What we can learn from early online platforms

Berkman Klein event explores the early years of online platforms, the state of current platforms, and the future

“Today’s platforms were inspired by the many that preceded them, but along the way, we started to go astray. How can we make sense of where we are today? What can we understand about the decisions that were made and the structures we had in place? And most importantly, how can the builders of new platforms that also intend to bring the world closer together, give everyone the power to create or organize the world’s information, do it better?”

BKC fellow Jad Esber posed these overarching questions at the start of a Berkman Klein Center event that looked back on online platforms over the past 30 years. Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, David Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, and Nancy Baym, Sr. Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research, joined Esber to reflect on early platforms, the state of newer platforms today, and what they could look like in the future. Their conversation covered topics including subcultures, content moderation, and the evolution of technology.

Fake and Bohnett are themselves founders of early popular platforms, and early in the discussion, the panelists highlighted the significance of founders’ values shaping the platforms, and how that trend continues today.

“You can do a lot to influence and change and manage how a community grows and develops from the outset,” Fake said. “And so much of it is based on the personalities of the founders: what they value, what they don’t value, how they design the software,” she said, also pointing out the important role of business models.

“I paid a lot of particular attention to the values of building communities of interest,” Bohnett added, highlighting that founders’ values also play a critical role in the inclusiveness of platforms. “Do the founders and the early settlers or participants in these communities value inclusiveness and diversity through their actions?” he asked. “That’s what helps foster it.”

Baym, in turn, emphasized that values may be harmful in the long run. “They’re essential but I think that we see platforms over and over kind of lose their way when it becomes about the founder’s values,” she said. “And one of the ways I think that they go really wrong is that early on their users who are different from the founders who were running into real problems with those platforms and the users are going, ‘hello, there’s this really bad thing happening to me here.’ And the founders for whatever reasons are not fully able to absorb what they’re hearing about the dangers their platforms are posing. And I don’t mean to underestimate the technical and human labor demands of trying to deal with all of that adequately. They’re very, very hard problems.”

The discussants also talked about the shift from free services that run on users’ data towards fee-based platforms and how these business models may shape or inform user behavior and investment in the online communities.

“I do think that people are evolving into a kind of a paid model in reaction to a lot of the exploitation that they’ve suffered under for a long time. And as a result of that, I think, these are obviously very positive trends,” she said, citing Patreon and Substack as examples. “I do think Internet business models swing back and forth between the paid and the free and it’s a pendulum swing that many of us, I think that work in kind of online social systems actually welcome to a great degree. So, I do think that the behaviors are different on platforms that you pay for for all of the reasons David and Nancy have already kind of explained.”

But the pay-to-play model is not an option for everyone, Baym noted. “I think the trick with platforms you have to pay for, of course, is that we want people who don’t have excess income to be able to participate in online communities,” she said. “So we have to think through how do you enable that so that people in poverty are not getting a third rate internet while the rich folks get the really good community, which of course exacerbates wealth and equity.”

A podcast version of the event is available here. For more BKC events, visit our website and sign up for our events newsletter.