I haven't posted to the blog for a while and I can't say it's because I've been too busy. I had a pretty terrible social technology experience recently. It left me feeling overexposed so I just had to walk away for a while.

Here's the short version of the story. My wife and I thought it would be fun and interesting to run a small online business selling products that she knows about, namely fashion. She scoured the web a for a good distributor and eventually found a reputable importer of Italian handbags. So we started with a small test batch. A big box landed on our porch, direct from Italy, and the bags looked beautiful. We snapped some photos, I created a pretty web page, and we started selling a few on eBay to test the market. It was going ok. They weren't selling for much over our cost but we figured it was because our reputation hadn't been established yet.

One day a nice customer of ours sent us a message saying that our listings were being discussed in the eBay forums and that "lynch mob" was forming. Reading through the forum messages was agonizing. They were saying that our bags were fake and that we were criminals. They said they were reporting us to eBay and to Gucci and that we would be fined and possibly jailed. They picked apart every phrase in our listing, looking for flaws. They declared that because our products were selling so inexpensively that they must be fake! They claimed that our photos were clearly stock photos stolen from the designers web site (an unwelcome compliment, in a way). They had even been sending questions to our listings, posing as interested buyers, and then posting the responses in the forum to mock us.

The worst part of all this was that they pasted text in the forum from my family blog and even posted comments to it with threatening language. It felt like someone had been in my house.

We sat back tried to approach the situation with objectivity. Many of them were probably handbag sellers and not happy to see new competition. And there is an atmosphere of hysteria around designer products because of the rampant fraud. It seemed futile to try to reason with them or defend ourselves so we'd just ignore it and focus on selling products. What could they do anyway? We soon found out. EBay sent us a message saying that our account had been suspended because of the complaints from the forum. Satisfied customers returned to the site to leave us feedback only to see that we had disappeared which made them rightly suspicious. Then they wanted their money back and the whole thing unraveled from there.

This experience left me with a lot of questions. When should people in an online community be allowed to remain anonymous and when should they be accountable by being identifiable? How do we counteract the behavior that results from a lack of personal connectedness?

People are so emboldened by anonymity and transient identities that they say things that would get them knocked on their butts in a face-to-face conversation. Maybe this is what's missing in social technology :) On the positive side, people are much more likely to act decently if they can look you in the face, read your non-verbal communication, and gain a sense of connection with you. Or you will learn that someone seems shifty and perhaps you should not be doing business with them.

This is one of the reason I've a fan of using video wherever practical. I think it can be used to restore a sense of trust and accountability in online relationships. I would expect to see video being applied to online commerce in the near future. It would really benefit sites like Craigslist and eBay where fraud is problem.

Some communities have also addressed the problem of bad behavior by promoting some members to moderators. They have the authority to freeze conversation threads if they become abusive or boot trouble makers altogether. It seems to work well on the UbiSoft (video games) forums where the demographic is especially feisty. It seems like eBay needs this, especially when so much is as stake.