Internet Addiction & How We Combat It

As the chief architect for a social networking website that caters to recovering alcoholics and addicts, I understand the power of addiction pretty well. I see its effects everyday. Addiction can tear its way through the lives of those addicted and close relatives and friends. It is a disease that really doesn’t care who you are, where you live, what shape you’re in or what economic class you belong to. Most addictions have pretty big teeth and once it gets its fangs into you, its a struggle to break free.

Substance abuse is the most common of all addictions on SoberCircle.com. But, within the core of most participants of this website are addictive personalities that can become hooked on more than just addictive substances. I get to see the nature of addiction much more closely than most web developers because our website caters to it, but addiction exists everywhere. Don’t think for a second that the unrivaled success of porn websites is primarily fueled by anything other than addiction. It exists in varying degrees throughout the internet. Facebook and Myspace might solicit only minor addictive bonds with its users, while gaming websites might have much stronger addictive effects on its users.

Is it a problem?
I would say it has to be a problem. If an addiction to anything causes a person to invest a concerning amount of money or time on a website, there is definite reason for concern. Social disfunctionality is often born from this behavior of becoming absorbed in a website or several websites. It is the same behavior that is created by an addiction to drugs, just with fewer socially unacceptible side effects. I highly doubt internet addiction ever becomes the cause behind armed robberies, carjackings or prostitution. The addiction will cost its victims their jobs, families and quite possibly their sanity.

How do we combat it?
What I am about to suggest is a radical concept for a web 2.0 world where wall street meets silicon valley and promising startups and born everyday with the aspirations of being the next big thing. For any website that subscribes members to it, that member count and their activity is a very important thing. My suggestion would be to allow a member if they feel they are addicted to a website, they can easily unsubscribe or take a timeout. Addicts often know they might have a problem, even if they would never admit it. Allowing an internet addict to take a siesta would not only be healthy for the user, it would probably be healthy for the website as well. We as web developers want to build websites that fuse with real life. When people become addicted to your site, they slowly start to withdraw from the reality that is life. Based on my experience with SoberCircle, there are many other issues that form from a members constant involvement with the website. An undue sense of entitlement can form that cause members to clash with each other or the website’s management.

Would websites adopt this policy of encouraging healthy internet use? Its contradictory to what most websites are trying to accomplish, but in the end the karma gained by the few lost hits would probably more than make up for it.

Social networking deviants

As many of you know, I am a co-founder of the social networking website SoberCircle.com. SoberCircle is a community that caters to recovering alcoholics and addicts, a population that general websites do a poor job in delivering a service that allows them to communicate comfortably about their recovery. This is where we come in.

Recently, an incident occurred on SoberCircle where another member masqueraded around the site as me, telling members that they had a problem and that they all were getting on my nerves. Here is a timeline of how the events unfolded in the chat room:

Monday, 2:24 PM CT
A bitter argument between two members takes place (this is not an infrequent occurance in chat). The person pretending to be me says :”oh, just simmer down, i am sure we will all get along as soon as you start thinking like me” These are fighting words for some in recovery…

Monday, 2:40 PM CT
I start receiving messages asking why I would bash monitors. Word travels fast apparently and not very accurately either. Its like that experiment we all have tried when we were younger, where you give a single person a secret, that secret gets passed from one person to another and at the end of the communication chain, the result is hardly like the original message. This is what happened here.

Monday, 3:45 PM CT
By this time there are a half dozen blog posts by various members that voice their frustration with me and they’re starting to comment on my profile. Here is an excerpt of one of the comments:

I would suggest you apologize to your monitors via blog asap.
Things got out of hand and none of it should have been in the chat room.
Please do this soon before things are broken and not repairable.

At this point, I am completely confused.

Monday, 6:30 PM CT

Find out that half of our chat monitors have resigned themselves from their positions. Damage control is in full effect at this point. A meeting is called where we pull our chat monitors into a conference call to discuss the situation and how to resolve it. After an hour and a half of discussion about the matter, we come to some pretty hard conclusions. Here is what we determined:

A moderation force for any website that sees millions of hits has to have a quick, fluid and continuous communication stream that exists outside of the walls of the website itself.

So many of the monitors walk around on egg shells, in fear that any move they make could be scrutinized. Scrutinization is good, but you have to empower these people for them to be effective monitors.

Every action that is taken to clean up chat must be documented so that the other monitors know everything that is taking place within the rooms.

These are essentials to a good social networking monitoring force. All of which are points I was aware of before but this incident just drilled it home even more about important these really are to a successful community.

Its a constant struggle for balance, where every little thing that is seen as negative could be that seed that starts a user revolt.