Category Archives: Community and Technology

Interview with Caterina Fake, Part 2

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Caterina small photo

Caterina Fake is co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.

This is the second part of an conversation we had about the nature of community.

Douglas: What do you think are the key ingredients of a high-functioning community?

Caterina: Well, obviously I think that there needs to be a reason for people to get together, and that can be an affiliation or an interest or proximity or some kind of common goal or need.

And I think that there needs to be people that care deeply about the purpose of this community. You see many examples of this not being the case online. Like corporations, for example, will say, “Oh, we are Cottonelle toilet paper.  We wanna form an online community around our toilet paper.”

And it’s a bit ridiculous.  There’s that famous case of L’eggs pantyhose wanting to create an online community.  This was back in the late ‘90s.

Frankly, you can’t imagine the conversation could sustain itself for very long.

They expected a bunch of housewives discussing the merits of different kinds of pantyhose. Well, they did get a passionate community, just not the one they were expecting. It was the cross-dressing and fetish community that latched onto L’eggs.

Douglas: Ha! I love that example, because what they did get is valuable…people using the community as a form of self-definition, It just wasn’t the one L’eggs was looking for. I would have been hilarious to see the brand managers’ face. It’s what happens on the self-organizing Internet I guess.

Caterina: Yes, exactly.

I think that community is – well, you know, my area of interest and study has been online communities.

But, I think that we’ve taken a lot of our cues from offline communities. I do think that there are certain kinds of fundamental principles of human sociality that do not vary between online and offline.

Douglas: So, what are those commonalities between online and offline?

Caterina: I think that every community needs rules of behavior. They may vary depending on the type of community. So, if you have a bunch of monster truck aficionados and their interests lie around monster trucks awesomeness, crushing their opponents, beer drinking and swearing, you have a very different set of worries and rules from say, The Ladies Christian Knitting Society.

But there do need to be rules that enable sociality to function.

This is the kind of thing that’s not allowed or discouraged or, you know, not welcome here, and this is the kind of thing that brings us together.

Community failure

Douglas: What are the characteristics of communities that fail?

Caterina: Well, I think that the main reason that communities fail is through lack of interest, like the pantyhose community.

Or lack of oversight by somebody.

That doesn’t necessarily need to be the software developer themselves, because there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of groups that are being formed on various pieces of social software.

But there needs to be somebody who cares sufficiently well and sufficiently enough to make sure that the trolls and the spammers stay away from the community.

I think that most communities fail due to lack of oversight and lack of care and maintenance and feeding.

Leader as guardian, nurturer and welcomer.

Douglas: That’s interesting.  So, are you saying that every sort of community needs a leader, and part of their role is to be a guardian or parent or nurturer?

Caterina: Yeah. They could also be the role of party host, where they introduce people that don’t know each other to each other and, you know, take the raincoats and offer them drinks and give them food. And they have to simultaneously, especially if this an online example, kick out the haters and make sure that everyone’s having a productive conversation.

Good and bad members

Douglas: I’ve found it interesting that after a while, new community leaders can’t love all their members equally. Whether it’s online or offline, they come to realize that there are good members and that there are bad members and that part of their role is to not only encourage the good members, but they really have to deal with the bad ones.

It’s a really an important responsibility to cull: basically get rid of the flakes and socially toxic members.

Caterina: They can actually destroy a community. For example, I belonged to a flourishing book club, and everybody was very engaged and enjoyed the group.  It was a great book group.

And at one point, somebody had invited a friend of theirs to join, and this person became this sort of obnoxious know-it-all. He started jumping in when other people were talking and correcting them and basically just being very offensive.

And within two meetings, the book club, which had flourished for two years previously, within two meetings of the introduction of this guy, who nobody stepped forward to get rid of – completely disbanded.

It was tragic because nobody had the cojones to say, “Thank you.  Please don’t come again.”

Douglas: Communities can be fragile things, and if people are breaking the rules, new community leaders have to learn very quickly that you have to be tough to be kind and get rid of those people.

Caterina: Yeah, yeah.

The future of community

Douglas: If you were to imagine the world in five years, what would community platforms look like, and how are they likely to be used?

Caterina: You know, I do think that the world kind of goes between promiscuous connection and expansion and then a kind of social contraction.

And I think that over the past several years, and even the past 10, 15 years, we have been socially expansive. Now there’s a general trend towards realizing that all of this promiscuous friending did not actually increase our sense of connection to other people and that we should actually spend more time concentrating on the small number of people with whom they have actual relationships.

Douglas: Is this something you kind of get a feeling about, or have you seen some data about this?

Caterina: One of my friends is a researcher on this topic, Linda Stone and her research has shown that now people are having fewer more meaningful connections.

Douglas: Interesting.  Is that within online community, or also offline?

Caterina: I do think that these things are pretty standard over time.  You have the Dunbar number, which is 150 people I think, that you can really only know reasonably well. You have your basic family unit, like 8 to 12 people that you keep in touch with on a constant basis in the course of, you know, a month. And these have seemed to be pretty standard in all kinds of human interactions over a period of time

Is community making a comeback?

Douglas: Part of the thesis of The Glue Project is that we’ve gone through several decades of the decline of community, whether it’s unions, social associations or whatever else. And it’s happened for all kinds of reasons, like sprawl, commuting, relocating, the culture of fear of strangers, whatever.

Caterina: Like the Robert Putnam Bowling Alone kind of thing.

Douglas: Yes, exactly. The thesis is that we are rediscovering the power of community. In a way, sites like Flickr and hunch and Facebook are introducing people back to both the fun and essentialness of association.

Is this something that you think is true from your own experience?

Big influence

Caterina: I do.

One of the driving forces of my life is that I was a miserable and lonely teenager growing up in Reagan-era suburbia and felt very isolated from likeminded people and friends and places that people could group.

And, you know, we would kind of get into our car and we would drive to our grocery store and have anonymous interactions with checkout cashiers and never actually speak to another human being for weeks at a time.

I found this to be just a horribly alienating experience. And I loved it when I went away when I was a teenager to a boarding school in Connecticut where everybody was living on campus in the same tiny little dorm rooms.  We were like rabbits piled on top of each other, and it was just this great Petri dish of human interaction. It was a thing that I had craved as a lonely preteen, you know, like preteen eccentric in a very homogenized community.

Douglas: And you said that was a big influence on what happened later?

Caterina: Yes. It was one of the driving forces of my life. I wanted to find context in which meaningful connections could take place.

Douglas: Suburbia is increasingly being criticized as a place that, although created with the best intentions, has actually driven community out. There’s no center, no locus, no equivalent of the forum, which enables accidental and purposeful interactions.

Caterina: Yeah, I remember some friends of mine were visiting from England, and they were in Santa Clara in California for a conference, which is like a big sprawly kind of town in Silicon Valley.  And it was nighttime, and my friend, Fiona, said, “Okay, we’re gonna go to the center and go out and have a drink and walk around and see people,” And then, she drove around for a good two hours.  She said, “There’s no center. Where do I go?”

Douglas: It is truly baffling to Europeans, actually.  That’s why they gravitate to New York and San Francisco and Boston, because they’re recognizable as communities.

Caterina: Yeah, exactly, exactly.  You know, I think that one of the things that’s happened is that, things like the suburban mega-churches become the center of community, and the schools become the center of community.

I mean, you know, the human will to form community is unquenchable. And so, even in suburbia people are very social. It’s just that it’s not nearly as easy to encounter people on the street as you would in a large city where you know your grocer and you are given the opportunity to kind of run into and see other people on an almost constant basis.

Enabling interaction=stickiness

Douglas: Here’s a more personal question. What’s the most useful or satisfying community you’ve ever belonged to, and why?

Caterina: Oh, that’s a really good question. I do think that some of the most, wonderful and gratifying communities were, as I mentioned earlier, boarding school and college. And I think that the reason that those were such gratifying and wonderful experiences was that there were so many people together.  We all had the common interest that we were all getting an education together.  We were, you know, young, open to new ideas.  We were present.

We were in the kind of the phase of maximal sociality that you go through in your life, which is when, between the ages of, I don’t know, I guess about 12 or 13 through the age of, like your 30s when you’re in your peak social phase of your life.

That period of time was truly a wonderful time. You had everybody living in close proximity to each other and all kinds of different people from different parts of the country and different parts of the world I was meeting for the first time.  All of those things, I think, conspired to make it a very gratifying kind of community experience.

Community is Protection

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In my conversation with Linda Stone, she brought up an interesting exchange she had had with a younger woman. It was about how two generations derived a sense of protection from two different sources. Linda paraphrased the young woman’s view this way:

“Protection to my baby boomer parents and protection to me are completely different things. For my parents they feel protected when they have paid off their house. They feel protected when they have money in their 401k. For me, I feel protected when I have a rich social network. I just left a high paying job and I’ve taken a month and a half to be with my parents and I know that even in this economic downturn I’m going to be ok, because I have this rich authentic network of online and offline connections. People are willing to help me, I’m willing to help them.”

Community is there to catch you if you fall.

There are some interesting implications here:

1. The daughter’s view about community is older and more in tune with the human condition than her parents’.

Community as a source of protection goes back to our species’ dependence on it to survive attacks from predators. Even nowadays, the ancient wiring still works. You are more likely to be protected from the dire effects of an acute medical condition (like a heart attack) if you have a supportive social network. You heal faster and avoid death to a significantly greater degree than if you you’re not part of a community with strong social ties. And the recent science of Happiness is showing that there is a strong relationship between community, happiness and longevity.

2. Successful communities provide protection when their members are under threat.

The cults and cult-like communities I researched tended to marshal significant resources to support their own when needed.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons) has a veritable care-machine that fires up when you’re ill or lose your job. Peg Fugal, a convert I spoke to in Utah, describes how it works:

“If you’re not in Church on Sunday, your home teacher is going to notice, your     visiting teacher is going to notice, the bishop is going to notice, and somebody’s going to call you, and somebody’s going to visit with you.

And if they discover you’re sick, they’re going to bring meals in. And if they discover your marriage is in trouble, they’re going to find you a counselor. And if they discover you’re out of a job, they’re going to refer the church employment specialist to you, and get you a job. And if they discover you’re out of groceries, they’re going to write you a welfare slip to go to the Bishop’s storehouse to get groceries…There isn’t a Mormon on the planet on [Government] welfare.”

Christianity may never have made it out of minor-cult status if it hadn’t been for how the community dealt with two devastating plagues that struck the Roman world in 165 AD and 251 AD. Unlike the rest of the population who’s habit in the face of plague was to literally run for the hills and leave the infected behind, the early Christians stayed in the cities and applied their ideology of care.

According to Rodney Stark in his book The Rise of Christianity, modern experts estimate that conscientious nursing care could have cut mortality rates two thirds or more: “love and charity had…been translated into the norms of social service and community solidarity. When disaster struck, Christians were better able to cope and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival.” Before the first plague, Stark estimates the Christian population to have been circa 0.4% of the total. Post-plague it had bounced to one Christian to four pagans.

Incidentally, this had a very interesting multiplier effect. Higher rates of survival increased the ratio of believers to non-believers. This in turn increased the number of interactions between Christians and non-Christians. Increased rates of contact between the two are highly likely to have increased the rates of conversion (see the ‘rubbing together’ posts on this blog for the power of frequent social interaction in creating social glue).

This, plus other factors, contributed significantly to the religion’s penetration of the Roman culture to the point that, sociologists estimate, it represented 50% of the population by 300 AD. Its status as State Religion conferred by Constantine The Great was more likely a result of political wisdom than a vision from God, as Christian mythology claims

3. Boomers’ reliance on personal resources (money) as a source of protection is yet another symptom of the me-generation’s posture of self-reliance vs. group-support.

We’ve (I’m one too) dominated the culture’s attitude to community for several decades. It’s not exactly one of contempt, but it’s been a ‘nice if you can get it…but it’s not that important at the end of the day, because I’m the source of my own happiness.”

I, and many of my friends reflect a general trend amongst our generation to now seek a greater sense of place and connection. We have a profound sense of dissatisfaction with what our furious pursuit of careers and personal satisfaction has delivered, and are now expressing more desire to be involved in neighborhoods, spend more time with our family, put down roots, and stop moving so fast.

4.   The daughter’s use of technology as a builder of protective social networks has interesting implications for her and subsequent generations’ product demands. What could Facebook, Meetup and LinkedIn develop to really lean into these generations’ needs for social network support functionality?

Community is higher than food and shelter on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But clearly it’s a fundamental need, and one that’s primal in its relationship to protection and survival.

For Linda Stone’s full interesting analysis on Boomer’s and Millenial’s differences in attitudes to community, check out her post on her new site.

Interview with Caterina Fake

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Caterina Fake is co-founder of Flickr and Hunch. The latter is a decision-making tool that uses the collective intelligence of its members. It launched in June this year.

I first met Caterina at her beautiful house in San Francisco where she had invited Scott Heiferman (CEO and Co-Founder of Meetup) and myself for tea. I have a lot to thank her for because she was indirectly responsible for my ending up at Meetup. She had read my book about cults and recommended it to Scott. And that ultimately led to an excellent chat over tea and a game of Wii tennis on the way to my first Meetup Board meeting.

This is the first of two parts of the conversation I had with Caterina this month.

HunchLogo w divot

Is Hunch about community?

Douglas: How would you say community works on Hunch?

Caterina: So, Hunch is an interesting thing, because I would say that Hunch is not a true community website or product, but it’s a collective knowledge system, and what people are doing on Hunch is creating decision trees.

And it operates in a similar way to Wikipedia, where people will contribute about a topic that they know something about.  So, for example, if I’ve spent some time doing research on which hotels to stay in Los Angeles, I can contribute to that topic.  And so Hunch is a different kind of social software.

People are not necessarily going there to interact with one another or to make connections or talk with one another. It’s more of a place where people can share their knowledge with one another.  It’s a kind of a culture of generosity and a way of showing your expertise on a certain topic.

Douglas: So it’s a crowd, not a community.

Caterina: Yes, that’s true. I would say that’s accurate, yes.

Role of Creator.

Douglas: How involved in the community should the creators of social platforms be? Like any community creator, should they be in there interacting and nurturing it, or just let whatever emerges, emerge?

Caterina: I think one of the things that’s very important when you’re building an online community is for the creators of the community, the company in this case, to be very present and interact directly with the people that are contributing to the system.

On Hunch we have a very strong presence. We’re all interacting directly with, and commenting on, responding to and basically helping coach, encourage and reward and cultivate the community that exists there.

Douglas: And is that something that you think is more important when the community starts and you can pull back later, or it’s something that’s continuously required?

Caterina: It’s very important at the beginning, because you’re establishing what the rules and expectations and parameters of this particular community are.

If you’re a monster truck community and swearing and trash-talking is part of the game, then you establish that at the outset.

Douglas: Right.  So that’s important for the platform builders, like when you start a Hunch or a Flickr. But it’s also important for people who create their own communities on those platforms isn’t it?

Every community needs to establish norms of behavior and rules of the road.

Caterina: Yes, and I find that if you model that behavior early on in the process that it carries through.

I call the founder of an online community the “Abraham.” You know, Abraham begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so The Abrahams of the community are generally the founders of the company or the person who first creates the social software and whatever their wishes and nature tend to follow through organization-wide.

Douglas: That’s something that’s a lot of community leaders that I’ve interviewed also say, whether they’re Meetup Organizers or Ning Network Creators. Inevitably the character of the community is a reflection of the character of the leader. And that’s OK.

Hunch’s potential for community

Douglas: One of interesting things about Hunch is that you’re aggregating huge amounts of rich data about what people have in common.

The dictionary definition of a community is a group of people who hold things in common, whether it’s monster trucks or beliefs in a particular god.

You’re collecting commonalities. So the overt purpose for Hunch is to enable decision-making, but you’re also sitting on a huge amount of data that would be an incredible platform for people to start creating communities on the basis of commonalities.

Caterina: I agree, and I do think that there is untapped social potential that we’ve got in Hunch that will reveal itself over time.  We’re in the very first phase.  We only launched three or four months ago, and so we are just on the verge of being able to see likeminded people emerge, people who share your aesthetic, or politics, or your interest in bird watching etcetera.

And so, there’s an emergent community that’s latent and unexpressed. But there’s definitely that kind of potential in the future.

Douglas: And is that something you want to do?  If you look two years ahead, will Hunch be enabling those kinds of connections so that people can form communities?

Caterina: That is TBD.  It’s not clear that people need to connect with each other directly. For example, say you’re somewhere in a small town in Michigan and you wanted to know where someone like you would have dinner. You don’t necessarily need to know the person who is making the recommendation.  You just need to know that you have tastes in common and therefore they would make a good recommendation for you.

Douglas: So you’re going to wait and see whether that’s a direction Hunch will take?

Caterina: Whether or not there’s an opportunity for sociality, that remains to be seen.  That said, there’s certainly things that Hunch could potentially catalyze. For the special snowflakes of the world to find one another!

Strategic Direction

Douglas: Do you think if you started to enable people to start forming groups, would that be a strategic distraction from the main purpose of Hunch, which is to enable decision-making?

Caterina: Yeah, when you’re building software, you have to constantly return to what are your founding principles, and whether we are we giving people the thing that we think that they most want.

That certainly can change.  You can discover things in the course of building software that you had not thought people wanted, but it turns out that they do.

Douglas: As a user experience of one, I found Hunch enormous fun. It’s not only that the questions are fun but it seems to be getting to know me in quite a profound way. I found myself thinking “I never really knew that about myself.  It’s forcing me to think about who I am and what I believe and what I like.”

I don’t know of any other platform that does it quite the same way, that’s capturing so much – that knows me so well and clearly knows other people as well, and identifies similarities.

It’s like a dating site that’s done well, richly profiling people like you on the basis of personality traits and interests. I want to get to know those other people! Especially when I can find them when I hit a tab called ‘Community’!

Caterina: Yeah.  I mean, I do think that we are still just scratching the surface of the possibilities that we’ve got for this particular kind of software.  And we may very well find that its use-case par excellence is in connecting other people to each other.

Douglas: Right.

Caterina: So, this is all – it’s all very early stage, and that’s why I enjoy being an entrepreneur, because you have no idea what’s down the road, and that’s what makes every day exciting.