Thoughts on Mass Collaboration / Social Participation

Image Source

Why I am not a contributor

The first time the term “mass collaboration” ever came into my mind, I was thinking what if everyone in China donated me 1 yuan. Wouldn't I become a billionaire? Then I realized if this plan ever got executed, it would probably be my parents donating like 2k (because they are my parents), my friends donating probably 5 each, while most of the others donate 0 because they don’t know me and don’t even bother.

The same situation applies to most of the online mass collaboration platforms. Only a small amount of people is doing most of the work in generating and maintaining the shared contents. I too am part of the majority that make no contribution to the social capital. I did tried once. I tried editing a wiki page of a niche Japanese stage actor. The submission was successful. However, there were several problems: first, they never approved my changes; second, they didn’t tell me any specific reason why it was rejected; and third, the site never encouraged me to try a second time. The solution to this frustrated experience was barely mentioned in the "reader-to-leader framework" reading. In my case, what hampers me from contributing is the lack of feedback on unsuccessful contribution. If I could at least earn a small badge after my failed attempt, I might have continued trying. From this point of view, the article might overlook the importance of rewarding unseen efforts in order to retain the returning contributors.

Does the framework still fit today?

Preece, J. & Shneiderman, B. (2009)

As the online communities grow, various forms of online collaboration have emerged. For example, Foldit is a game which asks the players / participants to fold selected proteins. The results can be used for real world research purpose. I’ve also seen AI chatbots that can be trained by users. In both cases, the roles of readers, contributors, and collaborators, seem to combine and merge together, and therefore cannot be strictly categorized by the reader-to-leader framework. The framework may be useful in designing collaborative community, but it may not necessarily be good at classifying the existing ones. We don't have to limit ourselves to this framework, as more and more options – AI, gamifications, VR / AR become available, we may have more dynamic and diverse mass collaboration systems to explore.

Chinese Censorship and Social Participation

Image Source

China has been heavily censoring contents that involve adult and political topics (and more), which greatly hinders people to communicate and share ideas. Interestingly, some platforms were able to benefit from it in a bad way. Chongya (which literally means Go) was an online creativity platform for people to submit artworks. It quickly attracted numerous influential illustrators to post and share R-rated works. The reason Chongya could escape from the censorship was, you must pay the authors to view the contents, and thus the contents are less publicized. However, the platform knew they couldn’t last for long. About a month ago, they stopped the services and absconded with users’ money (users cannot transfer money out of the platform). Now, what I see in general is that people are gradually losing trust in any social participation platforms due to both the lack of regulation and over-regulation. What they are experiencing is that, they are being be fed with information that the government or the website operators consider to be appropriate to them. The opinions / contributions from other users are rather irrelevant. It really seems that social participation is not necessary in this country. It could function just “fine” without the inputs from the people. As already mentioned in the reading, social participation can be used to organize political campaign, so it could be a form of power. Maybe CCP thinks it’s too risky to let us wield it, as if we people could really outsmart the governors, right? ;p

MSTU4020

It doesn’t take me long to realize how this class perfectly resembles the characteristics of online collaboration. We read others’ blog posts, contribute and share original information, and collaborate in comment section to refine our ideas. I really do think adding a rating component would get me more involved psychologically, even if I would rate everybody 5 stars (and I expect everybody to do the same, hehe). For now, what we are doing is more like passively completing missions or tasks. Being able to rate or like would evoke the sense of trust and empathy in us, which would then in turn encourage us to provide higher quality contents for others to read. 

Image Source