I'm In If You're In: Action Escrows as a Design Pattern to Achieve Social Change in Online Communities

In an online community, prosocial actions ranging from sharing authentic opinions to intervening against misbehavior to contributing to collective action are often deterred by a first mover disadvantage: isolated individuals deciding whether or not to take the first action often cannot be sure whether others would welcome it, and respond in support. As a result, people may fail to surface an opinion even though it is privately held by many, refrain from publicly speaking up against misbehavior even though many privately think it is unacceptable, and fail to act in response to concerns that are not voiced publicly but are widespread. In this paper, we formalize how designers of online communities can lower these first-mover disadvantages through a design pattern that we call an action escrow —a mechanism where people deposit a socially risky action with an intermediary system that only executes the action if a prespecified trigger criterion is met. For example, an action escrow for encouraging authentic opinions might allow a user to place a comment into escrow with the instruction that it be posted publicly only if the escrow system receives similar comments from two other users. Although action escrows are not new—they feature in some existing systems and are inspired by traditional escrows in legal and economic scholarship—we formalize their scope, and utility for addressing persistent challenges in online communities. We explain the general design pattern, present design cases of implementations that apply the pattern to specific problems, describe the broader design space for action escrows, and outline opportunities for the application of escrows more generally, to address CSCW challenges.