A Sustainable Train of Thought

Via the Citizen Agency Blog (Choice words from Stewart Butterfield) I found the following quote from an interview by CNN of Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders of Flickr:

There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too. [ emphasis mine ]

Think of the field as the internet and the farmers as Flickr (or any other Web 2.0 social-networking AdSense collecting site)...they can plow all they want, but without some kind of participation on the part of the early adopters (the seed), there would be no crops to harvest.

OK, so that was a horrible analogy.

Success is not an either/or proposition. Success is the result of both parties working together. It’s co-creation, it’s co-dependency. And at some point maybe one party needs to move on. I understand that, and I’m not blogging on and on about this simply to provoke my RSI.

Yes, I see a lot of whining. But underneath that whining I see some troubling aspects which I personally cannot dismiss as simply…well, whining.

ArsTechnica comments (Flickr’s shift to Yahoo ID requirement sparks (virtual) rioting) on the need to recognize the effort and contributions that early adopters make in support of fledgling social networking sites.

Those who run online (and offline) communities know that you can’t please everybody, and that old-school members are the most demanding and change-resistant. But when it comes to major community status markers you have to bend over backwards to accommodate the members who really value this sort of thing. In Flickr’s case, some kind of differentiating marker for legacy members would be nice, like a badge or a title, or some other visible signifier of the major investment that these senior users have made in the community.

Seniority perks and visible signifiers of in-group status are “Anthropology 101,” and no amount of Web 2.0 pixie dust can change that basic fact of human nature. Community sites that forget this in the midst of changes and genuine improvements do irreparable damage to the very social networks that they’re striving to build.

To be clear, I’m not questioning the business case for the Flickr and Yahoo merger, nor am I questioning the supposed benefits which await newly anointed Yahoo email address owners in the form of single-sign-on to all of Yahoo’s properties (or most of them, anyway).

Rather, as I’ve said before, I’m trying to point out that in the rush to make the business case I think people are overlooking some basic human needs, which the ArsTechnica article begins to highlight. Furthermore, in projecting this kind of reaction into the future, I feel that unless people pay attention to the underlying causes behind this reaction, rather than the reaction in and of itself (which could be passed off as whining or whatnot), this whole notion of a participatory internet may just hit a few roadblocks.

Just think about it. Without the uber-geeks falling all over themselves to make Flickr what it is today (a property of almighty Yahoo), would your (insert stereotypically computer-illiterate demographic here) be posting photos on Flickr? Do not vex/anger/enrage/put out/incense/annoy the uber-geeks.

Anyways, as one of the ArsTechnica members (Traddy) succinctly points out:

You could argue that the reason the site was valuable to be bought out is because of their [the Old Skool-ers] work; since the site is all about “community”.

Well put.

There are a couple of other interesting posts lying around the interwebs:

Slashdot
The Zooomr CEO

Oh, and if you’re wondering what “kthxbai” means, here’s your answer

If you’ve used Flickr for a while, you’ve known about their acquisition by Yahoo and the subsequent inexorable march towards using Yahoo login names instead of the old Flickr login names. Well, the date has finally been set (March 15) and predictably there is a huge uproar in the Flickr message boards.

To their credit, Flickr seems to be managing this furor the best way they can, by being available for comment and kvetching in the message boards. And, really, there’s not much more they can do.

However, I can’t help but feel a twinge of discomfort at what’s happening, mainly because it shows the dark underbelly of social networking sites.

To wit: A group of people have an idea and put together some software that lets a bunch of other people engage in so-called social networking. Those early adopters are just as crucial to the success of the social network as the people who man the infrastructure and prune the message boards, etc. The difference is that the early adopters are unpaid for their time and efforts, while the infrastructure d00ds eventually/hopefully make oodles of money.

We’ve seen this happen before, just recently, with YouTube. The people who created this system weren’t the ones who put the effort into the videos which actually drew the visitors which…well, eventually attracted Google. Yet of the obscene amount of money that the company received, how much went back to the people who, when you really think about it, made it happen? It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation, innit?

There is a co-dependency between the companies that develop social networks and the people who populate them, yet the systems currently in place serve to unfairly distribute the rewards of the service: 100% vs. 0%. Is this just how it is, or can something be done to make it more equitable? Because as it stands right now, YouTube and Flickr and all these other sites are effectively telling me that my time is worthless to them. And forgive me if I don’t agree with that perspective.

Getting back to Flickr, my fear is that as these kinds of mergers continue across the Web 2.0 universe, and as early adopters begin to feel more and more disenfranchised (or burned or perhaps even pwned), their enthusiasm for this exploitative environment will wane. What will replace it remains to be seen, but I can’t help to think it will involve shares of some kind, or some semblance of ownership or investment.

Now, this is not to say that early adopters know what’s right for a company, or that they should be involved in the day-to-day management of the company’s affairs. But I do believe it’s important to show respect, because they are as much a reason for where some of the companies are today as the people who put together the business. Whether that respect is acknowledged through discounts on premium services offered by the company, or manifested in some other way, such as recognition, I think there are means to reward the risk, time, and effort assumed by early adopters.

I would venture that so-called “old skool” members of Flickr prize their old-skool status, which is in its way a reward for their time and effort spent during the early days of Flickr. In that context, an outcry about changing login procedures is as much one of principle as it is identity and social standing, even if it’s a matter of personal pride (“I was one of the first!”). It remains to be seen whether Flickr will differentiate between former “old skool” Flickr members and newer members under the Yahoo system.

All I can think about right now is the next time one of these disenchanted, former-old-skool-Flickr users stumbles upon a new social networking site, and I wonder whether they will harbor any reservations about pouring their energy into yet another enterprise which, in the end, will not be theirs.

The bigger question, of course, is: will this sort of event, relived time and again over the course of many social networking mergers, lead to a chilling effect?