2007 6
User generated content, user generated problems
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
Last night I was having dinner with my friend Lars Hinrichs of Xing but the dinner was soured by the fact that somebody had posted antisemitic remarks in Xing and the press was accusing Xing´s management of being antisemitic. Other than the fact that as a buddy of Lars and being Jewish myself I can say that Lars is clearly not an antisemite I think that as Youtube and many others are seeing, “user generated content” also implies “user generated problems”. Will the traditional press ever understand that web 2.0 web sites cannot hire armies of people to police their own user generated content web sites? The only way user generated web sites can be managed is flagging offensive content. It is only then that web sites responsibility begins. And indeed if Xing had failed to remove those remarks it would be at fault. But they reacted immediately. And that is the only way the web 2.0 can truly function.
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Nico on June 6, 2007 ·
the traditional press will refuse to acknowledge this fact, because then they would miss the opportunity to create great headlines about problems regarding user-generated content.
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Henrik Ahlen on June 6, 2007 ·
Sadly, journalists are always looking for scandals and someone to blame personally.
I totally aggree with you that user flagging is the only way of dealing with offensive content now. I think all these communities need to encourage their members by flagging more, create incentives for this.
There is also a need to develop semi-automated ways of detecting offensive writings.
Speaking of XING however, I am sorry to see that it is deteriorating so much here in Sweden. Since there is no longer any local physical meetings and thre seems to be no Swedish party that manages and encourages Swedish users to be active online either. The rumor is that XING is focusing totally onthe Chines market.
It seems that online business communities are have lost their importance, just when they are needed more than ever I think.