Mind Candy

The latest figures show 1.7 billion people online every day, around the globe. In the US, 32 million young people under 17 are online every day (Nielsen 2009). If we think of the web as a virtual place (which it is), that’s approximately the physical equivalent of California’s total population.  That’s a lot of young people and a lot of virtual territory.

Monstro City’s population is 20 million strong; roughly Australia’s population. There are various government agencies to manage the country, including 14 federal and state law enforcement agencies. I’m guessing these agencies employ several hundred people, at a minimum  (I couldn’t find a number anywhere but I’m sure someone will email me with the information). We can’t consider Monstro City and Australia equal in terms of demographics, and the advantage we have on the web is that it takes quite a bit more effort to physically threaten or harm someone than the offline world. As several authors have noted over the years, “comparisons are odious.”  The point of the comparison, odious or otherwise, is that at the end of the day -  we are responsible for managing public safety for a population nearly the size of a country and continent. And the burning question is “How does Mind Candy manage 20 million people?”

Mind Candy employs about 30 full-time and 15 part-time people who run the entire Moshi Monsters operation. The team responsible for managing user behavior (or, online public safety) is the Community Team. We employ 22 staff members who are responsible for  community content, Social Media & events, Customer Service, Membership, Parent & Teacher contact, site moderation, behavior management, and online safety & education.  We couldn’t possibly manage 20 million Monster Owners with a team of 22 so we turn to 3rd party software providers for assistance. Thanks to technology (and the blood, sweat and tears of some forward thinking tech pioneers), we use 3rd party and proprietary software that allows us to manage the site efficiently and effectively with large concurrent populations.

In the early days, the Web 1.0 solution to online public safety involved staff responding to user-generated help requests or conduct reports. A staff member would be alerted to the report and then respond accordingly. It was all we had to work with at the time and involved hiring and training large numbers of people to respond reactively to problem behavior report, manually. Fast forward to 2009/2010 where we have available technology that allows the online public safety process more accurate, efficient and cost effective. The Web 1.0 method is not only ineffective and inefficient, it’s quite expensive. For example, World of Warcraft claims 1 million concurrent users on their English servers, alone. Using the Web 1.0 Moderation system would require WoW to hire at least 500 concurrent real-time, moderators just to keep up with user-generated reported issues. Why even consider this method when we have technology that not only catches problem behavior in real-time, but it analyses and prioritizes it, which allows your Community team to spend time on the potentially serious issues instead of issues such as “I need a boyfriend” and “What happens when I push this button” (95+% of user-generated reports I’ve witnessed at 3 major corporations over the past 16 years are frivolous or false, which wastes staff time.  This online false reporting issue is equal to “my cat is up a tree” calls to Public Safety offline).

Sites like ours, with a large populations, can no longer afford to use the Web 1.0 Moderation system. It’s not only expensive but it’s not as safe as content analysis via good technology. We couldn’t hire enough humans to follow every user around and watch them while they type. Thankfully, technology does this for us and allows our Community professionals to focus on the serious issues and to pay attention to and interact with the 98% of our population who are creative, well-behaved, good netizens and who contribute positively to our community. We’ll always need our lovely, professional humans – but we welcome advanced behavior management technology with open arms.

I feel certain parents, guardians and teachers want us to spend the majority of our staff time with kids online (kids of all ages, in fact)  by engaging, building, creating, and learning together. Moshi Monster’s Blog has more community interaction than any of our competitors – by a factor of 200 in fact. Monstro City is a vibrant, growing, excellent community – and we have technology (and our fabulous Monstro City citizens and roarkers) to thank.