Neil Swidley, a Globe Magazine staff writer, just published a great article titled, “Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster.” I was intrigued by the article because Neil does a fabulous job of reaching beyond the physical confines of the digital world by going right into the kitchen of an anonymous commenter on Boston.com to get insight and perspective. There were two points in the article that really hit home:

•  “If we hope to clean up the online conversation, we need a better understanding of the select group of people doing most of the talking.”
  
  
• “He recalls the time his comment on a column titled “My Lazy American Students” drew hundreds of “Recommends”. Leaning back in his chair, with his left arm resting on his thick belly and his right arm jingling change in his pocket, he smiles. “There were more than 600 comments, and at least half of them agreed with me!””

These two points hit home because they embody one possible solution in separating the anonymous winners from the anonymous users online—use the community to separate the winners from the losers. Now in fairness to Neil, I need to point out I am taking his first point out of context. He was speaking to leveraging real information to identify a user commenting on a site; however, I believe you don’t need to know the real identity of the user. Instead all you need is a way to allow the community to establish some form of social control, basically an enforced social contract.

If you read my last post you know I believe that anonymity has a place in community, but it also needs to be properly managed using techniques to encourage users to use their real identity or create a meaningful digital disguise. I also believe those tactics are not enough. You need help from the army of volunteers already contributing on your site, and as Neil discovered the folks hiding behind the disguise really care what the army of volunteers thinks. So how do you enlist the army of volunteers to enforce a social contract? I believe there are a few easy ways:

1. Allow users to score each contribution – Simply allow the community, the lurkers and the contributors, to vote a contribution up or down. The votes should add up to a total score, number of up votes minus number of down votes, for each contribution. When one person takes issue with what you say you are ready to battle, when 50 people take issue with what you say you shut up and run the other way.
   
   
2. Allow contributions reaching a certain threshold of abuse to be removed automatically – Abuse reports are not new to anyone; however, if properly applied they can make a big difference. Most abuse report systems flag a contribution for review by a moderator which is fine, but go a step further and allow a contribution to be automatically removed on the site if it reaches a certain number of abuse reports.
   
   You can even take it a step further by applying some intelligence to the sorting of abuse reports for moderators. In Pluck we apply a sorting algorithm that takes into account the tier of the user reporting and the number of abuse reports against a contribution. This allows us to show moderators the most sensitive items first in the list of abuse reports.
   
   
3. Use abuse reports to identify more than just bad contributions – Abuse reports are great for allowing the community to flag inappropriate contributions, but they can also be used to identify repeat offenders. Take advantage of the fact your community is continuing to report contributions of a specific user for abuse multiple times. In Pluck we do this by assigning demerits to users each time a contribution by them is flagged as abusive and deleted. This allows the moderators to quickly identify a list of abusive users in the system and take action independent of abuse reports.
   
   
4. Feature the valued contributors at the top – As both Xenophonic and Yoshimi25 confirmed in Neil’s article, they care about what other users think. I believe this is the case for most contributors, anonymous or not. For the ones who actually don’t care, my advice is to make it really hard for their contributions to be heard. One simple way to do this is to change the default sort of contributions from time based to score based. Show the contributions with highest score at the top and the lowest score at the bottom.

The ideas above are just a few ways to allow the community to separate the winners from the losers. They are all capabilities we currently provide in Pluck. In my next post I plan to talk about how you can allow each individual to cut through the noise and nonsense without any moderation on your part. I hope you found this post useful and in the spirit of full disclosure, Boston.com is a customer of Demand Media using our Pluck Social Media tools to power comments and forums.