Category: Uncategorized

Background

Before deciding on r/DataisBeautiful I looked into different communities where data is discussed. I first looked at news outlets such as The Upshot and The Economist and others. But from my initial observations about the discussions, while a number of the comments talked about the visualization, mostly comments went off on a tangent. Also most of these news outlets disable comments or allow them for a limited amount of time. And when they do, they are heavily moderated and toxic to the population who are not part of the group of moderations. Clearly, not a healthy community!

Given that type of moderation and selective harassment that get looked over in those news outlets, I felt it wasn’t a good choice for a “healthy” community. Mainly, what I care about is how people civilly discuss data visualizations and how they interact with them and with each other in a  more focused and healthy community. 

I found three communities that I had to choose from. I filtered them based on where most of the discussion happens and how saturated is the discussion in that community. The first one is VisGuides Figure 1. The idea of this forum is great in which visualization is discussed and criticized to produce guidelines that other members suggest to each other . However, not so much discussion happens there. When sorting the posts by the top ones, the highest one got 3 replies. That is not enough to explore the health and discourse of this community. 

The second community that I considered is vis.social Figure 2, a twitter like community for data analytics and visualization. The problem with this community is members were deviating away from the main goal of the platform. Users are posting just like they are doing on twitter except for a few accounts which were true to the nature of the community. Due to the insufficient data discussions that happened there. I looked into what I perceive as the best community so far to discuss data visualization online. In the few sections I will show why!

r/DataisBeautiful

DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey information Figure 3. According to their definition of the community: it’s “a place to share and discuss visual representation of data: Graphis, charts, maps, etc.”  The community lists many posts that are a composition of a visualization with a title and a description by the author of how it was made and his or her design rationale. In addition to that, users can comment on the main story and reply to each other. The community is for professionals and amateurs, experts and novices. I looked where the action is and it’s in the community itself in addition to “discord” (the chat community associates with it). 

The posting rules of this community are simple. Anyone can post as long as their post contains a data visualization, mention the source data and indicate if it’s their original contribution or not. As for commenting rules the norm is to be polite and avoid any hate speeches. In general, the social norms are standards and rules the are known by the community, enforced socially without legal or law enforcements. It’s how everyone is expected to behave in a community [2, 3]. Some of the healthy rules I will be describing in more detail in the following sections.

Methodology

In order to define the criteria I’m using to determine the health of the community I followed a mixed approach. I participated as a member and as an observer in r/dataisbeautiful.  I used content analysis [6] and participation observation [3]. I wanted to ground my work so I coded the comments that happened on reddit. The first pass helped me identify the general healthy criteria in the community. My second pass was to saturate and confirm my codings. 

Community Healthy Criteria

The main components I was looking at are: how sharing a visualization story triggers discussion, what kind of discussion and community energy from that.

Based on my qualitative analysis this is a list of the criteria of a healthy community that discussed data visualization online:

• A community must have a diverse set of Participants with different perspectives and goals
• A community must be a safe environment for learning and growing
• Community members should have the tendency to reproduce work and science
• Community member should participate in constructive criticism and collective effort to add knowledge
• Community discussions should ad more information to the story (insight, data,)
• Community moderation should be in Moderation

In the following section I will talk about each criteria and give examples from the community of choice r/dataisbeautiful

Diverse set of Participants

The type of users in this community range from experts to novices and amateurs to professionals. For example an expert in hip-hop and a professional writer in the field clearly explained his position and contributed to the discussion from his point of view Figure 4, replying to an audience that is mostly amateur in hiphop but more expert in data analysis and visualization

While some community members are experts in stats, some authors of the visualizations lack stats knowledge, they share a beautiful data story and ask for feedback on both the esthetics and the analysis. This diverse set of community members made it safe to clearly indicate what an author lacks and what kind of discussion or help they look for in relation to the story they have shared. Figure 5 & 6.

Given the nature of the community and the diverse experience and professional levels, a natural healthy behavior emerged in which I have observed in the discussion indicating “wanting to learn”, “how did you do this” ,”what software are you using etc.”. And more importantly, those who asked these questions have received answers. Which leads me to the second healthy point in this community.

Collective effort to Improve (Meta Commentary)

In this community I have observed interesting conversational interactions between authors and audience and among the audience themselves. The audience comment with suggestions, inquiries and feedback (on the visualization or the analysis) in which authors act on and sometimes share newer versions of their stories based on these comments. In addition, members of this community are continuously factchecking the conclusions and data used, leading them to a healthy explorative behavior in which they probe, investigate and inquire about the conclusions, the data and the visualization.

Reading the visualization story alone is not as rich and useful as reading the discussion about it. That collective knowledge is what makes these data stories more appealing and informative.

Tendency to reproduce work and science

Many members expressed in their comments that they would like to build a visualization similar to what the author shared. There were many questions about how, and what in regards to the process. While this could be a sign of a healthy community that wants to learn. It’s also a better sign that the design of the community itself is encouraging that as shown in figure 11.While the instructions and the language are encouraging the affordances are not yet inviting to novice users. And that is a problem I want to be working on in my project for this class.

Moderation in Moderation

Moderation in  the community follows a distributed social moderation [1,5]. In Figure 12 some of the moderators are visualization practitioners and researchers. 

The rules of the community are listed clearly in the home page Figure 13. Some rules are relevant to authors, others were for commenters. The rules highlighted in red exemplify a healthy behavior in the community. My favorite rule is #8 “Posts regarding American politics …are permissible on Thursdays”. These topics tend to be the most toxic “and sometimes boring if you’re not from here”. This limit in the type of topics allows for more diverse and general topics to take place.

Another interesting rule relevant to commenting is that short comments and low effort replies are automatically removed. This allows for richer and more deep discussions to happen.

Also, moderators created another space in which off topic discussions and complaints happen in their very own Discrod community. Figure 14

Moderation style as I observed is in moderation. As long as the general rules are followed, users are free to share their own tools even if they are not publicly available (while open source is recommended) moderators are allowing for more flexible contributions from the community. Figure 15

Avoiding Echo Chambers

The idea of r/dataisbeautiful is to list posts and stories around topics instead of emphasizing on the relationship between community members. In such community, member are introduced to all sort of contexts and ideologies which open up a huge opportunity to engage in conversations with the others, which in a result helps avoid echo chambers. [8]

One feature that encourages such a health behavior is the link right bellow the comment authoring sections that says “View discussions in 12 other communities. Figure 16.

The same data story appears on top and members are presented with the different discussions that happened around the same data story. Each community has a different point of view and different priorities in their conversations. Figure 17

Conclusion: Is this community healthy for all?

When I asked around experts and read online, I found that some people are complaining that r/dataIsBeautiful is becoming more analytical and ugly! As we see in the quotes bellow the commenter recommends r/dataIsUgly cause it’s more realistic and better for learning! I looked into the online discourse around r/dataisbeautiful and found that many people do prefer dataisugly over r/dataisbeautiful. I find this is confusing since most discussions and interactions happen in the r/dataIsBeautiful not Ugly!

Here are some quotes from quora [9] regarding dataisUgly vs dataisBeautiful

I think it’s a nice sentiment, but definitely dominated by amateurs and optimistic college students. I’m sure there’s a few experts on there making beautiful visualizations that tell a compelling story, but most of it is pretty graphics on top of bad analysis and further mutated by ham-fisted science journalism. 

Data Is Ugly seems like a much more realistic representation of my experiences.

—

I’m not a practicing data scientist (just a vanilla scientist who makes plenty of graphs and other visualizations for a living), but I’m pretty torn about /r/dataisbeautiful. I want to like the subreddit, but, while the data collected and presented could be interesting, the visualizations are almost uniformly terrible.

Figure: Both comments came from data scientists

While the number of posts and participants are enough to indicate the popularity of dataisbeautiful over dataisugly. Also the rules are more appealing in the first one. dataisugly doesn’t require that the posts are original contribution. However, dataisbeautiful highly recommends that.

To answer the questions of who this community is healthy for, I would say it’s healthy for everyone. It’s just “boring” and “frustrating” for data scientists since what they care about is the analysis side. While analytics is a very important part of the visualization, focusing on having a beautiful chart and strict analysis makes it an intimidating community that could be less inviting to the diverse set of users it has. And as I have demonstrated above, the experts and pro in stats help the vis savvy and vice versa and that’s a healthy dynamic.

I want to conclude with Figure 17, comparing the top results this month between the two communities. Clearly starting with an ugly chart is not a healthy way to start a conversation as indicated in the number of interactions. It’s ok to feel that your data is beautiful and have someone say it’s ugly and here is why!

References:

[1] Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Mattia Samory, Shagun Jhaver, Hunter Charvat, Amy Bruckman, Cliff Lampe, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert. 2018. The Internet’s Hidden Rules: An Empirical Study of Reddit Norm Violations at Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW (November 2018), 32:1–32:25. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3274301

[2] Robert B. Cialdini and Melanie R. Trost. 1998. Social influence: Social norms, conformity and compliance. Retrieved March 27, 2020 from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Social-influence%3A-Social-norms%2C-conformity-and-Cialdini-Trost/bc4d09459f298901ebb6894652319c9be3c3b8b2

[3] Danny L. Jorgensen. 2015. Participant Observation. In Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. American Cancer Society, 1–15. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0247

[4] Sophie Legros and Beniamino Cislaghi. 2019. Mapping the Social-Norms Literature: An Overview of Reviews. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science (2019). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619866455

[5] Lena Mamykina, Bella Manoim, Manas Mittal, George Hripcsak, and Björn Hartmann. 2011. Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’11), Association for Computing Machinery, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2857–2866. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979366

[6] Kimberly A. Neuendorf. 2016. The Content Analysis Guidebook. SAGE.

[7] Michael Schudson. 2008. Six or seven things news can do for democracy. In Why democracies need an unlovable press, Michael Schudson (ed.). Polity, Cambridge, UK, 11–26. Retrieved March 3, 2020 from http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0903/2008301247-t.html

[8] Ethan Zuckerman. 2013. Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World. The Atlantic. Retrieved March 28, 2020 from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/reddit-a-pre-facebook-community-in-a-post-facebook-world/277583/

[9] (1) What do data scientists think of the Reddit subreddit /r/dataisbeautiful? – Quora. Retrieved March 28, 2020 from https://www.quora.com/What-do-data-scientists-think-of-the-Reddit-subreddit-r-dataisbeautiful

[10] (1) What’s the best way for data scientists to share their work with the public? – Quora. Retrieved March 28, 2020 from https://www.quora.com/What%E2%80%99s-the-best-way-for-data-scientists-to-share-their-work-with-the-public

It’s hard to say that HUPU is a successful online community. As one of the oldest Chinese online sports BBS community. HUPU was founded by Dr. Hang Cheng in Chicago in 2004 which was the year after Yao Ming entered NBA. The original name of HUPU was “hoopChina” which reinforced its function as an online basketball forum. After 16 years of its establishment, HUPU still hasn’t obtained the right to broadcast NBA games. Compared to Tencent Sport’s 26 million users, it only has 5 million users with 12.6% market share.[1]

This is a male community where 89.48% of the users are male under 40[2], In China, people call them “Staight Man” which means an immature man who have little understanding of women and is slightly macho. HUPU is also a warm community. Its user’s loyalty is extremely high, over 40% of users have used it for more than 5 years. [3]“Family” is the core concept of HUPU. people call each other “JR” (Jia-Ren) which means brothers and sisters in Chinese, and the designer also combine the word “JR” with “HUPU” to generate the logo. It has even became a secret code for users to recognize each others in reality. When some JRs have difficulties in their lives, others are always willing to help them out in real life. HUPU is not a perfect community. There are also prejudice, ridicule, jealousy and bragging just like any other communities and are not free from misinformation or disinformation as well. But most JRs are willing to accept these defects and try their best to make the community a better place.

The lecture “Six Essential Pillars of a Healthy Online Community” provides a definition of a healthy online community. It defines a healthy community is:

“A community where the achievement of its core goals and mission is possible; and a place where its members can contribute and fulfill that vision without being harassed, threatened, or abused.”

I partially agree with this definition and I think a healthy online community is a community like a family that gives people a sense of belonging. It is also a community of sincerity and genuineness where people can easily “be themselves” and are encouraged to share their opinions and communicate with others sincerely without interruption of external or internal factors. From this perspective, HUPU can be seen as a healthy community.

The Establishment of HUPU Family

Before the advent of the smartphone era, TV was the only resource for Chinese people to watch NBA games. However, most NBA games were only broadcasted in the morning in China due to different time zones, and the majority of the audiences are students at schools or young professionals in the offices. Therefore how to watch the NBA games became a tricky problem. In this circumstance, HUPU came up with a solution of “NBA text streaming”. The hosts of the live room vividly described the process and scores of the games, meanwhile people can discuss with others on the comment area which also greatly added to the fun of watching NBA games.

HUPU played a significant role in propagating NBA culture after Yao Ming entered NBA. For me, as a user for more than 12 years since middle school, watching NBA games through HUPU’s “NBA text streaming” in classroom constituted my unforgettable youth memory. It even became a “classroom culture” for all the boys, we talked about “Lakers vs Celtics”, “Lebron vs Kobe” and even the sneaker cultures after class. HUPU not only introduced an exotic western world to us Chinese boys but also brought all the NBA fans together as a big family in the early age. In this way, HUPU accumulated the initial large number of loyal male users as the foundation of the dormitory culture.

With the introduction of smartphones in the next decades, the HUPU community became diversified, its topics has gradually extended from basketball, sports to technology, traveling, education and other sectors. The most famous sector is called the “Pedestrian Street” where people sharing their personal stories and opinions of almost everything from campus life to work experiences, from girlfriends to their employers. It has also became the most attractive part of HUPU and gradually formed its unique dormitory culture.

The first generation of JRs like me played a pivotal role in shaping the culture and spirit of the community. Encouraging them to stay active inside the community is the key for a healthy community and its fascinating culture.

The “Pedestrian Street” – Boy’s Dormitory

The “Pedestrian Street” is the most famous sector of HUPU.

With the rapid development of China in the last decade, Chinese young generations are under increasing pressures due to the horrible house price and the peer competition especially in tier 1 big cities like Beijing or Shanghai. It’s not easy for people to make real friends under such situations and they are no longer willing to share their true feelings and opinions with others in real life. In other words, people are always wearing a mask instead of being real. In this case, HUPU provides an excellent platform for like-minded people (They are at least NBA fans, otherwise they would not know this app) to communicate with each other and be themselves. Users are not in their real name, instead they can choose their own names to feel more comfortable. It’s just like a big dormitory for college boys, where people relaxing in their beds, listening to other people’s stories and talking sincerely about their embarrassments, secrets, their favorite basketball players, their final exam scores and the most important thing – their stories with girls.

JRs love beautiful girls like any young boys in the world and it also becomes one of the main topics of their discussion. They even run competitions for their favorite actresses every year to select the final champion after multiple rounds of voting and scoring.

JRs also love to hear others’ embarrassing stories with girls, especially stories about how others broke up with their girlfriends. JRs laugh at these ridiculous stories but also give them sincere advices. In HUPU, some animal or words were given new meanings based on these stories and even became the icon for the “Pedestrian Street”. For example, in “Pedestrian Street”, Honey Badger means people who are overconfident, it came from a story where an overconfident boy with a similar hair cut as a Honey Badger who was rejected by a girl. Most of the stories cannot be understood without the HUPU’s context, so it contributes to the formation of exclusive HUPU family to some extent and some of them even had been put into the exam for getting into the community.

Regulations and Management for HUPU Family

A healthy family ought to have their own norms to ensure that their family members are all welcomed.

People are usually tend to be more sincere and relaxed with old friends and like-minded others. Besides, high-quality and genuine stories can attract more people and contribute to the creation of a more healthy community. In this way, HUPU created its management and regulation system to reward the loyal and high-quality users and to eliminate undesirables.

To ensure the user’s quality of HUPU community, users need to browse the posts to have a fully understanding of HUPU’s culture without logging in first and have to finish an exam to be tested if they are qualified before creating a new account. The exam contains 20 questions about community culture, regulations and basic sports knowledge like “which team won the NBA championship in 2016?” or “What kind of posts would be banned?” Users have to answer 18 questions correctly to become a JR.

HUPU also has an evaluation system for users, it has 10 different titles based on JRs’ credits level. A new user cannot make new posts directly after creating his account. Instead, he or she has to make high-quality comments to gain credit first. Only JRs over level 5 can create new posts. Moreover, JRs can “like” or “dislike” the comments and posts to increase or decrease the credits of respondents. Those who deliberately insult and attack others or spread disinformation will be kicked out of the community by the administrator。

HUPU is a huge dormitory for both young boys and old boys, It is a place where people treat others like family members and can talk about anything just like college students bragging with their roommates. It is a place where everyone can express themselves sincerely. The name “JR” bond all members together as a family, which I think is the core factor for a healthy online community.

---

References:

【1】http://www.woshipm.com/evaluating/1605762.html accessed November 8,2018.

【2】http://www.woshipm.com/evaluating/3278945.html accessed January 2, 2020.

【3】http://www.woshipm.com/evaluating/3434393.html accessed February 27, 2020.

【4】https://chuansongme.com/n/2546358247811 accessed September 12, 2018.

And suddenly, everybody got my life. Everything is going online thanks to the COVID-19 pandemia. Okay, I may be exaggerating a little bit, but in a way it seems like it. I’ve left my home country for good more than ten years ago, leaving my family and lifelong friends behind a screen. I’ve been working completely remote for almost a decade too, with a virtual team in different timezones. 

Online weddings? Ours was not online, but I did have my sister and best friend perching over two iPads via Skype from Buenos Aires to Budapest. How to engage your team remotely? Somehow, in an anticipatory movement, I was asking around several Harvard and MIT professors last semester for their best tips and best practices. Little did I know that just a few months later, those same professors were going to be forced to go online too. 

While living in Budapest, I was so used to interacting online, to work online, to be online, that I thought it was not a problem for me. Just imagine the amount of laundry you can get done when working from your living room! But then, when my husband got a fellowship and we moved to Cambridge with our two small kids (2 and 5 years old), I realized how wrong I was. How much I was actually craving the real life interaction. I did not have colleagues, but I had a big group of fellows who I was meeting on a daily basis. I had real classes with real people and real teachers. I could have a coffee with someone and smell the freshly ground beans. Okay, again, I may be exaggerating, but it still did feel like it.

So, suddenly, a few weeks ago, coronavirus came to this part of the world, and our lives turned upside down. We first had to decide what to do, if jumping on a plane or staying put. We suddenly had two small kids at home 24/7 who demand all our attention, all the time. We have work to do, we have to buy food, we have classes, we have fears. We question if we have enough toilet paper. We question why we question this. We have fundraising conference calls during which our toddler decides to unplug the WiFi. We have a need for a social media detox, while at the same time we’re frantically scrolling down on Facebook and Instagram, while checking the latest coronavirus stats and memes. And suddenly, now even my two-year-old has morning circle time via Zoom. 

In the middle of this, we have an assignment. The task: write a case study of a healthy online community. And, in this context of brain overload, my perfectionist-rule-follow self finds herself at a crossroad. There is no time between the increased workload, kids, worries, and fears. There is not much brain bandwidth truly. But in an attempt to keep up (remember, not passive auditing of this class), I decide to sit on my ass and write my case study. Or a humble attempt/draft of it. 

Case Study: A hyperlocal Facebook Groups of Moms

In the middle of this crisis, I’ve realized that online communities have helped me a lot to navigate the new challenges. And, among those, especially the ones of moms. There are several groups that I could have picked: several Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, or even small communities that gather around some Instagram accounts. 

For the purpose of this exercise I decided to pick up one: a hyperlocal Facebook Group of Moms. This group is not just hyperlocal in terms of location (my current city right now), but also in terms of age group: moms with kids born the same year as my smaller kid. The one that is making our quarantine even more difficult (sorry kiddo, hope you won’t read this in the future, and that this lockdown won’t add extra therapy hours in your adulthood). 

I’ve been a member of this group since last year, I joined it a little bit before moving to the US, and it has helped me tons to adjust to this new environment. Even though I’m mostly a lurker in that group, I’ve been trying to contribute here and there to do my part. For privacy reasons, I won’t be naming the group, or adding any screenshot. But, I’ll try to list different reasons on why I believe this is a healthy online community, without any breach of privacy.  

+Moderation: You need to be approved to enter the group, and answer a few key questions. This seems to be working really well.

+Hyperlocal: You can find very concrete support in these groups, which makes it even more important in these COVID-19 times. Posts to support local businesses have been on the rise these days. Messages about kids bear hunts, or indoor activities. 

+Real: there are so many “mommy” groups out here. I find this one very special because it’s real. Moms can post about Montessori-like activities or the latest #quinoakalebeetroot snack, but they can also commiserate and talk about how f…. hard working with small kids at home can be (or, before pandemia, husbands latest fuckups). Not just, or almost none, Pinterest mommy style.

+Combat misinfo/disinfo: in times in which misinformation is on the rise (something that not even journalists are immune to), this group still seems like a safe place. And, in between posts on where to get diapers for a specific size in the middle of a lockdown, you can also see moms sharing peer reviewed articles about particular issues around the virus. 

+Sharing specific experiences not only around the virus, but related issues such as work rights or compensations. Or what to do when your daycare closes regarding payments and expectations. 

+Solidarity: before COVID-19 times, I saw many examples of moms posting for helping others, or raising money for global causes such as immigration rights. 

+Sharing of virtual circle times, yoga, meditation, and activities for kids.

+Sharing of memes. Personally, one of the best ways to go through these crazy times for me has been humor. 

Basically, this group seems to replicate a lot of healthy offline communities, with values that I find are important, such as solidarity, no judgment, help, and support. I’m grateful that in these difficult times I can rely on several of these online communities. And even though I miss the offline interactions so much, I feel that at least we have each other behind a screen. 

NOTE: I have left all names in screenshots as the South End Community Board is a public, visible group on facebook.

It’s hard to ignore the growth of Facebook Groups, whether you’re an active Facebook user or just a lucky consumer of the widespread “More Together” ad campaign. As of April 2019, more than 400 million people were in groups that they found meaningful (as determined by Facebook through surveys and engagement metrics).[1] It would appear that up to 6,000 of those people are members of the South End Community Board (SECB), a lively Facebook Group dedicated to the South End neighborhood of Boston.

To a casual participant (like the author, who has used the group… twice… to see if anyone found her podless AirPod case on a sidewalk), SECB seems like a fairly healthy online community thanks to adherence to the posted guidelines, the helpful or humorous tone of most posts, and member engagement. Yet, like any healthy community, not all exchanges are completely “positive” nor is SECB immune to exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. As coronavirus spreads across Boston and the world, does a neighborhood Facebook Group need to adapt, and if so, how?

Background

South End Community Board

SECB was created as a Facebook Group by Stephen (Steve) Fox on April 25, 2015. The group is visible and public, meaning anyone can find the group and see who’s in the group and what they post (including comments on others’ posts) – no Facebook login necessary. As of March 29, 2020, the group had 6,310 members, 62 of which had joined within the past week. Membership included two admins and 33 Facebook Pages, most of which represented local businesses and politicians. The other group members were presumed to be individuals living and/or working in the South End. While Facebook does not provide a dashboard for group members, a sample of the member list reflected a college-educated majority and a notable concentration of educators and health care workers.

Steve Fox

Fox has lived in the South End since the late 1980s. He has long been active in the community, co-founding the South End Forum in 2002 as an umbrella for the 17 distinct neighborhood and business associations that advocate for the South End.[2] In addition to administering and moderating SECB, Fox serves as chairman of the South End Forum and advisor to Friends of the South End Library.

South End neighborhood

The South End is a one-square mile neighborhood of Boston with 31,669 residents as of the 2010 U.S. Census.[3] This suggests up to 20% of residents were SECB members as of March 2020, though the actual share is likely lower given the number of non-person and non-resident members and even accounting for population inflow since 2010. Compared to the city of Boston overall, South End residents as of 2015 were more likely to be white (55% vs. 45% for the city), more highly educated (65% with bachelor’s degree or higher vs. 45%), and earn more ($77,161 median household income vs. $55,777).[4] Today, the neighborhood is just one example of rapid gentrification as high-end restaurants and luxury real estate developments abut historic gay bars, Puerto Rican housing communities, and Methadone Mile.

How SECB Operates

Purpose

As stated in the group’s description, SECB exists as, “A respectful and open discussion area for Boston’s South End residents and neighbors on just about any matter of interest, opinion, or community public notice.”[5] Topics vary widely but follow exhaustive guidelines / posted etiquette, which are strictly enforced by the two group admins. Recent memorable postings included an ask for a spare 3V CR1225 battery (the kind that fits most digital thermometers), an update on which stores have toilet paper in stock, and an offer for no-contact dog walking.

Guidelines

Like most of today’s online communities, SECB operates under guidelines that encourage healthy activity. The guidelines are clearly posted in the group’s description and are updated sparingly. A notable change was made following a steady increase in members posting screenshots or video clips from their Ring doorbells (or similar surveillance), after which Fox added, “Because video can be a valuable tool to help police to identify and potentially arrest individuals for criminal activity, we ask Board members to send any video or photographic footage that might help the police to ID a suspect quickly and directly to the BPD [Boston Police Department].” In addition, as SECB is a public group, members likely (or should) think twice before posting, commenting, or reacting, as their activity is visible and identifiable to anyone with Internet access.

Two specific guidelines that this Craigslist love-hating author particularly appreciated were 1) no “veiled or outright” ads, except for real estate for lease or sale by current occupant or owner, and 2) “members posting any for sale items MUST include price.”

Ongoing challenges

Even with a comprehensive set of guidelines, online communities are prone to occasionally go off the rails. While having just two groups admins made it easier to be consistent in how SECB is moderated, it also meant the board only has two people as checkpoints on potential misinformation, misrepresentation, or other miscellaneous nastiness. Especially with the tremendous uptick in posts – 81 on March 19, 2020 versus 7 for the week of March 12-19, 2019 – Fox and his co-admin faced a growing fight against SECB activity that violated posted guidelines.

Competitors

SECB is one of many neighborhood-specific Facebook Groups and faces additional competition on other platforms, including Nextdoor. However, SECB seems to dominate in size and overall activity thanks to its broad purpose. Other publicly visible groups are more interest-specific, such as Buy Nothing South End, Boston, MA (594 members, 50 posts in last 30 days), Boston South End Parents (553 members, 37 posts in last 30 days), and South End Young Professionals (188 members, 54 posts in last 30 days).

Measuring Digital Community Health

The following metrics were used to evaluate the online health of SECB:

• Member activity: Volume of posts and comments served as an important reflection of how much members were engaging with content. A bulletin board could be evaluated with read-only metrics, but with a community discussion, it felt important to understand how much people were adding their own input.
• Tone of posts: Facebook’s built-in “reactions” were sorted into three rough categories – “positive” included Love❤️ and Haha😂, “neutral” included Like👍  and Wow😮, and “negative” included Sad😢 and Angry😡. These reactions were used as a proxy for the tone of each post, which would otherwise have been subjectively evaluated by the author. Reactions were also an additional gauge of member activity.
• Breadth of topics: Posts were tagged to categories as applicable, including those seeking something, those offering something, purely informational posts, and discussion-opening posts. Seeking and offering posts were mutually exclusive, but other category combinations were allowed, e.g. discussion-opening and informational, offering something and informational, or seeking something and discussion-opening (provided the discussion was about something besides what the original author was looking for, such as a restaurant recommendation).
• Breadth of authorship: Posts were categorized based on authorship by a business vs. an individual, and grouped to determine the number of unique authors in a given timeframe.
• Truthiness: Posts were labeled “truthy” if they linked to a credible external article or source, included fact-based claims, and/or cited specific evidence in the body of the post.

• 

• 

• 

• 

COVID-19 escalated in local importance beginning March 5, 2020, when the first Biogen conference infection was reported, and was declared a pandemic on March 11. To capture a before and after comparison while minimizing seasonal variability, metrics were gathered for the week of March 12-19, 2019 and for the day of March 19, 2020 (original intention was to collect metrics for the entire week in 2020 as well, but there proved to be too many posts for this to be feasible).

Pre-pandemic

SECB in March 2019 was a pleasant enough place to be: with just 7 posts for the week, but a healthy 4.29 comments per post on average and only 7% negative reactions, members seemed to be engaging positively with each other. An impressive 86% of posts were “truthy”. Unfortunately for the burden on SECB admins, there were only two unique authors during the week in question, and Fox was one of them.

During pandemic

Fast-forward to March 2020, and SECB had become a different place, as had most news and media channels. While overall posts jumped to 81 in just one day, member engagement kept up with 4.86 comments per post on average. Reactions increased substantially, from an average of 4.14 per post pre-pandemic to 12.9 per post on March 19, 2020. The tone of reactions also became more neutral or negative, from 28% down to 17% “positive” and 7% up to 11% “negative”. Unfortunately, share of “truthy” posts went down substantially to 52% – likely related to the increase in number of unique authors, many of whom were more casual posters than Fox (though none of the posts appeared to be clearly “fake news”).

On the brighter side for overall community health, the pandemic period saw an increase in people offering something, from 0% up to 6%, and a consistent flow of informational posts, from 29% up to 54%. There was also an impressive increase in author diversity, with 40 unique members posting in just one day. Discussion-opening posts also remained fairly constant, from 14% to 10%, which is a positive reflection of how members continue to turn to SECB to have a variety of open conversations, regardless of a global crisis.

Planning for the future

New and anticipated challenges

Pressure on health care workers: South End is home to Boston Medical Center, the largest safety-net hospital and Level I trauma center in New England according to Wikipedia. Its proximity to Boston University, Northeastern University, and Longwood Medical Area also makes it a popular neighborhood for current / future / past health care professionals. As COVID-19 continues to spread in Boston, Fox should anticipate further changes in the tone of SECB based on the needs of local residents and businesses.

Reliance on hospitality industry: While many restaurants in the South End have remained open for take-out and delivery only, even more have completely shut down their operations with no clear path to re-opening. Much of the neighborhood’s economy relies on locally-owned restaurants and retail stores, which suffer most in a time of social distancing and e-commerce domination. Fox should anticipate that customers, employees, and managers of local shops will take to SECB to seek help and support.

Slowdown in real estate development: South End real estate prices have risen impressively, to the chagrin of many long-timers, and were expected to continue their upward trajectory based on a number of high-end developments under way. While the long-term impact of COVID-19 is impossible to predict, it is likely that a broader economic softening will lead to less active real estate markets. Many of the more contentious SECB posts in the past have related to new developments, so this may actually be a win for Fox in that he will not have to deal with as much negativity, but also poses an additional threat to the neighborhood’s economic liveliness.

Choices to consider

The easiest thing for Fox to do is stick with the status quo. There is nothing alarming in the health metrics examined, and certainly nothing in particular that demands an immediate change in how SECB operates.

The risk with doing what’s always been done, however, is that SECB misses an opportunity to go above and beyond. As many people have said in the past weeks, “never waste a good crisis”. Fox could, for example, double-down on Facebook’s existing effort to bring more coronavirus-related updates into every section of Facebook, including Group pages. SECB could become a place that follows up on and emphasizes the latest local / state / federal directives, which it already does to some extent through informational postings, but not systematically.

Finally, Fox could take a leap and reframe SECB as an opportunity to step up in local leadership. The group could be used as a way to connect entrepreneurs, organize volunteers, and/or orchestrate legislative initiatives, all in response to COVID-19 (and potentially future relevant challenges). This would mean a substantial departure from the group’s current format, but if done well, would also make the most of an already-healthy online community.

What would you do?

---

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/16/zuckerbergs-focus-on-facebook-groups-increases-facebook-engagement.html, accessed March 29, 2020.

[2] http://realestate.boston.com/buying/2017/09/14/what-is-it-like-to-live-in-the-south-end/, accessed March 29, 2020.

[3] https://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/South_End_Planning_District_Profile_tcm3-13007.pdf, accessed March 29, 2020.

[4] http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/7987d9b4-193b-4749-8594-e41f1ae27719, accessed March 29, 2020.

[5] https://www.facebook.com/groups/SouthEndCB/about/, accessed March 29, 2020.

BOARD POSTING GUIDELINES/ETIQUETTE:

A respectful and open discussion area for Boston’s South End residents and neighbors on just about any matter of interest, opinion, or community public notice.

Veiled or outright advertising posts, including for rent and other real estate purchase offerings–unless by the current owner or lessee–are not made to this Board since they could quickly overwhelm through sheer numbers. We encourage timely announcements of city or other service opportunities, events, new business openings, fund-raisers or community events likely to be of interest to South Enders.

South End businesses that wish to provide an occasional notice of a limited offer, a thank-you “deal”, or holiday event “special” targeted specifically to South End neighbors may do so as an informative neighborhood public notice rather than routine advertising of the business or “today’s pasta special.” Notices by SE businesses, non-profits, neighborhood organizations or individual neighbors of charitable events or sponsorship opportunities are always welcome on the Board. Members posting any for sale items MUST include price.

This is especially a place to thoughtfully discuss new ideas that will help the South End continue to be the most welcoming neighborhood in the city.

Board posts should always demonstrate a basic respect for all members, for the broad South End community, and for those who might be unknowingly identified either through language or images. We ask that posters show both restraint and courtesy by refraining from insensitive or insulting commentary, accusation, or clearly hostile suggestions.

Posts that seem deliberately designed to needle, insult, poke someone in the eye, shame, bully, start a fight, troll, or employ offensive or insulting language are not welcome. While this is a public Board, a poster’s right to express what they want ends where other members’ and posters’ rights begin. The key is to consistently show simple respect.

POSTING PHOTOS OR VIDEO OF SUSPECTED CRIMINAL ACTIVITY:

Because video can be a valuable tool to help police to identify and potentially arrest individuals for criminal activity, we ask Board members to send any video or photographic footage that might help the police to ID a suspect quickly and directly to the BPD.

If you witness, capture, or experience a criminal act, immediately report it to 911. The police cannot investigate or take actions to ID suspect unless a report is made. Tell the police you have video or stills and provide it to them as part of your report.

DO NOT POST these videos here in the mistaken belief that alerting your neighbors, will somehow help to locate a suspect. Even if another neighbor happens to see a person in a posted video and reports it to the police, the police are limited in how they can respond without probable cause, with no suspect description, no actionable complaint.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/SouthEndCB/