“ Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.”
– Malcolm Gladwell [New Yorker article, by way of this post]

This quote occurred to me this week as Facebook released it’s new Groups product. The feature is undoubtedly a leap forward for Facebook in many ways, but it abandoned one of the central tenets of the online communication: the idea that people should only receive email from an organization when they’ve explicitly opted in for it. You see, anyone can create a Facebook Group and then add any friends to it unilaterally. Your activity stream displays a note mentioning that you’ve joined the Group. Thereafter, whenever there are new messages posted to the Group everyone on the list receives the message via email (and/or FB mail). The flaw in this model was highlighted shortly after launch:

Someone set up a Facebook Group for NAMBLA–the pro-pedophile North American Man Boy Love Association–and added TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to it. Arrington, appreciating the irony of the prank, then paid it forward by adding Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. If Zuckerberg and the Facebook team didn’t understand the issue before, this prank should be a poignant example of the problem with default opt-in and no approval or confirmation process. [PCWorld]

Still, it’s incredibly smart engagement design, and should lead to a short-term increase in interaction across Facebook. I like that friends I trust can include me in group activities when I don’t have time to opt-in to new memberships. Also, Facebook can easily add some additional controls that address the most egregious of the holes. But let’s be clear: this is an erosion of yet another social compact as we collectively build our new “social world order.”

As Gladwell pointed out, the Internet has given us the gift of effortless connection with each other, and we’re eager to measure success in the size of our networks and the raw numbers of interactions. But we should never confuse this with high quality connection, or the motivation to participate meaningfully. Quality is always more difficult to cultivate and measure, but it is only quality contributions that solve problems and accomplish great things within online communities. And communities can’t thrive in the long-term if people can’t trust a social compact. We community builders need to tread with more care when exploding the norms that have evolved to protect people as we focus on growth.

The irony, of course, is that Facebook’s initial success was in large part due to its high barrier to admittance. Without a Harvard student ID you could forget about getting into the social network at all, and these strong bonds between classmates was phenomenally productive (both in utility and network growth). Who can blame them for wanting to lower the barriers to produce more of those results?

But remember, the road to degraded social engagement is paved with good intentions.