tandem-strollers for crack-moneys?
The stroller is for the child he lured through social networking sites.
Smasher put forth a total of 100m users for MySpace, which is actually about half the actual total(1). Since that's the site originally being discussed (Facebook being dragged into it didn't seem to help anything) that's the number I'll be working with.
About half of MySpace users are 35 or older according to a 2006 report, which I'm assuming still holds close to true(2). Obviously we don't need high schools to verify age here, so they only require background checks. Using your $10/check figure, that amounts to 100m x $10 = $1b. That's a b, as in billion. That's half the userbase.
The other half is probably close to a 70/30 split of college-age (18-34) and high school age(3). $10 x (70% x 100m) = $700m. Now we have to account for the kids, $3 x (30% x 100m) = $90m. You expect MySpace to somehow find $1.79 billion to check what they already have, let alone the 230,000 accounts they get per day(1)? Hell, even half that number is still $895m assuming they get massive discounts by law enforcement to enact this change. On top of that, MySpace is international. Have fun coordinating with international agencies to get proper background checks. They probably won't be as cheap as they are in the States.
Your intentions are good but as Fuzzy pointed out, are very much flawed. I know you keep saying that they're your opinion but that's a lame cop-out when you proposed an idea that is so flawed in the first place in a debate forum.
Random question, though I may have missed it being asked prior:
For the .edu age verification, what about people who didn't actually go to college. They're forever Underage in that system due to lacking a college email address or alumni address.
Anywho, if age verification was fast cheap and easy to do 100%, you'd get far better than the current "Click yes if you're 18" thing. But the truth of the matter is that at the end of the day, nothing you can do on the server side can verify who is physically sitting behind the keyboard typing false information.
Your site will never get popular if you demand Social Security Numbers or Credit Cards to join, to be quite honest. You're forcing the user to trust you enough to give you this information in order to create a core userbase to attract more users. I just don't see any social networking site starting under that situation.
Beyond that.. what's the point? You're not really protecting the children any more than you have been, and kids will still do Stupid Shit (please, everyone, think back to how much time and effort as a child you took to do everything your parents didn't want you to). Be it via myspace, IM, the mall, billy's house, whatever.
Random question, though I may have missed it being asked prior:
For the .edu age verification, what about people who didn't actually go to college. They're forever Underage in that system due to lacking a college email address or alumni address.
Anywho, if age verification was fast cheap and easy to do 100%, you'd get far better than the current "Click yes if you're 18" thing. But the truth of the matter is that at the end of the day, nothing you can do on the server side can verify who is physically sitting behind the keyboard typing false information.
Your site will never get popular if you demand Social Security Numbers or Credit Cards to join, to be quite honest. You're forcing the user to trust you enough to give you this information in order to create a core userbase to attract more users. I just don't see any social networking site starting under that situation.
Beyond that.. what's the point? You're not really protecting the children any more than you have been, and kids will still do Stupid Shit (please, everyone, think back to how much time and effort as a child you took to do everything your parents didn't want you to). Be it via myspace, IM, the mall, billy's house, whatever.
Jump back to page 2, there are already practical solutions that can help with the situation. Some people just seem to think we need to be absolutely sure of everything, which is never going to work in the real world right now for reasons you and others have already said. There still ARE things though that social networking websites can do to increase trust amongst its members.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
I'll go with C. This isn't that far off from me randomly flirting it up with another user on this forum, and unless people intend to go all biometrics on the entire freaking internet, there's no reason to single out social networking sites and blame them for hosting a random medium. Heck, sue Craigslist. Again.
Honestly, user verification is the single biggest issue in IT Security, and if we have trouble doing it on machines in our own building without seeing huge loopholes, I don't know how you ever expect to trust A_Random_Computer, ever.
I'll go with C. This isn't that far off from me randomly flirting it up with another user on this forum, and unless people intend to go all biometrics on the entire freaking internet, there's no reason to single out social networking sites and blame them for hosting a random medium. Heck, sue Craigslist. Again.
Honestly, user verification is the single biggest issue in IT Security, and if we have trouble doing it on machines in our own building without seeing huge loopholes, I don't know how you ever expect to trust A_Random_Computer, ever.
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
I'll go with C. This isn't that far off from me randomly flirting it up with another user on this forum, and unless people intend to go all biometrics on the entire freaking internet, there's no reason to single out social networking sites and blame them for hosting a random medium. Heck, sue Craigslist. Again.
Honestly, user verification is the single biggest issue in IT Security, and if we have trouble doing it on machines in our own building without seeing huge loopholes, I don't know how you ever expect to trust A_Random_Computer, ever.
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
Why should I give www.newnetworkingsite.com my CC number, exactly? From a social standpoint, this just won't work. I'm not handing some random jackass access to my funds with the promise they'll be really good and not keep it around. Plus, what about people who lack credit cards? There are (oddly enough to me!) an awful lot of people who avoid the things like the plague, or can't get them.
Stupidity Patrol is fine on some level, but on a free site like Myspace.. who is paying these people. As is, you can report profiles (it's somewhat of a prank to report people's profiles and pretend you're their concerned parents). So somehow they need to find enough employees to sift through a few thousand profile creations a day, without users paying for them.
Or, more specifically, it sounds like you want everything on the internet to become a pay site. Which I assure you would completely destroy myspace and facebook. Myspace is just a new Geocities. A huge website full of every idiot's bad ideas for blinking backgrounds and shitty font colors where they can chatter on about new kids on the block. Making people Pay to do that is completely missing the point as to why they're popular.
I'll go with C. This isn't that far off from me randomly flirting it up with another user on this forum, and unless people intend to go all biometrics on the entire freaking internet, there's no reason to single out social networking sites and blame them for hosting a random medium. Heck, sue Craigslist. Again.
Honestly, user verification is the single biggest issue in IT Security, and if we have trouble doing it on machines in our own building without seeing huge loopholes, I don't know how you ever expect to trust A_Random_Computer, ever.
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
Why should I give www.newnetworkingsite.com my CC number, exactly? From a social standpoint, this just won't work. I'm not handing some random jackass access to my funds with the promise they'll be really good and not keep it around. Plus, what about people who lack credit cards? There are (oddly enough to me!) an awful lot of people who avoid the things like the plague, or can't get them.
Stupidity Patrol is fine on some level, but on a free site like Myspace.. who is paying these people. As is, you can report profiles (it's somewhat of a prank to report people's profiles and pretend you're their concerned parents). So somehow they need to find enough employees to sift through a few thousand profile creations a day, without users paying for them.
Or, more specifically, it sounds like you want everything on the internet to become a pay site. Which I assure you would completely destroy myspace and facebook. Myspace is just a new Geocities. A huge website full of every idiot's bad ideas for blinking backgrounds and shitty font colors where they can chatter on about new kids on the block. Making people Pay to do that is completely missing the point as to why they're popular.
Why give your CC number? Well we had a lot of features we tied to premium account tiers. We used features to lure members into paying and that also had the nice bonus of verifying people's ages. We never required it.
As for point number 2, you leverage the community to helping you do your work for you. There are far more people who'll volunteer to help for free than you'd think on even small websites. They aren't 100% reliable people but they cast the net out and snare people for you, then you reel them in as necessary. The rate of false positives with a little common sense and checking is low enough it isn't a huge issue using volunteers either.
I don't want anything to be required honestly, though I think tying all of these things together is necessary. Especially a saluting system, which improves trust the user is the person in their pictures. You get people to cooperate by tying features and perks and bonuses to each action so it encourages people to participate and then the community does the rest of the work for you. This system I'd also add, is already in place and does work on social networking sites. Granted, it's never been tested or used on anything other than small ones, but these days you're either a small site or one of the major ones.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
That's fine and dandy, and helps make sure little timmy or laura doesn't end up being captured by the dastardly pedo bear, but what I'm addressing covers a much wider scope. The core idea is to find ways to improve trust between members both over and under 18. The goal behind a social networking website is to get people talking, communicating and building friendships or more serious relationships between each other. The best way to help make your site more successful at that, aside from just luring in as many members as possible, is to improve user trust.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
I'll go with C. This isn't that far off from me randomly flirting it up with another user on this forum, and unless people intend to go all biometrics on the entire freaking internet, there's no reason to single out social networking sites and blame them for hosting a random medium. Heck, sue Craigslist. Again.
Honestly, user verification is the single biggest issue in IT Security, and if we have trouble doing it on machines in our own building without seeing huge loopholes, I don't know how you ever expect to trust A_Random_Computer, ever.
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
Start charging for Facebook and watch as facebook's usage drops to lower than that site you worked on that no one here had ever heard of. Awesome business model, works great, very practical.
Edit: And a free site like Facebook definitely has the financial reserves needed to hire people to personally inspect over a million "salute" photographs.
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
Start charging for Facebook and watch as facebook's usage drops to lower than that site you worked on that no one here had ever heard of. Awesome business model, works great, very practical.
Edit: And a free site like Facebook definitely has the financial reserves needed to hire people to personally inspect over a million "salute" photographs.[/quote]
Did you read my post?
I'm not saying to make it mandatory, I'm saying make it highly reccomended and enticing users by offering features and perks for doing so. It's a carrot and stick tactic, not a gun-to-your-head tactic.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Why give your CC number? Well we had a lot of features we tied to premium account tiers. We used features to lure members into paying and that also had the nice bonus of verifying people's ages. We never required it.
As for point number 2, you leverage the community to helping you do your work for you. There are far more people who'll volunteer to help for free than you'd think on even small websites. They aren't 100% reliable people but they cast the net out and snare people for you, then you reel them in as necessary. The rate of false positives with a little common sense and checking is low enough it isn't a huge issue using volunteers either.
I don't want anything to be required honestly, though I think tying all of these things together is necessary. Especially a saluting system, which improves trust the user is the person in their pictures. You get people to cooperate by tying features and perks and bonuses to each action so it encourages people to participate and then the community does the rest of the work for you. This system I'd also add, is already in place and does work on social networking sites. Granted, it's never been tested or used on anything other than small ones, but these days you're either a small site or one of the major ones.
If you don't require CC verification.. then what's the point? Optional Age Verification gets you in the same News pickle when some unverified basic user happens to have been 13 and did something Stupid. You have to either require it, or not even mention it, really. It's like optionally carding people at a bar, it just doesn't fly if you want to pitch it as a solution to underaged anything.
You can't expect a giant social networking site to create a free police force (hi2u UO GM lawsuit. You can't have volunteers do something that is effectively a Job and give them perks, is Illegal). It may fly on small sites because nobody has half a mind to sue someone with no money, but 200 myspace police volunteers suing myspace for everything they're worth? Oh hell yes. There's a very very tiny sliver of things you can have a volunteer program to work on.
I'm trying to be logical here. You can't make them a pay site, it's not within their business model even slightly, nor would the userbase stand for it. You can't make age verification tied to perks, unless said perk is "being able to have a page/message users", because otherwise it just leaves you with a giant pool of unverified underaged people still getting you into a PR mess.
I don't know about your deal, honestly. I work in IT, a big thing for us is Scalability. Can a solution actually function when pointed at an absolutely enormous task. And I honestly don't see your system having any scalability here. It may work in a small shop, but when you point it at that volume of existing and new users.. good lord.
Start charging for Facebook and watch as facebook's usage drops to lower than that site you worked on that no one here had ever heard of. Awesome business model, works great, very practical.
Edit: And a free site like Facebook definitely has the financial reserves needed to hire people to personally inspect over a million "salute" photographs.
Did you read my post?
I'm not saying to make it mandatory, I'm saying make it highly reccomended and enticing users by offering features and perks for doing so. It's a carrot and stick tactic, not a gun-to-your-head tactic.
Except that currently the users already have the carrot, and you are saying that by taking it away from them and offering to sell it back isn't going to cost them most of their userbase overnight? You're talking about these solutions as if Facebook wasn't already an established service with an absurd volume of existing users.
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
Start charging for Facebook and watch as facebook's usage drops to lower than that site you worked on that no one here had ever heard of. Awesome business model, works great, very practical.
Edit: And a free site like Facebook definitely has the financial reserves needed to hire people to personally inspect over a million "salute" photographs.
Did you read my post?
I'm not saying to make it mandatory, I'm saying make it highly reccomended and enticing users by offering features and perks for doing so. It's a carrot and stick tactic, not a gun-to-your-head tactic.
If you don't require CC verification.. then what's the point? Optional Age Verification gets you in the same News pickle when some unverified basic user happens to have been 13 and did something Stupid. You have to either require it, or not even mention it, really. It's like optionally carding people at a bar, it just doesn't fly if you want to pitch it as a solution to underaged anything.
We tie it to features. The community in question serves 16 and up. We have features and content geared more towards adults. It's a way to allow for content that otherwise would require an 18 and only policy. We also like I said add extra features. It's a carrot and stick move, and it works pretty well with anyone who regularly visits the site.
You can't expect a giant social networking site to create a free police force (hi2u UO GM lawsuit. You can't have volunteers do something that is effectively a Job and give them perks, is Illegal). It may fly on small sites because nobody has half a mind to sue someone with no money, but 200 myspace police volunteers suing myspace for everything they're worth? Oh hell yes. There's a very very tiny sliver of things you can have a volunteer program to work on.
We leverage the community by opening channels for them to communicate publicly or privately with the actual site staff to make reports or accusations of accounts we need to look into. If there's enough evidence, it gets looked into and dealt with. We actually didn't give anything to the people who reported fakes though, for that reason. That said we had enough pissed off users we didn't need to. People have a natural hatred of 600lb bald men pretending to be 19 year old models. We just get them to report the accounts to us, then we investigate and deal with the situation. It worked pretty well.
I'm trying to be logical here. You can't make them a pay site, it's not within their business model even slightly, nor would the userbase stand for it. You can't make age verification tied to perks, unless said perk is "being able to have a page/message users", because otherwise it just leaves you with a giant pool of unverified underaged people still getting you into a PR mess.
Not if you require all content that could get you into said PR mess to be locked behind an adults only filter. You use premium account tiers with features people want to get people to pay. It's a source of revenue, it verifies users' age, and does all sorts of nifty things. It's not a 100% solution but nothing ever is and this one actually has shown it can work. We enforce our terms of service, put objectionable content behind lock and key and offer perks to get users to put more information out there. That's about as good as it's going to get.
I don't know about your deal, honestly. I work in IT, a big thing for us is Scalability. Can a solution actually function when pointed at an absolutely enormous task. And I honestly don't see your system having any scalability here. It may work in a small shop, but when you point it at that volume of existing and new users.. good lord.
It wouldn't be that bad, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once. It might be a little hard at first but after a few months you'd probably go back to a more regular ebb and flow. Would it require a few more staffers to regulate things? Probably on a large site. However, improving the trust in users improves the quality of the site and improving the quality of the site means more members/revenue which is better for business. I think it'd be worth it long run.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
So what makes this different from the other "adult" communities that charge for you to join? And what keeps people from joining one of the free ones anyway?
We tie it to features. The community in question serves 16 and up. We have features and content geared more towards adults. It's a way to allow for content that otherwise would require an 18 and only policy. We also like I said add extra features. It's a carrot and stick move, and it works pretty well with anyone who regularly visits the site.
What features? Features Facebook users already have access to? So you're going to make people more loyal to your service by taking away the majority of the features they already had and demanding they pay you to get them back? And you don't see this killing the site?
We leverage the community by opening channels for them to communicate publicly or privately with the actual site staff to make reports or accusations of accounts we need to look into. If there's enough evidence, it gets looked into and dealt with. We actually didn't give anything to the people who reported fakes though, for that reason. That said we had enough pissed off users we didn't need to. People have a natural hatred of 600lb bald men pretending to be 19 year old models. We just get them to report the accounts to us, then we investigate and deal with the situation. It worked pretty well.
You can already do that shit with MySpace an Facebook.
Not if you require all content that could get you into said PR mess to be locked behind an adults only filter. You use premium account tiers with features people want to get people to pay. It's a source of revenue, it verifies users' age, and does all sorts of nifty things. It's not a 100% solution but nothing ever is and this one actually has shown it can work. We enforce our terms of service, put objectionable content behind lock and key and offer perks to get users to put more information out there. That's about as good as it's going to get.
This has been shown to work on a site that has the volume of users that Facebook has, or this has been shown to work on your site? And as far as that being "as good as it gets" I'd have to disagree because I am not the least bit compelled to switch to your site and abandon my Facebook account.
It wouldn't be that bad, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once. It might be a little hard at first but after a few months you'd probably go back to a more regular ebb and flow. Would it require a few more staffers to regulate things? Probably on a large site. However, improving the trust in users improves the quality of the site and improving the quality of the site means more members/revenue which is better for business. I think it'd be worth it long run.
Cap'n, after the first few months Facebook wouldn't even exist anymore. You're right, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once, you're going to get a couple thousand people submitting anything ever and 9.8 million users abandoning your service, cutting the ad-revenue that keeps your site afloat out at the knees. Oh but people are paying now. And I bet those couple thousand users' $10 verification charges are going to make up for the lost ad-revenue, right? An air-conditioned cup-holder would increase the quality of a car but people aren't going to be willing to pay for it when they can get ice in their drink for free.
What major site is using such a model as a social networking (read: not dating, which is the only kind of site I can think of with this in place) site.
Heck, give some examples of moderately sized social networking sites doing this. My circle of friends is predominantly low-mid 20something girls, but I've heard not a single peep of Oh My God You Need A Profile On This Site beyond bullying me into getting a myspace profile.
I'm simply not seeing this being a large scale success anywhere, and I think (as in, not supported by any studies) a decent part of that is that when faced with free popular competition, Why Pay for Less Content(userbase).
What features? Features Facebook users already have access to? So you're going to make people more loyal to your service by taking away the majority of the features they already had and demanding they pay you to get them back? And you don't see this killing the site?
In the case with an existing site what you'd probably want to do is tie it to new features. In the cases of say, a saluting system, you'd also want to add options for restricting profile views or communications from unsaluted users (so if a person wished they could decide to only talk to people who used the new system.) But with other things just take any new features that aren't already being talked about publicly and consider if it'd be valid to tie that to it.
Wouldn't take anything away from anyone they didn't already have, it'd make the effort to adopt the platform voluntary, plus if you put a positive enough spin on it you could probably encourage lots of existing new members to adopt it.
You can already do that shit with MySpace an Facebook.
Perhaps they've changed policies but I know MySpace in particular used to love to pretend it didn't exist. You could report fake accounts privately to moderators but you had to be the person who's pictures they were using. (They'd ask you to make them a sign) versus a system of allowing other users to report potential fakes and show how that person in question might not be legitimate. I never had a facebook account though I did poke around MySpace for a while to see what all the talk was about. Big thing was we actually had a public effort to show we acknowledge the problems of this sort of thing and are trying to insure a quality experience.
This has been shown to work on a site that has the volume of users that Facebook has, or this has been shown to work on your site? And as far as that being "as good as it gets" I'd have to disagree because I am not the least bit compelled to switch to your site and abandon my Facebook account.
Of course not. The big social networking websites don't have to innovate unless they're put under pressure. Short of legal fallout I seriously doubt they'll invest a dime into features to improve user trust? Why? because once you get a certain population of actively socializing users it becomes a self-sustaining black-hole like effect. Ask yourself, why do you or anyone else use myspace? The answer I always here is "because all my friends are on it" or "it's the only/most reliable way to talk to certan people." People join these sites because their friends are there and of course they won't leave, why would they? These people then pull in their other friends and so on. This has the unfortunate side effect though of creating a lot of stagnation since while these sites can and do improve themselves and their features they have no compelling reason to continuously branch out or improve in any manner unless they want to since unlike smaller sites they aren't fighting for their very existence among tablescraps. Everyone joins MySpace or facebook or friendster, etc. It's just the way it works, and it's for that reason they don't feel a need to change.
Cap'n, after the first few months Facebook wouldn't even exist anymore. You're right, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once, you're going to get a couple thousand people submitting anything ever and 9.8 million users abandoning your service, cutting the ad-revenue that keeps your site afloat out at the knees. Oh but people are paying now. And I bet those couple thousand users' $10 verification charges are going to make up for the lost ad-revenue, right? An air-conditioned cup-holder would increase the quality of a car but people aren't going to be willing to pay for it when they can get ice in their drink for free.
They'd leave in disgust because you added a saluting system and gave a new option to verify your age to get access to some nifty new features no one had heard about? Care to explain why so many people would hate that?
Secondly, ten thousand is a lot, but I can tell you from personal experience it takes maybe one and a half minutes to verify and check one of those things with a good level of accuracy. So the average person could clear about 320 in an eight hour shift. So you'd just need about 32 people to deal with it if you had to get it done in one day, though you could just have about ten and do it over about three days if you wanted. It's not something that's direly necessary so it doesn't have to be immediately approved.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
What features? Features Facebook users already have access to? So you're going to make people more loyal to your service by taking away the majority of the features they already had and demanding they pay you to get them back? And you don't see this killing the site?
In the case with an existing site what you'd probably want to do is tie it to new features. In the cases of say, a saluting system, you'd also want to add options for restricting profile views or communications from unsaluted users (so if a person wished they could decide to only talk to people who used the new system.) But with other things just take any new features that aren't already being talked about publicly and consider if it'd be valid to tie that to it.
Wouldn't take anything away from anyone they didn't already have, it'd make the effort to adopt the platform voluntary, plus if you put a positive enough spin on it you could probably encourage lots of existing new members to adopt it.
Why would I benefit from "saluting"? No one can see any information I don't want them to unless I let them as it stands. This wouldn't add anything to the service except expense on the part of the operators who will then need additional revenue in order to maintain the necessary manpower to work the "new" feature.
You can already do that shit with MySpace an Facebook.
Perhaps they've changed policies but I know MySpace in particular used to love to pretend it didn't exist. You could report fake accounts privately to moderators but you had to be the person who's pictures they were using. (They'd ask you to make them a sign) versus a system of allowing other users to report potential fakes and show how that person in question might not be legitimate. I never had a facebook account though I did poke around MySpace for a while to see what all the talk was about. Big thing was we actually had a public effort to show we acknowledge the problems of this sort of thing and are trying to insure a quality experience.
Back when I used to periodically look at my MySpace I'd usually find about six friend invites from accounts that had since been deleted for being fake. You allege that your competitor ignores these reports but I've seen no reason to believe that.
This has been shown to work on a site that has the volume of users that Facebook has, or this has been shown to work on your site? And as far as that being "as good as it gets" I'd have to disagree because I am not the least bit compelled to switch to your site and abandon my Facebook account.
Of course not. The big social networking websites don't have to innovate unless they're put under pressure. Short of legal fallout I seriously doubt they'll invest a dime into features to improve user trust? Why? because once you get a certain population of actively socializing users it becomes a self-sustaining black-hole like effect. Ask yourself, why do you or anyone else use myspace? The answer I always here is "because all my friends are on it" or "it's the only/most reliable way to talk to certan people." People join these sites because their friends are there and of course they won't leave, why would they? These people then pull in their other friends and so on. This has the unfortunate side effect though of creating a lot of stagnation since while these sites can and do improve themselves and their features they have no compelling reason to continuously branch out or improve in any manner unless they want to since unlike smaller sites they aren't fighting for their very existence among tablescraps. Everyone joins MySpace or facebook or friendster, etc. It's just the way it works, and it's for that reason they don't feel a need to change.
So your claim that it has been shown to work is false.
Cap'n, after the first few months Facebook wouldn't even exist anymore. You're right, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once, you're going to get a couple thousand people submitting anything ever and 9.8 million users abandoning your service, cutting the ad-revenue that keeps your site afloat out at the knees. Oh but people are paying now. And I bet those couple thousand users' $10 verification charges are going to make up for the lost ad-revenue, right? An air-conditioned cup-holder would increase the quality of a car but people aren't going to be willing to pay for it when they can get ice in their drink for free.
They'd leave in disgust because you added a saluting system and gave a new option to verify your age to get access to some nifty new features no one had heard about? Care to explain why so many people would hate that?
Charging $10 to use the site isn't a nifty new feature any more than a free jagged, rusty dildo is.
Secondly, ten thousand is a lot, but I can tell you from personal experience it takes maybe one and a half minutes to verify and check one of those things with a good level of accuracy. So the average person could clear about 320 in an eight hour shift. So you'd just need about 32 people to deal with it if you had to get it done in one day, though you could just have about ten and do it over about three days if you wanted. It's not something that's direly necessary so it doesn't have to be immediately approved.
Or you could set it up such that people can't add themselves to other people's friend-lists without approval by the person being "friended" or whatever you want to call it, and thus let the users verify for themselves whether or not they know this person who wants access to their profile. Which seems to be working great for most of their users as it stands.
The taking features away bit, incidentally, is required to make your suggestions even remotely relevant to the topic, which is making it harder for people to misrepresent themselves on the site to harass people. If everything stays as it is for users who don't pay via credit-card or do some stupid name-card manual authentication the supposed problem (which still hasn't been demonstrated to actually be a problem) is not solved or even honestly acknowledged. Your suggested policies would not have prevented the events of the first post in the thread, the events that it has been claimed that social-networking sites should be required to do something to prevent. You're not keeping minors off the site, you're not preventing people from making fake accounts. The only relevant suggestion you had is already in place.
Why would I benefit from "saluting"? No one can see any information I don't want them to unless I let them as it stands. This wouldn't add anything to the service except expense on the part of the operators who will then need additional revenue in order to maintain the necessary manpower to work the "new" feature.
How would you benefit? It's an added tool to allow you a far greater ability to tell who's really the person in their pictures and who's the overweight bald pedo pretending to be a young girl for kicks. It's a way of improving trust amongst users by giving them the ability to look more closely and decide if they're being fooled or not.
Back when I used to periodically look at my MySpace I'd usually find about six friend invites from accounts that had since been deleted for being fake. You allege that your competitor ignores these reports but I've seen no reason to believe that.
I said it seemed like they wanted to ignore the problem compared to other sites' efforts. I never saw any public forum for discussing or reporting fake/underage users and I know from people I talked to on other websites that were commonly faked, that they had to do things very differently to make myspace remove fake profiles of them. On a lot of other sites I'd seen you could publicly and privately report fake users and you didn't have to have irrefutable proof they were fake or that you were the real person in the photos, you just had to have enough to show probable cause to suspect the person. It gives me the distinct impression they want to sweep something under the rug or just don't care when the only way to solve the problem is much slower and has to be done strictly behind closed doors.
So your claim that it has been shown to work is false.
My claim is that these features improve user trust and would go a long way towards helping improve user trust and making problems like this a lot harder. What I just said is despite that no major website will likely ever go through the effort because people are stupid and they don't have to do it to survive like the smaller websites do.
Charging $10 to use the site isn't a nifty new feature any more than a free jagged, rusty dildo is.
Why do you keep missing the part where I say it's an optional charge that instead of forcing people to pay we try to bait them into paying by offering a juicy carrot to get them to?
Or you could set it up such that people can't add themselves to other people's friend-lists without approval by the person being "friended" or whatever you want to call it, and thus let the users verify for themselves whether or not they know this person who wants access to their profile. Which seems to be working great for most of their users as it stands.
Now that reminds me of a common argument I always heard. About how people just use myspace to talk to people they regularly socialize with in real life. That seems like a real waste of potential if that's all you use it for, not to mention not everyone has a ton of real life friends they socialize with. What about helping the people who just want someone to talk to, has a few similar hobbies, and isn't really an asshole or psychopath pretending to be someone else? That's why things like say, a saluting system are so useful. It puts in a user's hands more tools to determine who's worth talking to and who's worth trusting. Trust is VITAL in an online environment, it's like a form of currency, so making it easier to establish trust is a very helpful and useful thing.
The taking features away bit, incidentally, is required to make your suggestions even remotely relevant to the topic, which is making it harder for people to misrepresent themselves on the site to harass people. If everything stays as it is for users who don't pay via credit-card or do some stupid name-card manual authentication the supposed problem (which still hasn't been demonstrated to actually be a problem) is not solved or even honestly acknowledged. Your suggested policies would not have prevented the events of the first post in the thread, the events that it has been claimed that social-networking sites should be required to do something to prevent. You're not keeping minors off the site, you're not preventing people from making fake accounts. The only relevant suggestion you had is already in place.
You don't need to take existing features away. No adoption would not be 100% effective and especially not right away. So it would take a while to be effective, the trick is taking the effort to convince people it's a necessary and good thing to do, which slowly can be done. The big thing here is to realize the problem of fake and underage users can't realistically be 100% eliminated but it CAN be reduced by a good margin. When I used to keep track the small website I work for, with a maximum active population of only about 300-400K users still got around 25-40 fake profiles removed each week and about ten to twenty underage accounts a week. So just imagine the traffic a larger site that has say, 30-40 million users would get, it'd be insane. You can't stop it but you can cut it down and by a fair margin, and that's the point. It takes time, and coaxing, but it does work.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Charging $10 to use the site isn't a nifty new feature any more than a free jagged, rusty dildo is.
Why do you keep missing the part where I say it's an optional charge that instead of forcing people to pay we try to bait them into paying by offering a juicy carrot to get them to?
MySpace/Facebook would never have gotten off the ground if there were BS optional charges to get "Premium" features.
People would just have gone to a free alternative site.
So... parenting is still winning.
EDIT: Also, is this really a big enough problem that we have to convince people it's necessary and good when IMHO it isn't?
Why would I benefit from "saluting"? No one can see any information I don't want them to unless I let them as it stands. This wouldn't add anything to the service except expense on the part of the operators who will then need additional revenue in order to maintain the necessary manpower to work the "new" feature.
How would you benefit? It's an added tool to allow you a far greater ability to tell who's really the person in their pictures and who's the overweight bald pedo pretending to be a young girl for kicks. It's a way of improving trust amongst users by giving them the ability to look more closely and decide if they're being fooled or not.
What? Far greater ability to tell it's really the person in the picture? Shit man I don't get so drunk that I don't remember what the girl I was talking to at the party looks like when I get home.
MySpace/Facebook would never have gotten off the ground if there were BS optional charges to get "Premium" features.
MySpace took off initially, from what I've read, because Tom actually did know some celebrities and actually got them to sign up for the site.
People would just have gone to a free alternative site.
So... parenting is still winning.
You're missing the big picture. The goal is improving trust amongst users and doing that by removing and providing tools to detect false users as well as verify age.
EDIT: Also, is this really a big enough problem that we have to convince people it's necessary and good when IMHO it isn't?
Consider the numbers I just gave. A website of about 400K users gets 30 fake profiles a week. Now then, we'll say that the rate of profiles caught to ones that slip by is around 50% so that's 45 new fake profiles each week. Now that's 2,340 fake profiles joining per year. Now let's up the user-base to MySpace levels, that means 234,000 fake profiles joining a year. Now that's just new profiles, you also have to take into account the ones that aren't caught and therefore contribute to a growing population of users, plus much more lax policies and less public knowledge about fake accounts.
I'd say there's a real issue there. Honestly I can't come up with a very good estimate for MySpace other than increasing the rate by the rate of overall population since I don't know their rate of new user registration, which would allow a more accurate apples to apples approach. Either way though, I've seen enough websites and enough people going to sometimes insane lengths to impersonate others that I do believe it's a problem.
What? Far greater ability to tell it's really the person in the picture? Shit man I don't get so drunk that I don't remember what the girl I was talking to at the party looks like when I get home.
While socializing with people you already know and have met first is a good thing, another big part of these websites is to encourage new people to meet and socialize online and who knows, maybe then meet in real life. That is another big part of the equation and it does make user trust important.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
What? Far greater ability to tell it's really the person in the picture? Shit man I don't get so drunk that I don't remember what the girl I was talking to at the party looks like when I get home.
While socializing with people you already know and have met first is a good thing, another big part of these websites is to encourage new people to meet and socialize online and who knows, maybe then meet in real life. That is another big part of the equation and it does make user trust important.
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook that way, and the only people I know who don't use facebook are either over 30 or prefer MySpace for the Hot-Topic atmosphere.
Just so I can actually follow this argument, what the hell is a "saluting system"?
I tried Ctrl-F throughout the thread, but couldn't find anything.
You take a picture of yourself holding a sign with your username written on it and someone who works for the site checks it, and somehow this proves that you are who you say you are because if they're not lying about their appearance why would they be lying about anything else?
Just so I can actually follow this argument, what the hell is a "saluting system"?
I tried Ctrl-F throughout the thread, but couldn't find anything.
You take a picture of yourself holding a sign with your username written on it and someone who works for the site checks it, and somehow this proves that you are who you say you are because if they're not lying about their appearance why would they be lying about anything else?
That seems worringly trivial to circumvent. I'd say better no verification than inadequate verification, that way at least everybody knows where they stand.
Just so I can actually follow this argument, what the hell is a "saluting system"?
I tried Ctrl-F throughout the thread, but couldn't find anything.
You take a picture of yourself holding a sign with your username written on it and someone who works for the site checks it, and somehow this proves that you are who you say you are because if they're not lying about their appearance why would they be lying about anything else?
That seems worringly trivial to circumvent. I'd say better no verification than inadequate verification, that way at least everybody knows where they stand.
Are you alleging that a false-sense of security could be much worse than a justified sense of suspicion?
People would just have gone to a free alternative site.
So... parenting is still winning.
You're missing the big picture. The goal is improving trust amongst users and doing that by removing and providing tools to detect false users as well as verify age.
How do you verify age for people who don't pay the optional fee? And who cares about fake accounts? Is it because of this case? Because this is an outlier that is so far removed from the norm that it's on another planet.
EDIT: Also, is this really a big enough problem that we have to convince people it's necessary and good when IMHO it isn't?
Consider the numbers I just gave. A website of about 400K users gets 30 fake profiles a week. Now then, we'll say that the rate of profiles caught to ones that slip by is around 50% so that's 45 new fake profiles each week. Now that's 2,340 fake profiles joining per year. Now let's up the user-base to MySpace levels, that means 234,000 fake profiles joining a year. Now that's just new profiles, you also have to take into account the ones that aren't caught and therefore contribute to a growing population of users, plus much more lax policies and less public knowledge about fake accounts.
I'd say there's a real issue there. Honestly I can't come up with a very good estimate for MySpace other than increasing the rate by the rate of overall population since I don't know their rate of new user registration, which would allow a more accurate apples to apples approach. Either way though, I've seen enough websites and enough people going to sometimes insane lengths to impersonate others that I do believe it's a problem.
What? Far greater ability to tell it's really the person in the picture? Shit man I don't get so drunk that I don't remember what the girl I was talking to at the party looks like when I get home.
While socializing with people you already know and have met first is a good thing, another big part of these websites is to encourage new people to meet and socialize online and who knows, maybe then meet in real life. That is another big part of the equation and it does make user trust important.
Facebook definitely isn't for meeting random people. Not too sure on MySpace, but if people want to meet random people they met online, then they know what they're getting themselves into.
Seriously, there is no way you can spin a payment program for a Social Networking site, not for a giant one, not for a small one.
EDIT: @ "saluting system", what do people do if they don't have a camera? would a system like this be optional?
Are you alleging that a false-sense of security could be much worse than a justified sense of suspicion?
Pretty much. Not to mention it being a liability nightmare when people, being people, do stupid things.
I'm really quite amazed that the oft-repeated message that "That person on the Internet is not necessarily who they say they are" doesn't seem to have hit home for a disturbingly large section of the population. It also seems odd (and I know I'm re-hashing slightly here) that people think there's something particular to social networking sites that means they should be required to be any more responsible for the activities of their patrons than web forums, IM providers, Email Providers, Telephone "dating" lines, Newspapers that run personal ads, Clubs, bars, Interest Societies, Mailing lists, and so forth.
Just so I can actually follow this argument, what the hell is a "saluting system"?
I tried Ctrl-F throughout the thread, but couldn't find anything.
You take a picture of yourself holding up a sign with your username and an @ symbol plus the website domain. You can photoshop fake ones yes, but we make it at least a little difficult to do that by having minimum requirements for resolution as well as readability. It also is required to be hand written. Does that mean some still get through? Of course, but it does provide a tool to improve user trust, since even if a moderator does approve a fake salute members can see them and individually check it out when viewing their profile. So it does up the trust factor.
And...? Do celebrities make people pay money for "Premium" Features?
You were saying premium tiers would hamper MySpace, I'm guessing if they slid that in (not right at the start, no that IS a bad idea) most people wouldn't have noticed as much or cared as much. Not just because people were blindly following celebrities, or there after the black-hole effect started, but since as long as the core functionality is there I don't think people really care. Most just want to search for people, have a friends list, a simple photo gallery, and send messages to one another, plus a forums/chat system. The rest is just icing on the cake. How can you say people would get irritated over adding a small one time fee to get at some cool new stuff?
How do you verify age for people who don't pay the optional fee? And who cares about fake accounts? Is it because of this case? Because this is an outlier that is so far removed from the norm that it's on another planet.
Did you see my numbers? (the real ones and estimations) It is a big thing on most social networking sites. Fake users are a problem even for small sites. Though it sure at the very least seems to be kept far more hush hush at places like myspace. As for verifying age, if a user has enough against them to condemn their account we give them an ultimatum to prove their age. They have to show one of the staff a hi-res scan of a laminated photo ID with the user's photo, name and date of birth on it. There's not really any other way. Do we sometimes close accounts that might've been innocent? It's possible, but we always make sure people are aware, give them time to contest things, and always are open to appeals if there's evidence.
Same as previous.
You must be really lucky. I and a lot of people I've talked to have experienced enough to convince us it's a problem.
Facebook definitely isn't for meeting random people. Not too sure on MySpace, but if people want to meet random people they met online, then they know what they're getting themselves into.
Seriously, there is no way you can spin a payment program for a Social Networking site, not for a giant one, not for a small one.
EDIT: @ "saluting system", what do people do if they don't have a camera? would a system like this be optional?
Well then facebook would be appealing entirely to one segment of a market. I find if I want to talk to people I know, I either call them, IM them or email them. When I get on a social networking website it's to talk to someone NEW and a lot of other people do that too for the same reason. So therefore if that's part of the game, unless you're going to totally isolate yourself from that market user trust is vital. Too many frauds can ruin your site's reputation so you have to pursue it aggressively and personally I've seen so many fake profiles I honestly don't trust sites without such tools (why I refused to re-join MySpace after my brief registration to see what the site was all about.)
As far as salutes, they are optional unless a user gets called out. We had lists of what was considerd proof for a callout, and if you tried to call people out for BS reasons you'd get silenced for trying to abuse the system. If there was a reason though, the person in question would be contacted and told they had seven days to take a valid salute (we later even bent the rules for some users and didn't require them to publicly upload it if they were that afraid, but a staffer had to see) or their profile was closed. They could always appeal though, but in the cases of callouts we would often have several people go over salutes very closely to double check for photoshopping.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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Does your current wife know about your future wife? Or are you just a scam so that you can sell tandem-strollers for crack-moneys?
I'm not so sure of that. I think that, absent a compelling reason to the contrary, the default anonymity on the internet is an incredible asset. It allows for a freer exchange of ideas by divorcing people from the possible repercussions of being identified. I wouldn't have said half the shit I did about my last company if I was posting under my real name, because a quick Google search could get me in deep shit.
I think the simplicity of info mining on the internet is a very compelling argument for anonymity. People can't spend five minutes and find a detailed log of everything I've ever said to someone in person ever over the course of my life. If you abolish anonymity on the net, though, people would be able to do exactly that for online communication. In that sort of environment, who the hell would ever say anything even remote controversial?
Smasher put forth a total of 100m users for MySpace, which is actually about half the actual total(1). Since that's the site originally being discussed (Facebook being dragged into it didn't seem to help anything) that's the number I'll be working with.
About half of MySpace users are 35 or older according to a 2006 report, which I'm assuming still holds close to true(2). Obviously we don't need high schools to verify age here, so they only require background checks. Using your $10/check figure, that amounts to 100m x $10 = $1b. That's a b, as in billion. That's half the userbase.
The other half is probably close to a 70/30 split of college-age (18-34) and high school age(3). $10 x (70% x 100m) = $700m. Now we have to account for the kids, $3 x (30% x 100m) = $90m. You expect MySpace to somehow find $1.79 billion to check what they already have, let alone the 230,000 accounts they get per day(1)? Hell, even half that number is still $895m assuming they get massive discounts by law enforcement to enact this change. On top of that, MySpace is international. Have fun coordinating with international agencies to get proper background checks. They probably won't be as cheap as they are in the States.
Your intentions are good but as Fuzzy pointed out, are very much flawed. I know you keep saying that they're your opinion but that's a lame cop-out when you proposed an idea that is so flawed in the first place in a debate forum.
Sources:
(2) http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1019
(3) I have no basis for this. Through my own, incredibly narrow experiences this is the split that seems accurate to me and is probably conservative.
For the .edu age verification, what about people who didn't actually go to college. They're forever Underage in that system due to lacking a college email address or alumni address.
Anywho, if age verification was fast cheap and easy to do 100%, you'd get far better than the current "Click yes if you're 18" thing. But the truth of the matter is that at the end of the day, nothing you can do on the server side can verify who is physically sitting behind the keyboard typing false information.
Your site will never get popular if you demand Social Security Numbers or Credit Cards to join, to be quite honest. You're forcing the user to trust you enough to give you this information in order to create a core userbase to attract more users. I just don't see any social networking site starting under that situation.
Beyond that.. what's the point? You're not really protecting the children any more than you have been, and kids will still do Stupid Shit (please, everyone, think back to how much time and effort as a child you took to do everything your parents didn't want you to). Be it via myspace, IM, the mall, billy's house, whatever.
Jump back to page 2, there are already practical solutions that can help with the situation. Some people just seem to think we need to be absolutely sure of everything, which is never going to work in the real world right now for reasons you and others have already said. There still ARE things though that social networking websites can do to increase trust amongst its members.
A) Credit Card Verification
C) Parenting.
I'll go with C. This isn't that far off from me randomly flirting it up with another user on this forum, and unless people intend to go all biometrics on the entire freaking internet, there's no reason to single out social networking sites and blame them for hosting a random medium. Heck, sue Craigslist. Again.
Honestly, user verification is the single biggest issue in IT Security, and if we have trouble doing it on machines in our own building without seeing huge loopholes, I don't know how you ever expect to trust A_Random_Computer, ever.
Which practical solution are you talking about?
CC verification + stupidity patrol + saluting system tied in with bonus features and perks. It's not perfect but it works and it works for users under and over 18.
Why should I give www.newnetworkingsite.com my CC number, exactly? From a social standpoint, this just won't work. I'm not handing some random jackass access to my funds with the promise they'll be really good and not keep it around. Plus, what about people who lack credit cards? There are (oddly enough to me!) an awful lot of people who avoid the things like the plague, or can't get them.
Stupidity Patrol is fine on some level, but on a free site like Myspace.. who is paying these people. As is, you can report profiles (it's somewhat of a prank to report people's profiles and pretend you're their concerned parents). So somehow they need to find enough employees to sift through a few thousand profile creations a day, without users paying for them.
Or, more specifically, it sounds like you want everything on the internet to become a pay site. Which I assure you would completely destroy myspace and facebook. Myspace is just a new Geocities. A huge website full of every idiot's bad ideas for blinking backgrounds and shitty font colors where they can chatter on about new kids on the block. Making people Pay to do that is completely missing the point as to why they're popular.
Not as practical as responsible parenting.
Why give your CC number? Well we had a lot of features we tied to premium account tiers. We used features to lure members into paying and that also had the nice bonus of verifying people's ages. We never required it.
As for point number 2, you leverage the community to helping you do your work for you. There are far more people who'll volunteer to help for free than you'd think on even small websites. They aren't 100% reliable people but they cast the net out and snare people for you, then you reel them in as necessary. The rate of false positives with a little common sense and checking is low enough it isn't a huge issue using volunteers either.
I don't want anything to be required honestly, though I think tying all of these things together is necessary. Especially a saluting system, which improves trust the user is the person in their pictures. You get people to cooperate by tying features and perks and bonuses to each action so it encourages people to participate and then the community does the rest of the work for you. This system I'd also add, is already in place and does work on social networking sites. Granted, it's never been tested or used on anything other than small ones, but these days you're either a small site or one of the major ones.
That's fine and dandy, and helps make sure little timmy or laura doesn't end up being captured by the dastardly pedo bear, but what I'm addressing covers a much wider scope. The core idea is to find ways to improve trust between members both over and under 18. The goal behind a social networking website is to get people talking, communicating and building friendships or more serious relationships between each other. The best way to help make your site more successful at that, aside from just luring in as many members as possible, is to improve user trust.
Start charging for Facebook and watch as facebook's usage drops to lower than that site you worked on that no one here had ever heard of. Awesome business model, works great, very practical.
Edit: And a free site like Facebook definitely has the financial reserves needed to hire people to personally inspect over a million "salute" photographs.
Start charging for Facebook and watch as facebook's usage drops to lower than that site you worked on that no one here had ever heard of. Awesome business model, works great, very practical.
Edit: And a free site like Facebook definitely has the financial reserves needed to hire people to personally inspect over a million "salute" photographs.[/quote]
Did you read my post?
I'm not saying to make it mandatory, I'm saying make it highly reccomended and enticing users by offering features and perks for doing so. It's a carrot and stick tactic, not a gun-to-your-head tactic.
If you don't require CC verification.. then what's the point? Optional Age Verification gets you in the same News pickle when some unverified basic user happens to have been 13 and did something Stupid. You have to either require it, or not even mention it, really. It's like optionally carding people at a bar, it just doesn't fly if you want to pitch it as a solution to underaged anything.
You can't expect a giant social networking site to create a free police force (hi2u UO GM lawsuit. You can't have volunteers do something that is effectively a Job and give them perks, is Illegal). It may fly on small sites because nobody has half a mind to sue someone with no money, but 200 myspace police volunteers suing myspace for everything they're worth? Oh hell yes. There's a very very tiny sliver of things you can have a volunteer program to work on.
I'm trying to be logical here. You can't make them a pay site, it's not within their business model even slightly, nor would the userbase stand for it. You can't make age verification tied to perks, unless said perk is "being able to have a page/message users", because otherwise it just leaves you with a giant pool of unverified underaged people still getting you into a PR mess.
I don't know about your deal, honestly. I work in IT, a big thing for us is Scalability. Can a solution actually function when pointed at an absolutely enormous task. And I honestly don't see your system having any scalability here. It may work in a small shop, but when you point it at that volume of existing and new users.. good lord.
Except that currently the users already have the carrot, and you are saying that by taking it away from them and offering to sell it back isn't going to cost them most of their userbase overnight? You're talking about these solutions as if Facebook wasn't already an established service with an absurd volume of existing users.
So if it's mandatory then what's the point?
We tie it to features. The community in question serves 16 and up. We have features and content geared more towards adults. It's a way to allow for content that otherwise would require an 18 and only policy. We also like I said add extra features. It's a carrot and stick move, and it works pretty well with anyone who regularly visits the site.
We leverage the community by opening channels for them to communicate publicly or privately with the actual site staff to make reports or accusations of accounts we need to look into. If there's enough evidence, it gets looked into and dealt with. We actually didn't give anything to the people who reported fakes though, for that reason. That said we had enough pissed off users we didn't need to. People have a natural hatred of 600lb bald men pretending to be 19 year old models. We just get them to report the accounts to us, then we investigate and deal with the situation. It worked pretty well.
Not if you require all content that could get you into said PR mess to be locked behind an adults only filter. You use premium account tiers with features people want to get people to pay. It's a source of revenue, it verifies users' age, and does all sorts of nifty things. It's not a 100% solution but nothing ever is and this one actually has shown it can work. We enforce our terms of service, put objectionable content behind lock and key and offer perks to get users to put more information out there. That's about as good as it's going to get.
It wouldn't be that bad, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once. It might be a little hard at first but after a few months you'd probably go back to a more regular ebb and flow. Would it require a few more staffers to regulate things? Probably on a large site. However, improving the trust in users improves the quality of the site and improving the quality of the site means more members/revenue which is better for business. I think it'd be worth it long run.
What features? Features Facebook users already have access to? So you're going to make people more loyal to your service by taking away the majority of the features they already had and demanding they pay you to get them back? And you don't see this killing the site?
You can already do that shit with MySpace an Facebook.
This has been shown to work on a site that has the volume of users that Facebook has, or this has been shown to work on your site? And as far as that being "as good as it gets" I'd have to disagree because I am not the least bit compelled to switch to your site and abandon my Facebook account.
Cap'n, after the first few months Facebook wouldn't even exist anymore. You're right, you're not going to get an entire ten million users submitting things at once, you're going to get a couple thousand people submitting anything ever and 9.8 million users abandoning your service, cutting the ad-revenue that keeps your site afloat out at the knees. Oh but people are paying now. And I bet those couple thousand users' $10 verification charges are going to make up for the lost ad-revenue, right? An air-conditioned cup-holder would increase the quality of a car but people aren't going to be willing to pay for it when they can get ice in their drink for free.
What major site is using such a model as a social networking (read: not dating, which is the only kind of site I can think of with this in place) site.
Heck, give some examples of moderately sized social networking sites doing this. My circle of friends is predominantly low-mid 20something girls, but I've heard not a single peep of Oh My God You Need A Profile On This Site beyond bullying me into getting a myspace profile.
I'm simply not seeing this being a large scale success anywhere, and I think (as in, not supported by any studies) a decent part of that is that when faced with free popular competition, Why Pay for Less Content(userbase).
In the case with an existing site what you'd probably want to do is tie it to new features. In the cases of say, a saluting system, you'd also want to add options for restricting profile views or communications from unsaluted users (so if a person wished they could decide to only talk to people who used the new system.) But with other things just take any new features that aren't already being talked about publicly and consider if it'd be valid to tie that to it.
Wouldn't take anything away from anyone they didn't already have, it'd make the effort to adopt the platform voluntary, plus if you put a positive enough spin on it you could probably encourage lots of existing new members to adopt it.
Perhaps they've changed policies but I know MySpace in particular used to love to pretend it didn't exist. You could report fake accounts privately to moderators but you had to be the person who's pictures they were using. (They'd ask you to make them a sign) versus a system of allowing other users to report potential fakes and show how that person in question might not be legitimate. I never had a facebook account though I did poke around MySpace for a while to see what all the talk was about. Big thing was we actually had a public effort to show we acknowledge the problems of this sort of thing and are trying to insure a quality experience.
Of course not. The big social networking websites don't have to innovate unless they're put under pressure. Short of legal fallout I seriously doubt they'll invest a dime into features to improve user trust? Why? because once you get a certain population of actively socializing users it becomes a self-sustaining black-hole like effect. Ask yourself, why do you or anyone else use myspace? The answer I always here is "because all my friends are on it" or "it's the only/most reliable way to talk to certan people." People join these sites because their friends are there and of course they won't leave, why would they? These people then pull in their other friends and so on. This has the unfortunate side effect though of creating a lot of stagnation since while these sites can and do improve themselves and their features they have no compelling reason to continuously branch out or improve in any manner unless they want to since unlike smaller sites they aren't fighting for their very existence among tablescraps. Everyone joins MySpace or facebook or friendster, etc. It's just the way it works, and it's for that reason they don't feel a need to change.
They'd leave in disgust because you added a saluting system and gave a new option to verify your age to get access to some nifty new features no one had heard about? Care to explain why so many people would hate that?
Secondly, ten thousand is a lot, but I can tell you from personal experience it takes maybe one and a half minutes to verify and check one of those things with a good level of accuracy. So the average person could clear about 320 in an eight hour shift. So you'd just need about 32 people to deal with it if you had to get it done in one day, though you could just have about ten and do it over about three days if you wanted. It's not something that's direly necessary so it doesn't have to be immediately approved.
Why would I benefit from "saluting"? No one can see any information I don't want them to unless I let them as it stands. This wouldn't add anything to the service except expense on the part of the operators who will then need additional revenue in order to maintain the necessary manpower to work the "new" feature.
Back when I used to periodically look at my MySpace I'd usually find about six friend invites from accounts that had since been deleted for being fake. You allege that your competitor ignores these reports but I've seen no reason to believe that.
So your claim that it has been shown to work is false.
Charging $10 to use the site isn't a nifty new feature any more than a free jagged, rusty dildo is.
Or you could set it up such that people can't add themselves to other people's friend-lists without approval by the person being "friended" or whatever you want to call it, and thus let the users verify for themselves whether or not they know this person who wants access to their profile. Which seems to be working great for most of their users as it stands.
The taking features away bit, incidentally, is required to make your suggestions even remotely relevant to the topic, which is making it harder for people to misrepresent themselves on the site to harass people. If everything stays as it is for users who don't pay via credit-card or do some stupid name-card manual authentication the supposed problem (which still hasn't been demonstrated to actually be a problem) is not solved or even honestly acknowledged. Your suggested policies would not have prevented the events of the first post in the thread, the events that it has been claimed that social-networking sites should be required to do something to prevent. You're not keeping minors off the site, you're not preventing people from making fake accounts. The only relevant suggestion you had is already in place.
How would you benefit? It's an added tool to allow you a far greater ability to tell who's really the person in their pictures and who's the overweight bald pedo pretending to be a young girl for kicks. It's a way of improving trust amongst users by giving them the ability to look more closely and decide if they're being fooled or not.
I said it seemed like they wanted to ignore the problem compared to other sites' efforts. I never saw any public forum for discussing or reporting fake/underage users and I know from people I talked to on other websites that were commonly faked, that they had to do things very differently to make myspace remove fake profiles of them. On a lot of other sites I'd seen you could publicly and privately report fake users and you didn't have to have irrefutable proof they were fake or that you were the real person in the photos, you just had to have enough to show probable cause to suspect the person. It gives me the distinct impression they want to sweep something under the rug or just don't care when the only way to solve the problem is much slower and has to be done strictly behind closed doors.
My claim is that these features improve user trust and would go a long way towards helping improve user trust and making problems like this a lot harder. What I just said is despite that no major website will likely ever go through the effort because people are stupid and they don't have to do it to survive like the smaller websites do.
Why do you keep missing the part where I say it's an optional charge that instead of forcing people to pay we try to bait them into paying by offering a juicy carrot to get them to?
Now that reminds me of a common argument I always heard. About how people just use myspace to talk to people they regularly socialize with in real life. That seems like a real waste of potential if that's all you use it for, not to mention not everyone has a ton of real life friends they socialize with. What about helping the people who just want someone to talk to, has a few similar hobbies, and isn't really an asshole or psychopath pretending to be someone else? That's why things like say, a saluting system are so useful. It puts in a user's hands more tools to determine who's worth talking to and who's worth trusting. Trust is VITAL in an online environment, it's like a form of currency, so making it easier to establish trust is a very helpful and useful thing.
You don't need to take existing features away. No adoption would not be 100% effective and especially not right away. So it would take a while to be effective, the trick is taking the effort to convince people it's a necessary and good thing to do, which slowly can be done. The big thing here is to realize the problem of fake and underage users can't realistically be 100% eliminated but it CAN be reduced by a good margin. When I used to keep track the small website I work for, with a maximum active population of only about 300-400K users still got around 25-40 fake profiles removed each week and about ten to twenty underage accounts a week. So just imagine the traffic a larger site that has say, 30-40 million users would get, it'd be insane. You can't stop it but you can cut it down and by a fair margin, and that's the point. It takes time, and coaxing, but it does work.
MySpace/Facebook would never have gotten off the ground if there were BS optional charges to get "Premium" features.
People would just have gone to a free alternative site.
So... parenting is still winning.
EDIT: Also, is this really a big enough problem that we have to convince people it's necessary and good when IMHO it isn't?
What? Far greater ability to tell it's really the person in the picture? Shit man I don't get so drunk that I don't remember what the girl I was talking to at the party looks like when I get home.
MySpace took off initially, from what I've read, because Tom actually did know some celebrities and actually got them to sign up for the site.
You're missing the big picture. The goal is improving trust amongst users and doing that by removing and providing tools to detect false users as well as verify age.
Consider the numbers I just gave. A website of about 400K users gets 30 fake profiles a week. Now then, we'll say that the rate of profiles caught to ones that slip by is around 50% so that's 45 new fake profiles each week. Now that's 2,340 fake profiles joining per year. Now let's up the user-base to MySpace levels, that means 234,000 fake profiles joining a year. Now that's just new profiles, you also have to take into account the ones that aren't caught and therefore contribute to a growing population of users, plus much more lax policies and less public knowledge about fake accounts.
I'd say there's a real issue there. Honestly I can't come up with a very good estimate for MySpace other than increasing the rate by the rate of overall population since I don't know their rate of new user registration, which would allow a more accurate apples to apples approach. Either way though, I've seen enough websites and enough people going to sometimes insane lengths to impersonate others that I do believe it's a problem.
While socializing with people you already know and have met first is a good thing, another big part of these websites is to encourage new people to meet and socialize online and who knows, maybe then meet in real life. That is another big part of the equation and it does make user trust important.
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook that way, and the only people I know who don't use facebook are either over 30 or prefer MySpace for the Hot-Topic atmosphere.
I tried Ctrl-F throughout the thread, but couldn't find anything.
You take a picture of yourself holding a sign with your username written on it and someone who works for the site checks it, and somehow this proves that you are who you say you are because if they're not lying about their appearance why would they be lying about anything else?
That seems worringly trivial to circumvent. I'd say better no verification than inadequate verification, that way at least everybody knows where they stand.
Are you alleging that a false-sense of security could be much worse than a justified sense of suspicion?
And...? Do celebrities make people pay money for "Premium" Features?
How do you verify age for people who don't pay the optional fee? And who cares about fake accounts? Is it because of this case? Because this is an outlier that is so far removed from the norm that it's on another planet.
Same as previous.
Facebook definitely isn't for meeting random people. Not too sure on MySpace, but if people want to meet random people they met online, then they know what they're getting themselves into.
Seriously, there is no way you can spin a payment program for a Social Networking site, not for a giant one, not for a small one.
EDIT: @ "saluting system", what do people do if they don't have a camera? would a system like this be optional?
Pretty much. Not to mention it being a liability nightmare when people, being people, do stupid things.
I'm really quite amazed that the oft-repeated message that "That person on the Internet is not necessarily who they say they are" doesn't seem to have hit home for a disturbingly large section of the population. It also seems odd (and I know I'm re-hashing slightly here) that people think there's something particular to social networking sites that means they should be required to be any more responsible for the activities of their patrons than web forums, IM providers, Email Providers, Telephone "dating" lines, Newspapers that run personal ads, Clubs, bars, Interest Societies, Mailing lists, and so forth.
You take a picture of yourself holding up a sign with your username and an @ symbol plus the website domain. You can photoshop fake ones yes, but we make it at least a little difficult to do that by having minimum requirements for resolution as well as readability. It also is required to be hand written. Does that mean some still get through? Of course, but it does provide a tool to improve user trust, since even if a moderator does approve a fake salute members can see them and individually check it out when viewing their profile. So it does up the trust factor.
You were saying premium tiers would hamper MySpace, I'm guessing if they slid that in (not right at the start, no that IS a bad idea) most people wouldn't have noticed as much or cared as much. Not just because people were blindly following celebrities, or there after the black-hole effect started, but since as long as the core functionality is there I don't think people really care. Most just want to search for people, have a friends list, a simple photo gallery, and send messages to one another, plus a forums/chat system. The rest is just icing on the cake. How can you say people would get irritated over adding a small one time fee to get at some cool new stuff?
Did you see my numbers? (the real ones and estimations) It is a big thing on most social networking sites. Fake users are a problem even for small sites. Though it sure at the very least seems to be kept far more hush hush at places like myspace. As for verifying age, if a user has enough against them to condemn their account we give them an ultimatum to prove their age. They have to show one of the staff a hi-res scan of a laminated photo ID with the user's photo, name and date of birth on it. There's not really any other way. Do we sometimes close accounts that might've been innocent? It's possible, but we always make sure people are aware, give them time to contest things, and always are open to appeals if there's evidence.
You must be really lucky. I and a lot of people I've talked to have experienced enough to convince us it's a problem.
Well then facebook would be appealing entirely to one segment of a market. I find if I want to talk to people I know, I either call them, IM them or email them. When I get on a social networking website it's to talk to someone NEW and a lot of other people do that too for the same reason. So therefore if that's part of the game, unless you're going to totally isolate yourself from that market user trust is vital. Too many frauds can ruin your site's reputation so you have to pursue it aggressively and personally I've seen so many fake profiles I honestly don't trust sites without such tools (why I refused to re-join MySpace after my brief registration to see what the site was all about.)
As far as salutes, they are optional unless a user gets called out. We had lists of what was considerd proof for a callout, and if you tried to call people out for BS reasons you'd get silenced for trying to abuse the system. If there was a reason though, the person in question would be contacted and told they had seven days to take a valid salute (we later even bent the rules for some users and didn't require them to publicly upload it if they were that afraid, but a staffer had to see) or their profile was closed. They could always appeal though, but in the cases of callouts we would often have several people go over salutes very closely to double check for photoshopping.