Treemo has a great concept and great technology. It's one of the best-integrated mobile media sites I've run across. The folks who created it are talented and visionary.
Treemo is effectively a YouTube of mobile. It's a well-designed, cleverly branded, technically sound social media site. But it's more. It has a mission to inspire digital creativity while serving an environmental cause.
Treemo has programs to recycle and reuse old cameras and mobile devices, turning toxin-laden, unused electronics into opportunities for creative expression for students. Not bad.
But there's a problem.
The content on Treemo SUCKS. It REALLY sucks, and it even makes you a little uncomfortable at times. The site experience, once you dig into the user-generated content even a little, is, frankly, sleazy.
I believe there's some question about whether the site's concept really works. Environment, check. Education and creativity, check. Mobile, creativity, and environmentalism... ok, maybe. But setting aside the question of whether the site has a workable concept to begin with, let's look at some steps to resolve Treemo's issues:
In the short term, there's no substitute for aggressive moderation. The site's moderators need to make perfetly clear what content is encouraged by promoting "featured" content to the home page and sprinkling it throughout the site experience. The upload page should have an explicit description, with examples, of the kind of content that's most appreciated. They need to sanction violators and reward the exemplars. The best content, in other words, needs to show up prominently and the worst needs to fall off the main pages of the site.
In the longer term, there are architectural issues to resolve. Here are some strategies for keeping things on track:
1. Raise the threshold of entry.
Every community site has a threshold of entry. You can think of this as the "minimum requirement to participate," or the ratio of degree of participation allowed to the credibility of personal information provided. The lowest threshold of entry is "anonymity allowed," that is, anyone can post content without revealing any information about themselves. The highest, these days, is credit card verified identity required, that is, your "real," or offline, identity is confirmed and is visible everywhere you participate--money where mouth is so to speak. If you absolutely MUST HAVE people acting like civil human beings, charge an entry fee. Make them financially invest in the value of the community. Of course, the community had better have a lot to offer if you want to take that approach.
Between those extremes is a continuum, and where you place yourself along that continuum has a lot to do with the degree of accountability you can associate with individual users' behavior.
2. Increase the visibility of the community guidelines.
First and foremost, write your community guidelines in plain English. Look to some great examples, such as the ones on Flickr and Blogher. And everywhere a person contributes content to the community, remind them of the community guidelines--not just with a link, but with a pithy heading, an excerpt or summary, AND a link.
You need to have legalese on your site as well. Link to it. Don't try to substitute the formality of lawyer-speak and requirements-language for a real, meaningful social contract that real human beings can get behind.
3. Think differently about what constitutes "quality." Embody the community mission.
User-generated content systems need to have a way to separate the good stuff from the crap. (And by crap I mean, most respectfully, "things of interest limited to their creator.") Treemo, like many social media sites including Flickr and YouTube, bases its notion of quality on user behavior.
But Treemo uses an exceedingly simple set of quality measures. Within the Explore category, you can see "Most Viewed," "Most Commented," "Most Favorited," etcetera. Treemo wants to be a site about creativity--what if it developed a quality algorithm including all the elements of user behavior it's already using, but also added an explicit voting or ranking system that enabled participants to weigh in on the "creativity" or "value" or "message" of content? Treemo wants to be about environmental responsibility, so what if it strongly highlighted content created on recycled equipment?
Building content structures and quality measures around an explicit mission has a powerful effect of deterring and burying inappropriate content while encouraging and rewarding exemplary content. Think of it this way: Let the lame band on stage, and let their friends dance, but unplug the mic so everyone else can talk about something more interesting.
4. Engage people who will be excited to participate in ways that support your mission.
Treemo is not full of people doing creative things with digital media. It's full of sleazy, pathetic voyeurs and exhibitionists, shallow, immature, irresponsible, inappropriate dilly-dalliers with no sense of purpose--in short, casual Internet surfers. Given a sense of alignment with Treemo's mission, might the voyeurs and exhibitionists be persuaded to tap into their creative/green-leaning inner selves and fulfill it?
Get real. Comments like "Nice tattoo. What ur body look like?" make pretty clear the trajectory of content to be created by Treemo's current user base.
These are just not the right people.
The way to get the right people in the first place is to seed the site with content that appeals to values aligned with the mission, reach out to and pre-invite influential people who are going to contrribute, do PR in the right places, get involved in existing communities, and build the site structure to reward the right kind of participation.
It's easy... to say.
5. Hold individuals accountable for their behavior.
There's a lot that can be said about designing for accountability, and I do plan to say it in some detail in a forthcoming post. For starters, though, make users' comments, posts, ratings, and everything else they do visible on their public profiles, and link from everywhere they participate to their public profiles. Treat the profile as the reflection of the user's participation, not as the holder of their bio and photo.
Second, moderate publicly--when you remove a post or ban a user, don't just make them disappear. Leave a "footprint" in their place explaining what you did and why. Make examples of them, and if the community disagrees with your policy or your implementation of it, discuss it openly. Hold firm to the values of the site--and be prepared to be flexible.
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