Every community must have some social structure to it, if only to have a way of distinguishing who is in and who is not in the community. Specifically, some behaviors are desirable within the context of the community, while others are undesirable and inappropriate. (For example, enriching the experience of other community members is generally desirable, while harassment and obnoxious behavior is usually not.) By shaping the social mores of the community, the system designers can encourage desired behaviors that enrich the stories being told, while preventing degenerate users from ruining the experience for others.

There are a number of ways to structure the social mores of a syst

In the same way, community approbation can itself be a way to encourage users to benefit each other. Users who have successful experiences within the system will want others to join; the story community will spread virally. People with high reputation will want others to see their status, while people who enjoy stories will invite others to come view what they created.

em to guide the behavior of its members. Perhaps the most important way is through the tool of status. When there is some measure of status that is publicly available, it serves both as a carrot and stick for guiding user behavior. Status can be given out for any behavior that advances the community's larger goals, such as, in this case, creating good stories. Status can equally easily be removed for bad behavior such as harassing other members.

For example, eBay and Slashdot both rely on a user-based status system. Slashdot essentially allows users to vote on what posts they consider interesting or relevant; the content of the system is rated by its members. With eBay, it is actually the users themselves who are being rated. If people have good experiences with a particular seller, that seller will garner good reviews, while if a buyer consistently fails to pay, the negative reviews will come flooding in.

In terms of structure, the only strict requirements for community values to develop in a narrative system is that there be a strong feedback mechanism. Both users and stories must be able to be rated, and those ratings must be viewable by all others. The rating system should include an automatic, algorithmic component; a component based on others who have experienced storytelling with the individual in question; and a balancing component awarded by the community leaders, to maintain an element of human judgment.

In both these examples, the community itself becomes a control on the negative elements within the community. If someone consistently behaves badly, they will get many negative reviews on their person. If someone consistently posts irrelevant material to a story, the stories they are a part of will not gain high ratings. It is in the interests of the other community members to control this individual, because the

Some topics in this essay:
, social mores, community values, community grows, narrative system, community people, users create scripts, social mores community, concrete privileges, status awarded, behavior public, community control, status system,