Ernest Dempsey - Popular social networking and article sharing website gather.com is now accessible to Pakistani users after more than five months of inaccessibility on the grounds that Pakistani users post a lot of spam on the site.Gather blocked Pakistani users from using the website some time in January this year, alleging that Pakistani users were putting a lot of spam on the site. While Pakistani users could not access the site from the country, they continued to receive updates and notifications from the site via email. As I typed gather.com in the address bar of my browser yesterday morning, just to see if Gather had somehow reopened its doors to Pakistanis, the site opened easily in my browser. Cheering up, I posted my first message on gather after returning to the site. However, the question of a social network’s responsibility toward its members didn’t fail from popping in my head.
About 6 months ago, Gather suddenly became inaccessible to Pakistani users, creating annoying confusion for me as I got no notification of any kind from the site. Thinking whether something was wrong with my internet connection and repeatedly trying to log into the site, all in vain, I finally got my writer friends from Pakistan and US attempting to log into the site. Then it became clear that Pakistanis have been blocked from accessing the site. And to learn about the reason, I had to ask one of my American friends to contact the gather team. I can only imagine how confusing it would have been for those Gather contacts of mine who sent me messages and notifications and never heard from me.
Now, gather has as secretly let Pakistanis back as they had been blocked in January. While this is good news, one certainly is tempted to ask wouldn’t it have been more convenient for the users to have received an official notification from the site telling them about their status regarding access to the site. It would have saved the affected users time, effort, and confidence, and of course would have improved the site’s own claim to reliability.
Experiences like these, hopefully, do not frequently occur on most social networking websites and gather may also be more caring in future. But the case in question certainly raises the question of a social platform’s responsibility toward its members. The more caring it is toward its members, the more passionate the members about it. Things rarely work one-way and social networks are no exception.
