Mark Pincus' Blog

essembly.com - a political social network

i've been playing with essembly for the past day. it's the coolest political web site i've seen (because it's about interacting over informing) but it stops short of enabling the kind of grass roots organizing i've been hoping and searching for.  [if you want to try it, email me and i'll invite you on.]

it seems like the founders are trying to keep it stealth for now as they have not responded to several emails from me (or they just dont want to talk to me.)

what's cool about it is the simple way it lets users create their own 'resolves' - kind of your own little survey or policy proposal that goes out to everyone to vote on. it's fun to watch the action in votes and comments.

also cool but not used yet are the groups functions which enable candidates, coalitions and issue campaigns to organize, set their platforms and recruit.

where it falls short for me...first, it appears to be for profit which is fine, but may drive the wrong incentives. which leads to my second issue, we lack any leadership on any front. everyone is so neutral that nothing changes. we need a web movement to reform the system (i've blogged about my hopes to create an eparty). a neutral site will devolve into a message board where people are forever fragmented.

what we need is a site that can help facilitate organization and collective voice. it should gently point out our similarities on many issues rather than essembly's simplistic (but fun) approach of showing your % correlation with another person on issues. while that's cute, i'm looking for a site that can promote my overlaps with seemingly disparate people and groups so we can form NEW coalitions that can replace the current power base.

overall, i'm psyched that these kids created essembly and see it as a big step in the right direction of 'radical democracy' and hope that they/we can take it further towards enabling real action and not just real interaction.

'help the community' vs. 'help myself' - how to motivate peer production?

fred wilson writes about amazon's new HITs service which allows companies to pay people to provide useful data and content...it brings up the interesting question of which incentive a community driven service is appealing to 'help the communty' or 'help myself'.

According to Amazon, a HIT is a Human Intelligent Task, ie something that humans do better than computers.  Like identifying photos or filling out captchas.

Amazon has built a service called Mechanical Turk, or mturk.com, that is like eBay for HITs.

If you need a human to do something, you send a HIT request (via the mturk API) to Amazon.

The HIT is displayed to the masses, who then complete them, and get paid for doing so.

This is an attempt to automate peer production and add a payment system on top of it.

i'm very skeptical even though it's so cool to see. as fred points out, community contributed content relies on personal incentives to drive good results. in some cases, this is entirely self interest, and that usually works best - ebay and craigslist. in a few cases there seems to be a more 'help the community' ethos which can work like delicious.

at tribe, we launched a 'pay it forward' program a year ago. the idea, which i was really excited about, was that a lister could name a bounty to be paid to anyone who helped them get a transaction done. we experimented with jobs which already have examples of bounties. at the time, i hoped there could one day be a marketplace with attention driven by individuals forwarding listings to friends they knew were in the market for an apartment, job or car.

our experiment failed. we found that the number of forwards went up by 4x but the number of job applications did not. many tribe users told me they would forward a job to a friend whenever they saw one that might fit to help them out and that a bounty would not make them think of new friends or more likely to send to an existing one. in other words, they said this is something they do out of
'help the community' and not 'help myself'.

my belief is that there is little to no crossover. i have also learned how hard it is to change consumer behavior. if you're trying to build a peer produced system seems that you have to leverage existing behaviors driven by one of these two incentives and never bet on them changing. amazon's new services will only work if they can tap into people's 'help myself' incentive and i seriously doubt the dollar incentive will ever work. jobs was the highest bounty incentive we could find at as much as $5k and it failed.

i know there are also a number of startups pursuing this type of system specifically in jobs. i doubt this approach will work but will watch with great interest. maybe it's a good idea that was poorly implemented by me, which would not be the first or last time that happened!

Community vs. the Corporation

jeremy zawodny had a great post covering a piece by robert young on the dilemma and internal battle faced inside companies like yahoo in deciding how far to go in handing control over to their communities...

I've got one foot inside the company and the other firmly planted in the community. The two are often at odds and, more often than not, I side with the community.

This makes some people at Yahoo very unhappy, but I really believe that it's in the best interest of Yahoo. I'm not doing it just to be a pain in the ass. Some people are really good at running a business. I like to think that I do a decent job of representing community interests when I try to do so. And making sure the community is heard loud and clear inside the company walls helps keep us honest. That's why I say many of the things you read here.

The two camps need to better understand each other.... somehow.

The transition from the old way to the new is not easy, but we're making real progress. Some groups are getting their heads around it faster than others. Having the Flickr folks in the Yahoo family helps. Flickr is all about community. The same goes for Chad, Danah, Alex, and many of the others who've joined Yahoo this year, either through acquisition or relentless pursuit of them. The more community-minded folks we hire, acquire, and breed, the better off we are in this brave new world. There will be more before this year is over.

and robert young writes...

It won’t be the corporation that locks its customers into a walled garden any more; instead, it will be the people themselves who create their own high switching costs. For instance, if you are an eBay seller, your switching cost is not so much the relationship you’ve created with eBay itself and the store you set up, it’s the reputation and trust you spent years building with fellow members of the community. Similarly, if you are a member of MySpace, it’s not the web-page and blog you spent time constructing, it’s your social network of cyber-friends you’ve cultivated and accumulated over time.

At the end, the lesson is one of a paradox. As the power shifts increasingly towards community, the corporation loses its grip on the traditional means of control. Yet, by letting go of control, the corporation creates an environment where the community willingly creates its own switching costs. Such changing market behavior, which is structural and permanent for any industry being usurped by the Internet, must be met with a corresponding shift in corporate mindset. Otherwise, a “generation gap” will exist between the members of management themselves (old vs. new media), as well as the company and its market. In my view, if there is one company that seems to grok such dynamics better than anyone, and is in the process of executing superbly against these new set of challenges, it’s Yahoo!

my response...

i totally agree with this concept. this has been an issue at tribe since its founding. i would love to start a community site where the community has a much bigger role in deciding its fate. i do believe this is part of the brilliance of craigslist. craig is fanatical about listenting to the community both so he doesnt fuck up and so they trust they are partially in control. what's hard is that often a small part of the community is most vocal while the silent majority is too busy to bother. tribe made some big mistakes over the past couple of years by focusing at times more on business model than user love. the lesson from web 1.0 was that user love alone didnt make successful companies. in the first chapter of web 2.0 companies like myspace seem to be proving the opposite as that company has had little success in getting high ad rates or monetization per member, but such massive success on uniques and page views it doesnt seem to matter.