Social filtering for online forums

Four filter settings on the left side of the page: you and only you, you and your buddies, you and your buddies and their buddies, or everyone. Set the filter and the forum shows you a different subset of itself, the rest fades away. As far as I know, this is the first forum to use the buddy list as content filter.

Yayhooray relaunched in June 2004 with a new version that uses social filtering to raise signal-to-noise. A short history of online-forum filtering approaches, and notes on what the new Yayhooray does.

A bit of Yayhooray history

Built by skinnyCorp in 2001 as an experiment in online community. Along with o8 (see this cached journal entry), it soaked up some of the users from Dreamless, the ‘design forum’ that reached critical mass and became its own worst enemy at the end of 2000.

Originally it was built to manage itself through a levels system, allowing users to earn administration responsibilities (similar to the implicit moderation systems used by Metafilter). It worked well at a small scale but led to cliques forming around early adopters’ social networks.

The levels system evolved into a points system, allowing anyone to award points to anyone on a limited basis (one per day, one person per week), similar to karma systems at Slashdot and Kuro5hin. This briefly led to multiple-account scams, ending in the ‘point orgy’ where “points were swapped rather than STDs”.

In the end, both systems were abused, subverted and widely discussed, often taking over from normal discussions and swamping the site with controversy. Many regulars left for other places, some seeing closed, invite-only communities like humhum as the only option left for humane, creative discussion.

The new filter

Yayhooray, in this latest version, is dealing with these problems by globally filtering content through a buddy system, rather than explicitly administering the content and user reputations. This applies to the entire site: categorised discussions, blogging interface, links database, buddy lists and search.

Yayhooray's social filter meter, showing four levels: you, your buddies, their buddies, everyone
Yayhooray's social filter meter, showing four levels: you, your buddies, their buddies, everyone

The most obvious feature is the meter on the left-hand side, with four filter settings:

This applies a filter to the entire site, including user lists and search, which took me a little by surprise. The site effectively meshes off into small, interlinked communities of interest, based on individual social networks and collaborative filtering.

In my case, buddies are mostly people I’ve met, talked to, or seen invest time into making things, initiating photographic threads, dealing with social issues, administering creative collaborations, giving good design critique.

Logging in now (using ‘you, your buddies, and their buddies’) I see a small subset of the overall forum, focused on those parts of the discussion. Given that the filter is prominent and usable, it’s also possible to jump out into the chaos of the full site.

There is also a useful, if somewhat harsh, system that censors posts and links based on a list of people you classify as ‘enemies’. Being based on proper XHTML, CSS and DOM technologies means censored posts are easily toggled on and off.

Open questions

On the downside there will likely be confusion and clashes when different groups that don’t mesh with each other, but have completely different experiences of the place, come together in a single thread. There will also be more repetition, or double posts of content, as it gets repeated amongst different groups that are out of sync by virtue of the filters.

To fully appreciate this you need to invest time in it and build up a network of trusted buddies. Yayhooray can be hyperactive and annoying, and it must be difficult for a new user to become engaged. The filters are perhaps most useful for long-time users looking for relief from ‘worst enemy’ problems.

Because it has become an adaptive social platform, and has the potential to be subverted and shaped into many different kinds of system, I’ll reserve judgement for now, and make a new report soon.