My Google+ community: I got it wrong
In December 2012, coinciding with the launch of Google+ Communities, and at the invitation of the company, I decided to set up a community called Tech News Analysis. The idea was to develop a place to talk about what was going on in the world of technology, that would be useful for me, and useful to others as an aggregator of different source material, something along the lines of two minds are better than one. I won’t deny that I had my doubts about the subject, as well as my ability to act as a moderator, given the constraints on my time, but it seemed like an interesting experiment, and one worth undertaking. Eighteen months later, and with more that 12,000 members, it seems clear that the experiment was a failure, and I am about to shut it down.
What has been the main problem with this community? In one word, spam. Huge numbers of users looking to attract others to their pages bombarded the site with their publications, despite warnings that this would not be tolerated.
In the end, I found myself tasked with policing the site, and having to watch as people uploaded articles from a single source or sent the same news to a huge number of sites, until this kind of junk was far outnumbering genuine material. Added to this, there was little discussion on the site, which led me to the conclusion that the community was never going to work.
I’m not sure if this a general problem, or one related to Google+. My impression is that most Google+ communities work. The experiments that I have carried out with closed groups as part of my teaching activities at IE Business School have largely been successful. The problem lies elsewhere. The communities that work, from what I have seen, are about very specific topics, and are mainly a forum for discussion, and therefore of not much interest to spammers. Google+ still seems a reasonably useful tool in itself: some discussions about my entries have a long life and attract a considerable number of people, and the network has shown itself over time to be a major source of referrals to my page, even though, logically, growth has slowed down over the months.
In any event, this has proved a learning experience, and I have found the discussions on the issue, participation, limits, control, and associated problems extremely interesting. Does anybody have any opinions on the matter?
Below is my farewell message, published on a Google+ community, and that will probably disappear in a couple of days.
In November 2012, I launched this community on Google+ as part of an experiment suggested by Google.
This was one of the first Spanish-language communities, and set up before creating them became widespread, an opportunity for which I would like to thank the company, with whom I maintain a fantastic relationship, and which has seen me dish out praise and criticism in equal measure.
The page was set up to discuss issues related to technology, a way of keeping ourselves informed about a fast-moving subject, and with the premise that there would be no spam, no sending news items written by the authors. I have obeyed this rule to the letter: the only time that articles from my pages have appeared on the community has been when others sent them.
After almost a year putting this to the test, I have to admit that I was wrong. The majority of contributions to this community of around 12,000 people are spam, mass mailings by irresponsible people who send their articles to this and many other communities, clearly ignoring Google’s own guidelines. They are very easy to identify: a simple click on the author’s profile shows that he or she sends the same news item out all the time, and in general so as to provide a link with the host publication.
I will not tolerate this kind of spam, but trying to eliminate it from the site would have become a full time job. I tried recruiting other regular users of the site who weren’t spammers themselves, but they have chosen not to take an active role as moderators.
So, after 18 months’ trial and error, and after expelling or blocking hundreds of people from the site, I think the time has come to put an end to the experiment. Others, in the context of closed groups within the IE Business School have worked extremely well, much better than other systems I have used. The problem isn’t to do with Google+, but my naivety in thinking that as a community we would be able to deal with spamming. This was my mistake, if dealing with this problem on sites such as Menéame requires an active, involved community, then it was wishful thinking to imagine a new site would be able to overcome this in short order. Sadly, I came to this realization too late to do anything about it.
After several months during which I grew tired of monitoring the site, and after watching the spam pile up, I have decided that the simplest thing is to put it out of its misery. I have little spare time, and even less to devote to this site. If anybody has any objections, or any suggestions, please make them now, or, as they say at weddings, forever hold your peace :-)
(En español, aquí)
