One Site, Multiple Accounts

Description
This pattern occurs whenever the same person has more than one account on the same site. There may be several reasons for this; either the site does not allow the user to sort content, or make different privacy setting for different content; or the design very much benefits having many friends/connections collaborating.

Examples
One example comes from Facebook. Since Facebook up until August 23, 2011, did not allow a user to direct a certain post to a certain category of friends, some people instead created two or more different user accounts. For instance one might have had one “private” account for an audience like friends and relatives only, sharing personal things, in addition to one “public” account where all friend requests are accepted and the content posted is perhaps business-oriented or at least not very personal. Note how Google used this to their advantage when launching Google+ that allows users to have different circles containing people with whom one has different relationships (e.g. friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc). It is not far-fetched to say that the August 23 change on Facebook was an action to counter (or at least keep up with) its competition.

Another example comes from many social media games (e.g. Zynga’s games FarmVille and CiutyVille on Facebook) – in these games it is very beneficial to have many neighbors to collaborate with – there are even some things in the game (actions, resources) that can only be achieved from a neighbor. As a result, some players will boost their gaming by creating a second user playing the same game, in effect becoming neighbor with him- or herself and utilizing this connection as much as possible. (This is to some extent countered by the game developers by demanding that a player’s ability to collaborate is limited through the game’s first levels). In this, the pattern is similar to the gameplay design pattern Mules(Björk & Holopainen). Similarly, having more than one account can serve as a way to boost a person, post, group or link by giving it seemingly many viewers/followers/admirers.

Note that this pattern differs from Sock Puppets (Crumlish & Malone) since the reason for creating more than one account is not related to malicious use.

Pros and Cons
It may seem as if this is an unwanted pattern, since it – at least in the first case – creates a lot of extra work for the user, when trying to artificially create different aspects of the service. However the site itself may still want to keep whatever it is that triggers this pattern, either because they want to have many users (which always looks good…) or because adding the functions that remove this pattern may instead complicate use for the other users.

Relations
The pattern is fostered in environments where Public Conversations (Crumlish & Malone) are predominant and there are none or limited possibilities for Private Conversations (Crumlish & Malone). Also, it is fostered by Explicit Relationships (Crumlish & Malone); if the relations are implicit (as in twitter where anyone could see your comment) there is no need to differentiate between audiences, since there is only one.

Contributors
Created by Sus Lundgren. Revised by Patric Westberg.