A couple of days ago, Channy wrote something about The rise and decline of web services: economics of exhibitionists and peeping toms. The gist of the essay is: For a web service, you need to have a delicate balance between satisfying exhibitionist desires and those of peeping toms. By way of example, he describes the history of the most successful web services in Korea: Daum cafe, sayclub, cyworld, naver cafe/blog combo and me2day.
An interesting observation, certainly, but I cannot but doubt if it’s somewhat an overstatement to see them through the eyeglass of the socio-psychopathological concepts and devices. I mean, no new insight or advice could be gained by maintaining such a psychodramatic perspective, but to trigger readers’ interests. It might as well be called in more pristine economic expressions maintaining the basic idea that web services need to get a balance betwen the need to advertise (show the entire world what they are up to) and the desire to be informed (see what everybody else is up to). The use of phrases such as “exhibitionists” and “peeping toms” distracts rather than informs readers like me.
Actually, their failures — for example, by being used as an instrumentality for whores in the case of sayclub — doesn’t appear to be the result of their failing to keep the balance and tilting one way or another. Rather, it might as well be attributed to their failure to keep spams from swaying the system (Here, I have used the word spam broadly, suggesting indiscreet or indecent use or exploitation by users for quick money, thereby harming those users sticking to the intended use).
I believe the issue of spam is where you really need to balance yourself. You want to attract as many users as possible, but those many users inevitably will include people who would try to gain (system-wise, or economic) advantages through means never intended by the system designer. Take the example of those spam blogs shamelessly and ruthlessly copying contents from other blogs in an effort to gain search-wise advantage. It’s not a desire to expose to the entire world that he’s a spam blogger, or to stimulate others to see what they are up to is really proliferating meaningless spams (I mean, they’re meaningful for the search engine, but meaningless for actual users) which encourages the generation of spam blogs. They’re only trying to trick the search engine. It has nothing to do with indiscreet desires of peeping toms or exhibitionists. Difficult problem is, where to strike the balance between encouraging users and usage (with appropriate, healthy incentives) and suppressing excessive spams.
