SimBay

As anyone who has played SimCity knows, once a community grows beyond a certain point, you can expect an increased burden of managing a large society, such as a need for expanded infrastructure, taxes, entertainment, and public services, such as a police force. Online communities, such as Craig's List and eBay, seem to suffer the same challenges. What began as two men's utopian dreams grew to global proportions and introduced one of the greatest challenges facing large communities: crime.

If I'm recalling correctly, the video we watched in class last Monday mentioned a 100-person strong policing division within eBay US. They scan site content constantly looking for suspicious items, site infractions, and other types of fraud. Craig's List has the same problem, although they have a smaller enforcement team. Both companies employ fraud software to uncover illegal practices.

But, both companies rely on their communities the biggest crime deterrent. eBay's rating system allows buyers and sellers to rate each other--positive, neutral, or negative--on each transaction. This acts as a warning system to buyers and sellers. Wikipedia's article on eBay lists the following weaknesses of the feedback system:

• Small and large transactions carry the same weight in the feedback summary.
• A user may be reluctant to leave honest feedback out of fear of negative retaliatory feedback (including "negative" in retaliation for "neutral").
• The receiver of a negative feedback is allotted only 80 characters to type a response in their defense, making a thorough rebuttal extremely difficult to write.
• eBay's policies make it nearly impossible to remove unfair or retaliatory feedback.

Still, the feedback tool remains eBay's most powerful weapon against fraud.

In Craig's List case, crime has the potential to move out of the strictly online arena and into the personal. Reading through Craig's List you'll see posters warning of other posters, and the e-mail messages that Craig's List sends to potential buyers contains an automatically-appended message warning against putting money up front for transactions.

Each company cites fraud as one of their biggest challenges, and legal proceedings involving the companies are often around fraudulent transactions enabled by the companies. These companies walk a line between simply providing a convenient transaction location online and mediating the activity that takes place there (maybe like Napster--see Wikipedia for a summary of their legal issues).

As with other types of online crime, no matter how good the tools, there will be those who seek to circumvent them. For the Web, perhaps a self-policing society is going to be as good as it gets.