transient connection building
Tag: cairns
In a space with transient members, how can we encourage connection between those members and a sense of community? If this space is online, can we do this while still maintaining user privacy?
Looking up “humanizing online”, “humanizing people online”, “humanizing anonymous” etc. brings up a ton of papers on online classrooms, which is somewhat helpful, but these communities aren’t extremely transient, nor do they have to worry about privacy to the same extent.
Looking up “online community building” or “forum community building” is similar. Most of those papers discuss fostering bonds between existing communities and trying to limit their “transientness”.
Funnily enough, the best avenue for research I’ve seen so far is about reducing online toxicity, since reducing toxicity is all about creating connections between people. In a poetic twist however, the vast majority of these articles push a decrease in anonymity as the best way to decrease toxicity. Things like “add webcams and eye contact, add profile pictures and user names” (well ok, the thing about pictures and usernames isn’t directly from a paper, but it’s an educated guess. I tried looking up papers but didn’t find anything solid.)
Based on the little research I’ve done here, I wonder if “faking” humanization is a viable path. What if other users had profile pictures autogenerated from this person does not exist and names similarly autogenerated.
The obvious problem with this approach is ethics.
- Users wouldn’t be harmed in thinking that they are dealing with other humans, since it is the truth (that they are interacting with other humans.) The deception is not that other humans exist, it’s the names and pictures.
- until of course you start attaching these profile pictures to bots… Don’t do that.
- Would there be harm in assuming that the other users look like that or have those names.
- It may be a bit odd if a user sees everyone else with a name / profile when they never uploaded one. (A particularly paranoid user may even assume we scraped it somehow.)
- Depending on the content of these communities, there may be harm in associating a picture / name with content not actually generated with someone like that.
Autogenerating pictures / names is generically applicable, but there may be more specific solutions based on the exact nature of the platform.
