Sal Humphries was having trouble sending this to the list, so sent it to me. With his permission I pass it on to the list.

Nancy Baym wrote:

...

What I find interesting, and frankly rather upsetting, and cannot yet fully articulate (help fellow listers!) is that we (speaking here as a user) get invested in these sites. We use them to build identities, to create connections, to network, for whatever purposes. We spend a lot of time there and we get invested through time, social connections, and affect. And then the developers get a new idea and suddenly we all have to live with it or leave. To use the front lawn metaphor, it's as though they decide that actually the streets shouldn't be on a grid pattern, they should all be cul-de-sacs and if you didn't want to live on a cul-de-sac, well, move to a new town. Who were you to think you had any say in city planning?

As these sites become more and more integral to everyday experience, it seems the developers have more and more of an obligation to understand and their users, and to incorporate their concerns into the design before making big changes, and to give people options for managing problematic elements of the changes they decide to make anyhow (in the facebook case, turning off the minifeed for your own profile).

There seems to be a real difference between the ethical and practical obligations to users in these "web2" sites and the way that businesses have related to their customers in the past. As I say, this is not something I've worked through, but design and development, customer service, public relations, and community relations all seem to merge in new ways.

Does anyone have more thought-through ways to think about what I'm trying to get at here?

I think you raise some very interesting points about the ways we lose control (to some extent) of our communities and identities through conducting parts of our social life in proprietary spaces. I've been thinking about this in relation to mulitplayer online games and the relations between publishers and players. Most Terms of Service agreements used by social softwares (including MMOGs) are one-sided contracts which leave users with little recourse to administrative justice should things go wrong. For instance if a player is banned by the customer service team in a game, there is often no mechanism of appeal, no system of accountability in place which can constrain the publisher. And players of these games, like the users you mention above, invest thousands of hours into games, building content for the publishers (which the publishers then usually lay claim to).

The (market-based) argument is that as consumers we are able to constrain the publisher through our 'exit power'. The thought that if they (publishers) push too far, players will trash the game and leave is the thing that will supposedly prevent inequitable treatment of the users they provide the service to. But this argument ignores the high switching costs to the users. Because in social softwares, the affective and time investments are huge. The cost of leaving, to the user, is often too high to contemplate and they will put up with a good deal more than is fair. Exit power may work for consumers, but actually users of games and social softwares are more than consumers - they are very productive and that changes things.

The thing is that currently these service providers achieve their success on the back of content created by their users, but there is no attendant sense of obligation to their users. The irony is that, in the MMOGs at least, players pay to make content for the publishers, (and by content I include the idea that social networks are affective content with a very real economic value to the publisher) who can then screw them every which way, and with impunity. I think this is probably clearest in the case of bannings - the denial of access to a persons own online identity and community, but there are also implications for the ongoing design processes.

I've published a paper canvassing aspects of this which you can find at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00004311/01/4311.pdf

TL Taylor is publishing soon on more design oriented issues, and I think you might find that interesting:

"Beyond Management: Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture," First Monday, forthcoming.

She also published a rippingly good article back in 2002:

"'Whose Game Is This Anyway?'": Negotiating Corporate Ownership in a Virtual World" in F. Mayra (ed.), <http://granum.uta.fi/cgi-bin/book.cgi?6901>Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002.

Hope some of this might be useful in thinking through the issues you raise Sal

Dr Sal Humphreys Post Doctoral Fellow Faculty of Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia Mob. 0414 456 078