Tribes For Forums
September 4th, 2011
The idea of Tribes For Forums was devised minutes before the start of LeedsHack 2011 by Toby and myself, although it’s origins are much older. Through our involvement of several large forums (including BRFCS) and some very unique one (such as Mono) we’d spent many hours discussing how to address some of the long term problems facing online forums.
One analogy always made with forums is the pub, but one part that never fits the analogy is in a pub situation, as the size of the group chatting grows, it eventually splinters into subgroups, often aligned upon common interests or demographics, so each conversation is kept between a manageable size of participants. However on a forum, even though these groups can be artificially created (breaking discussions down by subject for example) the problem is the users with sufficient time can still join in (and even dominate) every conversation. Imagine in the pub situation if the “pub bore” (see the Fast Show’s Billy Bleech for what I mean ) could be involved with every single conversation, all at once, he’d love it, everyone else would hate it.
We’d spent ages thinking of ways of filtering out “the pub bore”, we discussed reputation indexes (something I explored in some detail at an excellent Knight-Mozilla event aimed at bringing technologists and journalists together) and user feedback systems (such as slashdot’s meta moderation and karma systems) but none of them seem to actually seemed to achieve what we were after.
Why? We realised that one man’s pub bore is another man’s oracle. A combination of many months of watching large groups interact socialy (both at football events and local geek events) along with a chance re-reading of Anthropologist Desmond Morris’ fantastic late 70s book The Soccer Tribe
Actually, that’s not strictly true, but small semi-exclusive groups are the natural result of conversation as the number of participants grows. Fighting against this means that only the most vocal still have a voice.
So, for our entry at LeedsHack 2011, we set about working out how to nurture and manage these groups, deciding how to group people together whilst keeping out people the group may not want and given the conditions of LeedHack (you have 24hr to go from idea to competed code) we had to do it quickly. Thankfully BRFCS had been running a simple feedback system where users could vote up or vote down posts, for a long time, which gave us a great dataset to play with.
With the help of Dave “Stig” Priestly we took apart the data to see if we seeded groups with a few key members who shared similar views could we devise an algorithm that would allow like minded people (i.e. people who had similar views on the posts they had voted up and down, as well as the group’s view of their own posts) and amazingly in just a few hours, we did and it worked really really well. In our 24hrs at LeedsHack, the three of us came up with a hook for the popular IP.Board forum software that allowed the admin to create “Tribes”, seed them with a few key members, then allow people to check which Tribes they can join and join them up if they want to.
The idea is now to set up a small number of these Tribes on BRFCS and see how it goes.
It’s still early days and we’re still collecting data, but it does seem we’ve come up with a system that could revolutionise how internet forums work, only time will tell.
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