What determines the quality of user generated content?

On the Freakonomics blog they link to a comparison between recent YouTube and MetaFilter user commentary.  The question is asked if $5 can improve the quality of the comments.  You can guess what this looks like, but its worth checking out the difference in comments for yourself.

On the Web site thatsaspicymeatball, you can view the latest comments from MetaFilter (which requires a one-time, $5 membership fee to post a comment) and YouTube (free) side by side…

Here’s how a poster from each site expresses disagreement:

Metafilter:

And here’s where we diverge, as we have from the get-go …

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YouTube:

yeah you’re dumb you expect me to shut up because you tell me to? ha yeah sure

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Via Freakonimics

My personal opinion is that there isn’t just one thing that determines the quality of user comments. My theory is that the quality of commentary (and user contributions to a site in general) is dependant on a mix of the following in order: 

  1. Original Content: The content you put on your site is what draws users to it in the first place.  It also sets an example of the type of writing and quality you expect from your visitors.  Present a well written set of wiki articles or blog posts and expect well written replies for the most part.  Host videos of flatulent pandas and the people that are drawn to that sort of thing are the people that are going to be leaving their mark (for better or worse) on your site.
  2. Monkey See Monkey Do: If your user comments are already full of LOLSpeak tnage txtspeak (man I’m old) then that’s what people think is expected of them.  Then, wanting to fit in, people will devolve to match to the expectations. It’s going to be hard to prove otherwise once you start letting content you don’t want to see flow into your site. 
  3. Reputation:  How do you reward/credit the people who generate content you like?  Do you look them up, thank them, and highlight their content?  How tied are users to their accounts?  Do you give them a reason to post good content?  This is the carrot side of things and the stick, of course, is…
  4. Moderation Policies:  It’s your site so you have control over what’s posted and behavior you want to see.  If you moderate posts and aggressively and penalize bad content by removing or hiding it from other users then you start to impact factors #1 & #2.  
  5. </ol>

    Did I miss a category?  What else factors into the quality/type of user content on community sites?  If anyone knows about a study with real data that would help prove or disprove the importance of these factors I’d love to see it. I’ll leave you with the following, semi-related, picture.

    Humorous Pictures