Papers:
- Identity and deception in the virtual community – Judith S. Donath.
- 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community – Michael S. Bernstein, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Drew Harry, Paul Andre, Katrina Panovich and Greg Vargas.
Short Summary:
It goes without saying that both the papers deal with issues related to identity of the users on an online social platform. Both spend some time describing both how the design of these systems affects trade-offs between the credibility, status, reputation building, and accountability that identity affords the user on the one hand, and the freedom from consequence, judgement, and equality of consideration that anonymity provides on the other hand. Both papers also discuss the ways in which users deal with or adapt to the design of these systems, creating their own methods to tip the balance of these trade-offs, as befitting the situation.
[1] focuses on the users of Usenet, an online topic-based chat/advice forum. It broadly discusses identity, attempts at deception of identity, and mechanisms for identity verification and the prevention of deception that users create on Usenet.
[2] discusses not just identity, but particularly how anonymity and the transitory nature of data on the website affects content, and user interaction and behavior. It focuses on the random (/b/) thread of the website, 4chan.
Reflections:
[1] describes the concept of signalling as a way to establish possession of a desirable trait, e.g. experience in a community, or domain knowledge of the topic of the community discussion. In particular, [1] mentions examples of signatures which contain programming jokes, “Geek Code“, or riddles used in programming Usenet communities. [2] also mentions similar “signatures” in 4chan /b/, like the “triforce“. It might be interesting to explore the usage of such explicit “signatures” on modern anonymous or pseudonym based platforms, like Reddit, StackOverflow, etc.
More ubiquitous are implicit signalling mechanisms, like the language, grammar, references, usernames/email-ids, etc. While investigating this in a data-driven way might be harder, it would also be interesting to collect data about the trends in usage of in-group language and references of a single new user over time, as the user goes from being a new member to a seasoned member of the group , and starts using the same language and references as the group. It would also be interesting to track how these rates would vary among groups, and how easily a single user simultaneously part of multiple disconnected online social groups can switch between the different mores of implicit signalling of the groups.
[2] mentions that “sites like Twitter … feel ephemeral” because of continuous streams of content, despite not being ephemeral. Would this have an impact akin to ephemerality on the user? Would there be any 4chan like “bumping” (or subtler forms of such behavior) on Twitter, because the end user subconsciously feels the site to be ephemeral?
Side note: [2] mentions in passing that to combat the effect of ephemerality of data on 4chan, users comment “bump” or sometimes “bamp” (as a linguistic variant of “bump“). This highlighted for me the importance of spending a lot of time on the particular website or online community being explored, before conducting data analysis, as a casual user of 4chan would be aware of “bumping“, but not of the keyword “bamp“, which is something of an intermediate reference. Thus, posts which were “bamped” would be ignored while gathering data for analysis in this case.
[1] also states that Usenet went from being ephemeral to being a permanent website, as far as data storage was concerned. This raises an interesting opportunity to explore the effects of this transition on the usage patterns, and the behavior of users of the website.
[1] talks about how a users web home page is a useful, believable way of declaring identity, since it is time-consuming to make, harder to fake, and can’t be discarded or replicated easily. Thus, it increases the cost of deception. Most online users nowadays do not have personal web-pages, but many users connect certain website accounts (e.g. Goodreads, Instagram, etc.) to their Facebook or Google accounts. If these accounts are sufficiently old or regularly used, this greatly increases the cost of deception on a website where the users Facebook or Google account is linked, as they contain large amounts of important social information, and may also be linked to other websites. It would be interesting to explore user speech or behavior patterns on websites linked with their Facebook account, like the rudeness/politeness of speech, lies told, etc., versus websites where there is no need to link another social media account.
