TY - CONF T1 - Social Regulation in an Online Game: Uncovering the Problematics of Code T2 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP’10) Y1 - 2010 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Jack Muramatsu A1 - McDonald, David W. KW - code KW - ethnography KW - games KW - online communities KW - police KW - social computing KW - social control KW - social interaction KW - social life KW - social regulation KW - socio-technical design KW - software infrastructure KW - user study KW - virtual communities AB -

More and more interaction is becoming code-based. Indeed, in online worlds, it is all there is. If software is providing a new basis for social interaction, then changing the infrastructure of interaction may necessarily change social interaction in important ways. As such, it is critical to understand the implications of code - we want to know what the use of code means for socio-technical design. In this paper, based on an ethnographic study of an online game, we examine social regulation in an online game world as a case study of socio-technical design using code. We wanted to know how changing interaction based in code conditioned use in our site. We found that code changed social regulation in three specific ways. First, code made some user actions that were socially unwanted to be immediately visible. Second, code could prevent some actions from occurring or punish users immediately. Finally, software was not able to see all action. Some user actions were too nuanced or subtle for code to catch; others were too ambiguous to place into code. Following Agre, we argue i that a "grammar of action" resulting from the use of code limits the kinds of behaviors that can be seen and dealt with. These findings suggest that there is more than just a gap between the social world and technical capabilities. There are new possibilities, tradeoffs, and limitations that must be considered in socio-technical design, and all come simultaneously.

JF - Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP’10) SN - 978-1-4503-0387-3 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Sharing: Strategic User Behavior on Taskcn T2 - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - contests KW - crowdsourcing KW - e-commerce KW - knowledge market KW - learning KW - online communities KW - question-answer sites KW - virtual communities KW - witkey AB -

Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.

In this paper, we examine the behavior of users on one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. On Taskcn, we observed several characteristics in users' activity over time. Most users become inactive after only a few submissions. Others keep attempting tasks. Over time, users tend to select tasks where they are competing against fewer opponents to increase their chances of winning. They will also, perhaps counterproductively, select tasks with higher expected rewards. Yet, on average, they do not increase their chances of winning, and in some categories of tasks, their chances actually decrease. This does not paint the full picture, however, because there is a very small core of successful users who manage not only to win multiple tasks, but to increase their win-to-submission ratio over time. This core group proposes nearly 20% of the winning solutions on the site. The patterns we observe on Taskcn, we believe, hold clues to the future of crowdsourcing and freelance marketplaces, and raise interesting design implications for such sites.

JF - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-60558-169-9 UR - Complete ER -