Powazek Chapter 8: Barriers to Entry...Making Them Work for It

Discussion leader/summarizer: [CathyLu]

Key Points/Claims

In this chapter Powazek discusses the myth of the “inclusive nature” of online communities, the necessity of placing barriers on online communities, the three kinds of barriers to entry, and some key characteristics of the barriers.

First Powazek points out two incorrect assumptions about online communities:

• "Communities are open to all."
  In fact, “all communities are exclusionary to some degree.”
  
• "Barriers are bad."
  “Barriers to entry are a necessary part of creating a successful community space.”

To emphasize the importance and necessity of placing barriers, Powazek pinpoints that communities need barriers because this barrier to entry “fulfills an incredibly important role” which is to make “you focus the conversation to stay relevant to the site”.

There are three kinds of barriers mentioned in Powazek’s discussion: 1) informal barriers to entry, e.g., content filtering, 2) formal barriers to entry, e.g., membership registration, 3) extreme barriers to entry, e.g., trimming the user base by taking drastic measure such as shutting down a site and restarting the site at a new location.

At the same time, Powazek mentions that barriers can change over time and they should be adjusted over time “in response to the changing needs of your community”. The implication is simply that a community site owner or host needs to keep a close eye on the barrier to entry in order to keep their site well guarded.

Critique

I like the idea in this chapter that there is no absolute "openness", even in the World Wide Web. As a community builder, you need to have a barrier to entry for the sake of peace in your community space but you can't set the bar too high because then you lose inclusion. Thus you need to identify your audience and adjust the barrier while your community grows. Slashdot's Karma system seems like a successful self-adjusting barrier/policy tool. The essence is to make your members work to gain their seat and status in the community. "There is no free lunch." Adding to this notion, I say, "free lunch ruins the community."

PaulResnick: I think Powazek is less than lucid about why barriers are useful. He says the purpose is not to keep the riffraff out. But I think the purpose of barriers to entry is in fact to keep the riffraff out, where riffraff is defined as the people who are not interested in the enterprise of the community. For it to work, there need to be two key elements. First, the community must be more valuable to people who share its enterprise than to those who don't. Second, there must be a cost to entry. If the cost to entry is just the right amount, the people who are desireable will join and the undesireable will choose not to. This is what information economists call a "selection effect" (if only the least desirable people join, then it's called "adverse selection". Akerlof won the Nobel Prize∞ for modeling adverse selection.) Thus, the advice to designers should be to try to increase the separation in the value of participation for desirable and undesirable participants, and then to choose a barrier that's just high enough but not too high.

PaulResnick: Powazek also doesn't point out one other valuable thing about barriers, the psychological commitment that comes when people pay some cost to enter a group.

FrankLester: Powazek quotes Brenda Laurel as saying that "communities cannot function well without some means of exclusion." Wikipedia is an example of the tension that arises when barriers are relatively relaxed, or when there is even some sort of formalized community-wide stricture on imposing such barriers. I like PaulResnick's idea of barriers as "keeping the riff-raff out" because it is true that most online communities do seem to define themselves in some way both as communities of which certain people are a member (for whatever reason or based on whatever identity) and as communities from which by definition certain people are excluded (for converse reasons or whatever other reasons). I would agree that Powasek's discussion of this phenomenon is less than rigorous. "Every community has people who are in and people who are out," according to Powazek. Well, sure. But why? "A community ... would simply lose all meaning if everybody in the world was in it" is an inadequate response. Are barriers to entry to solidify community identity, as Powazek implies? Are they to clarify what makes "us" different from other communities that may have a similar focus (even Wikipedia defines itself as "different" as against communities like Everything2∞, which has a reputation as being even more freewheeling in its boundaries than Wikipedia, yet in some ways is more strict about who is entitled to join). These are all questions that Powazek for the most part seems to leave untouched, execpt in terms of the discussion on how barriers improve design.

Connections with other readings, ideas, etc.

GrouchoMarx (by way of PaulResnick): "I would never belong to a group that would accept someone like me as a member."

Comments

Barriers to entry do play a key role in community formation. Take SI for instance: an incredibly diverse, welcoming community of like-minded students, yes. A place where we all feel fairly safe expressing opinions, where we recognize each others' talents, and try to help each other grow. At what cost is this achieved? Well, the tuition is one barrier to entry: nearly seven grand a term in-state, and twice that for out-of-state. The admissions process is another barrier: while we accept a really high percentage of applicants, the process makes application a self-selecting activity so only those already well-suited even apply, and some (many?) of them still don't get an invitation. Without these barriers, we might be overrun by hordes of screaming Yahooligans, y'know? I think Pawazek finally hit on something un-obvious but important here.

RebeccaTremaglio: It is also interesting to me that in some cases, barriers to entry might actually be more of a selling point for the community. In taking SI as an example, the fact that the University of Michigan in general, and the School of Information in particular, have reputations for high standards and academic rigor may actually be viewed as a good thing by members of the community. We all care about the faculty hiring process for many reasons, not the least of which might be that the academic reputation of the school will be influenced, for the good or for the ill, by the quality of the faculty who teach here. As students, we may be gone by the time new instructors arrive, but the ongoing reputation of the school as a whole will determine the value and prestige our degrees are perceived to hold, both within and outside the SI community, into the future. The more challenging the curriculum, the more high-profile the research, the more the reputation of SI precedes us, the better it may for all of us in the long run. This may have been a reason for choosing SI over another program in the first place, or it may be an after-effect, but in this case, the barriers to entry may be viewed by the community as beneficial. I can also imagine online communities where this might be the case; the higher the barrier to entry, the higher the 'quality' of potential contributions by each individual member, and thus, the better and more satisfying affiliation with the community may be for everyone involved.

FrankLester: I agree with the point that barriers to entry have a significant cost in terms of limiting diversity. Powazek leaves the question of those costs undefined in favor of a discussion of what benefits barriers bring. I also agree with RebeccaTremaglio that barriers to entry can enhance the reputation of a community. I think in this connection about the discussion in KimChapter9 of the difference between a community like Yahoo Clubs (now called Yahoo! Groups∞), where (sub)group proliferation, according to Kim, "is 'cheap, fast, and out-of-control,'" and a community like AncientSites (now called AncientWorlds), which has in place a detailed set of procedures for entry for creating new groups, with barriers including rejection of proposed groups that are too close to another group in purpose or identity.