every person on the front page is male, and all with photos are white #634
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Yeah this is tough. Maybe we should try to randomly show other users? I don't know how well this would solve the issue though. |
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Showing random participants will help for #216 by definition, but would only help here if the overall demographics of our participant base are what we want them to be, which I doubt. |
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There is some intuition behind this being rather poor. By placing the top receivers on prominent display, you can only hope to further increase their value, and by showing the top givers, you promote giving to them when they do not need it (are willing to give far more themselves.) Maintaining the status quo, yet giving some extra money to those that accomplish either large projects or are simply a bit louder than others. The real value of this service comes to those who would otherwise go unseen? A means of highlighting those doing riskier things or smaller things or difficult-to-market things can go a long way. Highlighting in a way that promotes diversity over status quo is necessary. Some quick suggestions to discuss:
Not gonna solve this in a short amount of time. :) |
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@wilkie I've been thinking that funds (#449) and communities (#496) are the way we're going to attempt to address the popularity contest problem (#216). There were a ton of tickets around this issue. Unfortunately, when I redid milestones recently I clobbered the one that collected all of these. The big tickets were #27, #216, #327, and #372. That said, let's use this ticket specifically for diversity-related concerns, I think. |
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Feature stories (#636) would help here. |
I looked at knocking this out quickly but got bogged down because it wasn't a simple copy/paste from the existing top 10s. |
Relevant:
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The goal is to make Gittip much more community-centric by having pages that aggregate activity for each community (#496). |
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But yeah, let's use this ticket to talk about diversity in particular. :-) |
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I think randomization is definitely helpful here to make sure there's more exposure to different people. As far as getting a more diverse community reaching out to groups that cater to specific communities is probably a good way to help with that. Right now there's not as much awareness that this project even exists in many circles (though, it was recently posted on devchix which should help getting more women involved). Seems like community outreach is really key to getting diversity here. |
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Something to make the site more welcoming that my partner, @mfgink pointed out to me: The "You're lurking" message. There is very little information and no way to find users other than those you type in names of or those you find on the front page, so signup seems like the logical next step to seeing more info. Then, instead of further navigation or help, the user is confronted with a sort of confrontational, almost accusatory greeting of "You're lurking." I imagine that people who are curious and have signed up might become turned off at that point and leave the site. |
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Several different sorted lists might also be helpful. "Most recent" alongside "greatest quantity" would allow newcomers to potentially see their own face on the front page and feel welcome. Differentiating between monetary quantity and number of tippers/tips might also be useful. |
This varies the message for people with no giving or receiving based on how long they've been on the site. For the first minute, we say "just joined Gittip!" then for a week we say "joined recently," then after that we go with "is lurking." It was too abrasive to say "is lurking" as the first thing people see when they join the site.
Right. Were you expecting something like seeing your social network friends who are also on GitHub (#536)?
Interesting. Good catch, thanks. This is an artifact of the redesign last week. Prior to that the experience on initial sign-in was being confronted with the "I am making the world better by ..." prompt. That's muted now with the new profile page, and you're right that "So-and-so is lurking" is off-putting. I've tweaked it so that:
How's that? |
@bbinkovitz Good idea. :-) I've done a first pass at this and am going to tweak it a bit. |
This moves the givers before the receivers and adds a "New Participants" listing on the homepage.
This accounts for over-long usernames and drops back to digits instead of words for age.
This is a hack to get "New Participants" up quickly. Really the to_age helper in Aspen wants to be evolved.
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O.o |
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@bbinkovitz May I close this ticket? Do we need to reticket specific additional suggestions? Asking you since you were the original reporter. :-) |
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Or, we leave this open perpetually, in a sort of War on Terror "ever vigilant" kind of way. Then we can kick out specific retickets from here. |
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I have no idea if this is the right place to post this, but keep in mind that the people posted as "winners" on the front page communicates who the GitTip community values most and why we value them. Leaderboards, the way most people use them, end up encouraging a lot of anti-community behaviour to increase individual stats. Or end up being meaningless to the recipients because they think of themselves more as a part of the community and not so much an individual. We must be cognizant that we celebrate people for actions within their realm of control and avoid celebrating individuals for passive side effects, and in ways that don't create an easy way for meaningful competition. Ensure that the performance measures are for behaviours people can actually move and have influence in, specifically active contributions that move the accomplishments of the aggregate community, not just themselves. Specifically, focus on behaviours that have an expiration, or diminishing returns over time. That front page should have a large number of metrics dedicated to communicating overall community health and distance to various milestones. When we're close, that encourages us to push it over the top... Highlighting the newest users; that's a good metric. Another powerful score related to community growth is "total number of non-members tipped". In addition to newly registered users, also on the front page, put in a system where everyone will eventually cycle through the front page repeatedly. For example, take everyone who has ever registered; sort them by registration date/time; then create a moving window that ensures all people will spend at least 7 days on the front page every 4 months (this will make the number of users shown variable. As the number of users grows, shrink the size of their profile image to make room. This way everyone will know that their ID will be on the front page for at least some period of time. It shows the community values everyone just for being part of the community. Keep in mind that leaderboards create an incumbent reinforcement dilemma. Reinforcing incumbents over time creates an automatic bias against new entrants. Hiliting a few "winners" with the highest/fastest/best scores, automatically creates a majority of losers. The only scores that we want to measure as being the highest/fastest/best are aggregate community scores like 'total number of people/dollars being tipped', 'number of new users/non-registered person tips over the past 6 months', 'number of total community achievements unlocked/accomplished', and other measures of 'how has the community improved itself over time'. I say we need to create and track a total aggregated community score that is very easy for new members to improve but very hard for older more experienced members to improve. For instance, "number of new personal bests in the last 4 months". As you gain more experience and skill it becomes harder and harder to beat your own older records. However as a community, we have lots of people at various skill levels. The new entrants have the most amount of improvement capacity. Since we are valuing community improvement, the older more experienced and skilled participants can't contribute value to the metric directly. However if they can teach the younger less experienced members how to perform better; that becomes their access to continue moving improving that community score. If there was an individual leaderboard type thing at all, then it should be "those recently acknowledged by others for having contributed to the community". A leaderboard of people who've gotten mentioned alongside a +1, new tips, !m, kudos, or any other active acknowledgement recently. We want to encourage and make it easy for everyone to be giving out these acknowledgements early and often. The internal dialogue we want happening is "I can see how our community currently is performing, I know what my contribution to that outcome has been, I know what future behaviour contributes to that improvement, and I see how I can make a difference". Lastly, we also want to create "Rites of Passage" and "Badges", creating lots of opportunities to acknowledge people who have achieved milestones, and for completing or participating in improvement quests, in our community. The GitTip front page could be used to communicate what our community values are and describe the kinds of behaviours we admire/value. I believe that top givers/receivers should be completely removed as I don't see them actually encouraging any behaviours we want to encourage, or they serve to discourage newcomers who can't compete with the old incumbents. The Top Receivers is a totally passive metric. It's the equivalent of "these are our community's favoured darlings who have been around forever, good luck ever catching up to them, go run around and get people to tip you, or sit back and pray people learn to tip you more than them. Someday maybe you can be like them too." The Top Givers is a metric that more is a measure of ability than something a participant can really control. I'd love to be the top giver and it's really easy for me to run around and tip people (I just click a button) and I want to tip everyone a lot, (why wouldn't I?). The problem is I simply don't see I have the discretionary income for it, so based on my experience of having an inability to pay, that's one leaderboard I won't ever see myself on. So being a "Top Givers" leader ends up simply being something people purchase. It boils down to "if you spend enough money in our game, we'll put your name in the top spot". If we want to measure something like this, let's measure "percentage increase in giving over 4 months ago". That is both a community aggregated score and an individual score. This is a score where those who aren't giving, or are only giving small amounts, can take the lead all the time. As you give more, it becomes harder for you to increase your giving on a percentage basis thereby dropping you off the leaderboard. I have several recommendations for other metrics to go on the front page.
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With the risk of sounding racist and sexist, how is this a problem that's supposed to be fixed in the software? |
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untitaker, at the risk of sounding rude, have you read the post directly above yours? |
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I'm glad untitaker posted in this issue, though, because it reminded me that I was thinking about the "Most recently signed up" display and how it often showcases profiles that haven't been filled out yet. It might make the front page more meaningful if instead of/in additon to "most recent signups" there were "most recently completed profile" and/or "most recent givers/receivers"? I also think we can take a page from StackOverflow's playbook and possibly institute a badge system sometime in the future? I really like the changes that have been made so far and I think they can be built on continually, so I'm in favor of leaving the ticket open. |
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@bbinkovitz TBH, i didn't, because the length of the text and the complex language didn't motivate me to read it, not having english as the mothertongue. I assumed that the original front page of Gittip also contained dynamicaly generated data, that's why i posted my question. I might have been mistaken about this. |
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Here is a paraphrasing of what MikeFair said: The front page communicates who the GitTip community values most and why we value them. We need to be careful not to reward things that aren't good behaviors, or aren't something that the user can control. Specifically, focus on behaviours that have an expiration. So we should not reward things that are related to just how early a user signed up. Things that get measured over a long time, like the whole time the site existed, make it hard for the list of top users to change. The number of users on the whole site is the number that is most important to the site as a whole. The only way to improve that score is for new people to register. But there is no specific goal for how many users the site wants to have. Another powerful score related to community growth is "total number of non-members tipped". That's because tipping a non-registered user is like inviting a new person to the site. So we should reward people for doing that. There can also be a program that shows various users on the front page in a way that rotates to make sure that every user is featured on the front page eventually. That shows that everyone is valuable just for participating. Leaderboards set up a system where people who are already getting featured get more and more popular. It makes it seem like everyone else is a loser. Displaying numbers that apply to the community as a whole is important too. That can help people see how the community itself improves over time. We should track a community score that is easy for new users to change but harder for older users to change, like "number of new personal bests in the last 4 months". This encourages people to do better all the time, not just better than other users. New users are more likely to be improving than older users. We can also feature people by how recently they were mentioned by other users. The thing that is important about this conversation is so people can see how the community is getting better and how they are helping. Showing Top Receivers is not always the best way to show what the community values or to encourage new people to particpate because the list doesn't change very often and it's very hard to get on the list. Showing Top Givers makes a little more sense because people can control how much they give, within the limit of the money they have to spend. Since not everyone has a lot of money, it can become something like advertising that people can purchase, and that is not what it is meant for. Then he went on to suggest some ways to do this in more detail. The short version is that the program should be a good match for what the community values, instead of accidentally encouraging things that aren't helpful. |
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Got it, thanks! 🍰 |
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Okay, so what are some bite-sized action items, and who's volunteering to do them? :) |
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Bite-sized action item: Replace "recently signed up" with "recent givers" and "recent receivers". |
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Change the top tagline to include something like: 1,895 people are giving Replace top givers with "People being more generous".
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Happily, we now have a woman in top givers and another in top receivers! :D I'm going to backpedal on the "perpetual ticket" idea and take the opportunity to close this ticket, since the immediate issue raised here has been addressed. I appreciate everyone for participating in this discussion, and I look forward to evolving Gittip further together! :D |
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/group highfive |
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I'm sorry but, isn't the whole premise of this "bug" sexist and racist? It very precisely discriminates against gender and race. |
ht @bbinkovitz via Twitter.
@wilkie ties this in to the popularity contest issue (#216).
What do we do about this?
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