Rethinking The Virtual Community: Part One

Less than a decade ago, the Virtual Community was one of the most powerful ideas emanating from the Net, and BBS's and the nascent Internet were already providing glimpses of a better world to come. Proponents are a lot wiser -- and sadder -- now. Can the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era? Yes, but it will have to be dramatically reconceived. (First of a series).

Of all the odd and idiosyncratic groups that built the Net -- the hackers, academics, Defense Department strategists, scientists and engineers -- one of the most compelling and poignant was a cluster of community idealists, digital pioneers who founded early virtual communities like The WELL.

The virtual community is the long-sought but almost-never-found New Jerusalem that's touched the hearts and minds of some of the nicest, most ethical people who've ever gone online. Freenet, mailing lists, MUD's, Usenets and IRC's and IM and (even P2P) systems have mushroomed over the years, but the Virtual Community was supposed to be a different kind of space, a way to use the Network to connect people, to help them know and sustain one another in previously inconceivable ways.

Although almost everyone who has spent much time online has occasionally experienced this sense of community, it's generally proven impossible to maintain in an ongoing or large-scale way, for either individuals or sites. An ideal sought in part by 60s refugees trying to keep their societal dreams alive was done in by the Internet's unexpected success, by the changing economics of cyberspace and by vocal bands of articulate and aggressive adolescents.

One of the articulate prophets for that new kind of place was Howard Rheingold, a WELL mainstay and author of The Virtual Community, the book that laid out the yearning for a humanistic virtual community, rather than one purely technological or informational. The WELL, more than any other virtual space, has evoked the possibilities of a wired community whose loyal citizens meet, argue with, support and befriend one another in their work lives, their personal struggles, even in their deaths. From the first -- perhaps by dint of the particular geographic, political and cultural cast of the people who launched and inhabited it -- the WELL was unique. It still is. Despite the stunning growth of the Net and the Web, there has never been an online place like it. Increasingly, it seems there never may be.

More recent virtual communities are much more "virtual" than "community." Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting. But most are transitional. The seminal idea of the WELL -- using the new network to connect personally with other humans -- feels outdated today, almost naive. Apart from sites like Senior Net, or certain mailing lists and messaging sites devoted to shared problems like cancer, the modern virtual community trades in information at the expense of intimacy. Even the most sophisticated Weblogs exist to trade ideas and commentary; participants may know next to nothing about the people behind the posts.

The idea of community itself is often mythologized, especially in America, where Disneyfied representations of an old-time Main Street have become a standard almost no one achieves in the real world. To suggest the Net has eroded community is foolish: ancient ideas of community have been eroding for generations, thanks to such innovations as the phone, TV, autos and interstate highways. The Net is just another evolution of that pattern, and it's not surprising that the virtual community has been mythologized as well.

Creating online communities is brutal work, requiring a particular kind of energy and commitment. In "Cyberville, Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town," published by Warner Books, New York City's ECHO founder Stacy Horn writes about her response to the suggestion that she ought to start some online communities in Boston, LA or New Orleans: "I put the idea aside...I'd have to find people locally to host, build, relationships with local organizations and businesses -- it's an incredibly delicate and gut-wrenching process -- I simply couldn't go through it again and again unless some big huge company paid me a lot of money to oversee the local people they would also pay a lot of money to do the actual work of building a local virtual community from within a physical one."

If everyone online were like Horn or were Rheingoldian -- smart, warm, ethical, community-minded -- then the Net might actually have become the connective environment that Rheingold and others articulated so powerfully. But most people are not, of course. Flamers and corporations and lawyers have thundered online, along with e-traders, role-players, spammers, governments -- everyone! -- with a long list of other agendas, from improved market share to con games.

As Rheingold, one of the founders of Wired Magazine's late Web site Hotwired, points out, it was briefly different, at least in some places. In the intro to Virtual Community, first published in l993 and revised and reissued this year by MIT Press, Rheingold describes how ever since the summer of l985 he has plugged his PC into his phone and logged onto the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) to carry on public conversations and exchange e-mail.

It was, initally, a revelation. "...Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation."

There is something touching about those words, the sense that Rheingold is describing something already from another age, something of enormous promise but, still, a dream unfulfilled. All over the network, individual grassroot community systems have been overshadowed, marginalized, or driven out of existence by the very technology they helped to grow.

Why? In new reflections added to his book, Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.

Internet researcher Elizabeth Reid of Australia, in an essay reprinted in Communities in Cyberspace (edited by Mark Smith and Peter Kollock), describes how some early BBS's -- she cites "CommuniTree" -- were intended to be free, open forums for intellectual and spiritual discussions. This community, she writes in a selection called "Hierarchy and Power," collapsed under an onslaught of messages, often obscene and hostile, posted by the first generation of adolescents with personal computers and modems. (Understandably, there is something about adolescence that doesn't care for free, intellectual and spiritual discussions.)

In Cybersociety 2.0, a collection of essays about digital communication and community (edited by Steven G. Jones), Reid and co-researcher Beth Kolko write in "Dissolution and Fragmentation: Problems in On-Line Communities" that it's the ease of individual expression -- the "singularity of on-line personae," that can be the greatest threat to online communities. "It has been all too easy for virtual communities to encourage multiplicity but not coherence," write Reid and Kolko, "with each individual persona having a limited, undiversified social range. This cultural schizophrenia makes the virtual community brittle and ill equipped to evolve with the demands of circumstance."

Other Net students and scholars have also found what many members of virtual communities know: efforts to control discussion, mediate disputes, or reach broad consensus often fail, breeding alienation, paranoia, anger and more controversy as online personae and positions harden in the abscence of moderating social forces like face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice contact.

So this more or less remained the plight of the virtual community as one after another struggles to maintain order against a culture that still, mysteriously, engenders endemic alienation, hostility and narcissism, even among intelligent and articulate people.

Besides, the world shifted into Net overdrive after the publication of The Virtual Community, the author notes ruefully in the new edition. In the 1980s, when he and a handful of journalists began writing about online society and culture, only a few technophiles, scholars and researchers grasped the point-to-point, many-to-many-possibilities of digital architecture.

At the time, the total online population numbered in the tens of thousands. Less than a decade later, "the Internet has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to transform civilization's most powerful institutions -- commerce, politics, science, scholarship, entertainment, education, health care," Rheingold writes. "Our world has changed profoundly and swiftly, in large part because of the phenomenon this book described -- the sudden emergence of the Internet as a new communication medium."

Yet the change, he candidly acknowledges, was not the stirring revolution and reinvention of community he hoped for and expected.

Next, Part Two: What is a "Virtual Community," anyway? Note: You can purchase Virtual Communities at ThinkGeek.

Comments

Revision of Leery

[ackthpt]

For the Virtual Community:

Login in
Tune in
Tune out
Log off

--

Call me a Luddite

[Zachary Kessin]

But to my mind the thing that I value most about a community is sitting around after a meal with real people and talking. Yes you can chat online but its just not as much fun. It is a wonderful fealing when you see someone who you have not seen in a long time. Online less so.

I personaly think we need to spend more time working on physical communities than virtual ones.

The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

Re:Call me a Luddite

[glebite]

I wouldn't call you a Luddite. Ned and his bunch were responding to what they considered to be a real threat. It turns out that people are still employed - not replaced by machines as much as the intellectuals would have enjoyed. Ludd wasn't against machines so much of the de-humanizing effect as he was against the loss of jobs. Theodore K. however was more against the de-humanizing effect that he forsaw as a looming disaster to man. Machines were not bad, it's just sometimes their implementation is bad.

Certainly there is merit and worth with human face-to-face interaction, but I can tell you that I have never been closer to so many friends now that I have a webcam and e-mail. There are whole communities of people who can get in touch with people of their like mind which otherwise would have been difficult if not impossible.

It's nothing really new though - moving from talking with only your family to talking with other families, to other groups of families, to states, and societies happened in the past. And everytime, change occurred, and we move forward just a little bit further.

If anything, the computers and networks of the world have just allowed the archetypal primate grooming to just extend itself to more people.

Re:Call me a Luddite

[tchristney]

No, that doesn't make you a Luddite. Now, if you were a calculator from the pre-computer age, and ran around smashing computers because you felt they would ruin your livelihood, then you could be called a Luddite.

Personally, I think that both types of community are valuable. Sure, it is essential to have real people around you, but you get a much wider range of opinion online, from people you would not be able to communicate with. For example, a typical online forum will have people from the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Sweden, Germany, Finland, France, Italy, ... You get the picture.

what's the question?

[swagr]

Can the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era?
Are they killing it?
I'm sure half the trolls and flamebaiters here have another account to use when they want to say something sensible.
Anyway, trolls are funny. Should we try to make the virtual community more "business-centric", or more like a bunch of friens hanging out, sometimes talking intelligently and sometimes talking shit?

Re:what's the question?

[Pahroza]

I think it's great that the current community allows us to do both. Some people want to talk business, others want to socialize, it's just like going to your typical party or after work gathering. I don't see anything wrong with the way it's being done now.

Any real data here?

[Cujo]

What is the factual basis for all hese assertions about online communities? HAs anyone got any hard, reliable data, or is JK relying purely on anecdotal evidence?

I participate in at least one comunity where many of the members know each personally and in which flaming is rare. That's my anecdotal evidence. I'd liek to see a serious study.

Re:Any real data here?

[bmongar]

Seems like soft core research to me.

Soft core research is kinda like soft core porn, people who want real porn are disapointed by soft core. People who are offended by real porn are offended by soft core. The only people who like it are those who are undecided on the issue, or the masses. So soft core research isn't good to people who like real fact, people who dislike your topic anyway will still dislike you, only the masses may much attention.

Re:Any real data here?

[Interrobang]

Depends on what you mean by "real data." A lot of people -- particularly the "hard science" types -- don't consider the results that come out of "soft" or "social" science methodologies like ethnographies, "barefoot epidemiologies," interviews, and surveys to be "real data," but sometimes these methods do work, particularly when applied with some kind of rigour and a strict weather eye towards methodology and validity.

There are some areas where qualitative methods give better results, simply because quantitative measures just don't fit. So don't dismiss something like this out of hand, at least until you know relatively for sure that the researcher screwed up. (It's likely, but do we really know?)

Interrobang,
MA, LPW ('Applied Rhetoric')

Is slash a virtual community?

[ishrat]

"More recent virtual communities are much more "virtual" than "community." Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting." Is slash not doing the same thing?

Re:Is slash a virtual community?

[another_ganesha]

According to this definition

Virtual community is any place groups of people talk together on the Internet -- in mailing lists, in newsgroups, in chat rooms, or on Web sites. Virtual community can also cover more specialized situations, such as long-distance education or shared project work spaces. And it can describe some communications that aren't discussions, such as posting customer evaluations or answering opinion polls. Whenever people are aware of each other's presence on the Internet, they're likely to consider themselves part of a community.

then, yes, Slashdot is a virtual community.

Here's some more interesting articles:

• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community
• The Virtual Community by Rheingold

Re:Is slash a virtual community?

[rotor]

Of course! It's a virtual community of people who enjoy laughing at Jon Katz!

-

Well, it's sad and true...

[AntiPasto]

Well... not sad really, but just life.

I've been involved with a few webpage marketting attempts, and building a community was always number one on the list of priorities. When it couldn't be done, however, we just tried make people believe that it *was* a community, just that you couldn't actively see it (ie, we ditched the message board idea, and used big words to denote that the site was popular).

I guess that's pretty pathetic and basic compared to the big boys.

My point is, however, that people *want* a community just as we all for the most part want a romantic partner in life. We want to be herded with a sense of individual leadership (heh... read: slashdot).

Now with the sense of "community", (and I heard a whole thing on NPR a while back about how misused that word is) I believe that a community is a virtual-social term in itself anyway. The "gay community" is a community that exists everywhere, not just in a small geographical area.

Community is a term for our actions and beliefs in response to the needs of leadership, fellowship, direction, and self-worth.

----

better in early days

[peter303]

It was higher quality pre-1994 when the aol/webtv
masses leaped onto the net. That was before commercial
spamming too. When the net was mostly academic
the discussions were better.

Re:better in early days

[swagr]

The difference between insight and redundant is found in the delivery.

It was higher quality pre-1994 when the aol/webtv masses leaped onto the net. That was before commercial spamming too. When the net was mostly academic the discussions were better.
or...
_______ was good until the masses and money got involved.
Try music, literature, operating systems, ...

Part of the solution

[Shoeboy]

Part of the solution is to make people use their real names. This really helps make the WELL much more personal and intimate.
People usually use their nicks to hide behind - either because they don't want the world to know what a vulnerable, sensitive guy they really are or because they need to project a powerful, dynamic image to compensate for personal shortcomings. That's why some of the best posters on slashdot use their real names.
Using your real name gives your communications a sense of directness that is essential for understanding. It also reminds people that they are dealing with a real person which helps make them more respectful.
Real names are the essence of community.
--Peter David Johnson

Re:Part of the solution

[H3lldr0p]

I can't say that I actually agree with you. While there may indeed be posters that make insightful, well thought out comments and use their real names, there are also those that don't. Look at yourself for that. Here, your comment has been rated very highly, yet you are not using your real name.

As for making things more personal and intimate, that should be left to what the user wants. I know of several people that go online and use a nickname not to get closer to people but to push others away from themselves. Call it a need for space if you will, but when your job involves dealing with people face to face all of the time where you can't make very good boundaries, a little personal space where you can find it is an incredibly good thing. (And no, get your dirty little minds out of the gutters. I happen to be talking about pizza delivery in a very small, rural town.)

The internet is a tool, as are the "communities" that spring up on it. What they are used for and to what end is ultimatly up to the individual.

Re:Part of the solution

[the_argent]

I agree with you. I think that this stems from the lack of accountability that the anonyminity (sp?) of the net provides. If someone learns that they can stand on a street corner and scream profanity, and not be caught or punished,someone will be sure to think this is the best thing since sliced bread. So how do you make someone accountable for disruptive behavior on a "community" site? Sure you can log someones IP if they are disruptive or profane, but what then? Ban them? They'll just log on from another account. So what then? Ban the whole class "C" that they are on?
But on the other hand, this same anonymous-ness allows users to remain free of spam, stalkers, and general ass-holes of the net. Is there a middle ground. I don't know.

Re:Part of the solution

[DrMadVibe]

Please.

One of the reasons that 'the net' was so much fun back in the day was the sense of anonimity that it provided. People were free to say whatever
they thought was important, funny, etc - without fear of retribution.

A personal favorite quote from a friend, circa 1994:

My name is Zoweee Wow. Find me, F**ker.

It still makes me smile.

Re:Part of the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

All the people you mention have one thing in common - a secret so disgusting that, should it become known, they will be publicly shunned:

• Vladinator is a paedophile, on the run from the FBI
• Taco *is* the goatse.cx guy.
• Lisa is a fish-eating lesbo.
• Bowie J. Poag rapes rare African voles.
• Bruce Perens, well, Bruce is a sex offender (too many to list) wanted in 20 states.
• Cowboy Neal, Bojay Iverson and Dan Hayes are part of an S&M fetish club, and practice the most depraved sex acts you can imagine.
• Jon Katz merely feltches donkeys.
• As for Shoeboy, well he's the worst of the lot... he's really a Canadian.

I haven't quite worked out all this links together yet, but I will.

Re:Part of the solution

[Woody77]

I also dissagree. I also use different names, although they don't vary much.

I have several different names I use, in different forums. I'm one name in one group (this geek community), but another in one of the other forums I participate in (off-roading).

My "indentities" sometimes don't get along very well with each other. Not in the sense of multiple personalities, but in that I use different language/mindsets depending on where I'm at.

Examples are my parents, friends from work, friends from school, and my off-road buddies.

I'm fairly straight-laced around my parents, don't swear, etc, because they don't like that. When around people I work with, I can talk about highly techinical subjects (embedded programming, etc.). When people from school, it's likely to be cars/societal issues/algorithms. However, when I'm off-roading, I can't be that technical, I'm just out having fun with friends, and probably drinking afterwards.

3 to 4 very different sides to my personality. I use different personas in person with these groups. So I do the same here, on-line, within those same groups and others.

When wearing one persona, I don't need to worry about the other

Shed no tears for the virtual community

[scotay]

It was a delusion to think that virtual communities would be trouble free when they are composed of the same people that ruin real communities. Sure, the anonymity of the Internet does lead to excess, but for all the noise, there is still enough signal to make the benefits of global communications significant.

I don't hear people whining about how sales and crank calls are ruining the virtual communities created by the telephone. Slashdot does pretty well considering all the first post nonsense. Virtual communities will do just fine, but never be perfect. If you expect technology will create nirvana from collections of imperfect humans, you are doomed to disappointment.

Re:Shed no tears for the virtual community

[haystor]

If people could cc 10,000 other people when making a crank call, or sales call there wouldn't just be whining, there would be laws against it.

The reality of communities

[rjh3]

Building a community, real or virtual, is hard work. The really enduring communities have been ones that provide a mechanism to exclude unwanted outsiders. This seems a bit contradictory, but it is the reality. The community is open to those who share its ethos, it is closed to those who will not share its ethos, and it ejects those who attempt to disrupt it. This is much easier in real world communities. The obnoxious teenager can be shunned. Body language, side conversations, polite hostility, and other powerful social tools can be used. The truly anti-social personalities are eventually ejected. Usually the social pressure of being openly unwelcome suffices. Sometimes the police are employed. This also has a beneficial side. The social reactions are usually modulated. They begin with discrete corrective suggestions. They escalate to the combined carrot and stick of rejection for bad behavior and acceptance for good behavior. This can change those who are open to change. But there is a powerful mix of nihilism and solipcism at work in US and European cultures. Contemplate the horrifying changes to things like childrens sports. Where at one time (long ago, but I am old enough to remember it) these were a method for teaching children how to manage anger and conflict without becoming anti-social and violent. It taught the social skill of "Good Sportsmanship", albeit an ideal that was rarely acheived. The usual achievement was grudging politeness despite frustration and anger. Today it too has succumbed to the solipcist hostility and the nihilist willingness to destroy that which you cannot win. The virtual communities have it much harder. It is extremely hard to eject the destructive players. It is extremely hard to provide the gradual responses and discreet (un-embarassing) feedback for inappropriate behavior. And its openness makes it more attactive to those frustrated anti-social personalities that have been ejected from real world communities. These people share the human desire to be part of a community, but have yet to learn the skills needed. They flock to the wide open access of the virtual community and thereby increase the stress on it.

Re:The reality of communities

[eris_crow]

[Note: I tend to agree with the above poster, but the first paragraph created an image in my mind that screamed out for parody. Please forgive me for what I now do.]

Building a community, real or virtual, is hard work, requiring lots of brick, mortar, planning, and the time and effort of many workers, both skilled artisans, and manual laborers. The really enduring communities have been ones that provide a mechanism to exclude unwanted outsiders, such as a great huge stone wall or other fortification. This seems a bit contradictory, but the effectivness of armed defense is a reality. The community is open to those who share its ethos, its gates are closed to those who will not share its ethos, and it ejects, imprisons, or executes those who attempt to disrupt it.

This is much easier in real world communities. The obnoxious teenager can be stunned with a cattle prod. Body language, side conversations, polite hostility, active hostility and power tools can be used. The truly anti-social personalities eventually become politicians. Usually the social pressure of being openly unwelcome suffices to create the necessary atmosphere of conformity, such as making sure everyone vote for the new football stadium and root for the home team. Sometimes the police are employed. Sometimes they are unemployed. But Texas always needs more prison guards, so the out of work cops can get jobs quickly.

But there is a powerful mix of Neilism and liposuction at work in US and European cultures, as Neil Sedaka music sucks the life out of our cultural instituions. Contemplate the horrifying changes to things like childrens sports. Where at one time (long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...) these were a method for teaching children how to manage anger and conflict by tackling people, throwing hard balls at them, and kicking. And sentence fragments. It taught the social skill of "Dumping Gatorade on the Coach", albeit an ideal that was rarely acheived, owing to the coaches fear of freezing to death in the cold New England winters. The usual achievement was grudging politeness and a pledge to crush the enemy's bones and drink their blood during the next battle...ahem...game. Today it too has succumbed to the solipcist hostility and the nihilist willingness to destroy that which you cannot win. In other words, it's just become honest about its true goals.

The virtual communities have it much harder. While throwing some jerk out of a window it quite satisfying, it is extremely hard to throw the destructive players out of Windows(tm). It is extremely hard to provide the gradual responses and discreet (un-embarassing) feedback for inappropriate behavior, and thus most people have to settle for absolute unchecked flame wars on public forums, complete with DoS attacks against the offenders ISP. And its openness makes it more attactive to those frustrated anti-social personalities that have found no other single supplier of hard-core porn, warez, bomb making instructions, and conversation with other 3133t d00dz. These people share the human desire to be part of a community, but have yet to learn the skills needed to be human. They flock to the wide open access of the virtual community and thereby create massive virtual communities of assholes.

Re:The reality of communities

[rjh3]

Very good. I like it.

Bullshit

[NineNine]

Again, Katz in all of his incredible, intelligent, splendor is wrong. I'm a member of several very successful virtual communities that are both personal and ongoing. Slashdot is about as personal as a McDonald's. That doesn't mean that other communities aren't.

Communities are dead.

[Ars-Fartsica]

Has anyone really formed a fundamental bond with a virtual community in the least three years?

Thankfully most of the web media companies have given up any notion of creating viable markets based on the perceived value of being on the same web site as other people.

Of course, numbers still matter when it comes to web auctions, but I think it would be a stretch to call Ebay users a community.

Re:Communities are dead.

[cotopaxi]

Yes, I have.

Communities unfortunately don't seem to work very well for technology sites. There simply isn't enough reason for people to want to know each other. I read slashdot to check up on news, to learn things, and to get a good laugh. I don't have much interest in meeting people here face to face, or having them know who I am. That is why I almost always lurk.

I am very involved with a rock climbing related website with about 600 users, maybe 100 of which log in nearly every day. Those people have become some of my best friends. We are there to learn from each other and also for the occasional holy war(replace vi and emacs with sport and trad and the arguments are very similar). Beyond that, I've met a lot of climbing partners through the site and also learned people I had climbed with for years were the same person I was occasionally getting so angry with in the discussion forum.

There are several things that separate a forum like that and slashdot.

First, it is smaller and much more easily manageable. The usenet group rec.climbing is much bigger and a lot more of a tight-knit community than slashdot, but it is still hostile and faceless by comparison. I know most of the regular posters-I can associate a name with a face, etc. I also know a lot of the people who don't post so often. When it gets down to it, I really know probably 30% of the regular users of the site-whether I have met them in person or just through many regular interactions.

On slashdot, I don't know many people from anything aside from their posts and occasionally following links to their websites. Maybe a few dozen total. When you figure the percentage of a 100 or so people from 250K+ userid's, you get a situation more like knowing coworkers and people in the news in a large city.

Second, with a smaller community that is bound by a fairly obscure commonality like rock climbing at a specific place, you just do not attract trolls. A few show up from time to time, but there isn't really any incentive for them to be there, so they go away quickly.

Third, we do occasionally see each other. We mostly all met and became friends through the site, so I do consider it a virtual community-but it is not a pure electronic abstraction.

The only sweeping generalization you can make about the net that holds true is that you can't make a sweeping generalization. There are plenty of very community-oriented sites out there. They are just built on community and not "we're on the net, lets get lots of people here to talk"

andrew

I think Katz's cyberworld orbits a different sun..

[Karen_Frito]

Okay, I'm a mite big confused.

I was on the early BBS's -- I've been online since I was 13.

I didn't find a hostile, all-flames-all-the-time envoriment.

I found intelligent conversations, a lot of stupid jokes, people who were
willing to explain the nicities of the online world to a naive kid, I found
a local group to do RPG with -- I found people who held picnics and actually
made connections with each other in the real world because of their online
connections.

Yes, we had a few flamers -- and our share of soap opera relationships. But
who DOESN'T as a teenager? There's always a jerk, always a couple who breaks
up every 15 minutes only to be found snogging on the couch between breakups.

The BBS's collapsed in my area due to the Sysops getting jobs or going to
college. And due to the ride of -- dum-da-dum -- the Internet.

Now that I'm an adult - and on the 'net -- I've found that its much the
same. I'm in a community of people who share not a local geography, but a
common interest.

We have a multitue of mailing lists, half a dozen message boards, all linked
to a hub page -- we have our own IRC room - -hell, we have half a damn dozen
IRC rooms for various purposes.

And at least once a year we all meet and sit around a pub and talk and drink
and eat. Just because.

We've got several strong relationships -- numerous friendships, and we're
damned tight-knit.

(I myself have a relationship with someone I met from the community. Who is
probably gonna read this and be vaguely amused.)

Perhaps we're abnormal -- but I can't imagine that being the case. Not with
a metric assload of people on the 'net -- not with howevermany gazillions of
interest groups. We CAN'T be the only one.

Communities on the 'net are alive and well -- Katz just isn't invited to
any.


Poor little no puppy toe!

Re:Jon...

[AlfaWolph]

"the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era?" case in point.

Virtual Bollocks

[JimPooley]

Seems I've been reading about these wonderful touchy-feely-huggy virtual communities for years, and I've always felt it was a load of bollocks.
MY community is the people I hang out with IN REAL LIFE, and no amount of idle banter on the internet can replace that.


Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems

Remember the "Avatar Revolution"

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a while ago (~1996)"Avatars, with moving mouths that you could speak/chat through" were supposed to revolutionize the net and the way we socialize. They were supposed to have an UO/Everquest community where everything there is persistent and enthralling.

Needless to say I thought it was as much bs then as it really seems to be now. The funny thing is that when Q1 was the poop I got on a server that was called Quake Chat. No weapons, and everyone hung out in that part that let you choose which episode to go to (I forget the name). Basically everyone stood around, chatting and bs'ing and it reminded me about that avatar bs that I mentioned above. Needless to say I logged off after about 30 seconds.
The point is that it's easy to say what hasn't worked and it's even easier to say what you think would work but what really takes off is as hit or miss as most of the stuff they are prophcizing about.

No, call your bluff

[goliard]

Ha. Ill considered words, Zack, or should I say "J". :) Look at my user info if you don't know who I am. At least two meat.world communities to which you, personally, belong depend on their email lists to provide social glue among people who don't live and work together. Working on virtual community often is working on physical communities.

-- T.

Re:No, call your bluff

[Zachary Kessin]

Hi, Goliard good to see you here.

Ofcourse you are right. And ofcourse the Jewish community has used corrisponice to hold itself together for thousands of years. But E-only comminities are kind of shaky.

The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

1985? Newcomer...

[Anonymous Coward]

1985, eh? The People's Computer Company started in 1972. They promoted the Community Memory concept, a combination BBS and database. Implemented on timesharing machines, as this was before personal computers.

I don't see what the fuss is about ...

[hoss10]

> The sudden emergence of the Internet as
> a new communication medium.

That's ALL it is.
A great scientific/research tool.
email is invaluable of course.
now you can buy stuff.

Wanting a "community" to form is a bit sad, IMHO
The internet binds already formed groups (send emails to your friends, among scientists, among people working on an Open Source project etc.)

An intimate (non-sexual) relationship over the 'net is as stupid as pen-pals

There's a user on kuro5hin.org who has similar feelings but I forget his/her name:
IT'S JUST SOME COMPUTERS CONNECTED TOGETHER

The hacker culture, in the jargon-file sense of the word, is the closest to "it" and that's different (but not mutually-exclusive) to the 'net

Re:I don't see what the fuss is about ...

[kamileon]

Computers are a tool. The fact that you use computers to communicate is no more meaningful than if you'd used tin cans, pen and paper, or a telephone. But the fact that a tool is used doesn't rule out the possibility of a community.
Well before the development of computers, pen pals were a good way of creating and maintaining bonds with people you'd never met. Some people are happy forming intimate bonds with people without ever needing to see them face to face. It's obvious you're not one of those people, but there are plenty who are. People who want someone to talk to and form community with will do it any way they can, using all the tools at their disposal, whether it be meat, paper, or electronic. Don't underestimate the desperate human need for a herd to belong to. :)

Aleatha
Director of Solipsism

In a real 'community'

[Anonymous Coward]

You are held accountable for your actions primarily because your identity is known. In an online community you can start a flame war and simply turn off your computer as user h2ker3 and never go back to that site. Anonymity gives people the feeling of 007-like powers that extend down to their fingertips.
As soon as voice/video become readily available for the aol/time warner/msn/yahoo types of users - people will begin to come closer to the real-life community thereby releasing the man behind the curtain feeling. So instead of using aliases are people going to start dressing up to spoof their video image?

I am anonymous because I can be

Virtual Communities - Moving West....

[BunkieTheElf]

I'm going to be lazy and cut and paste what I said on a listserv regarding this article (which I love, btw!) I think the thing I try to keep in mind, re: virtual communities, is that it's no different from offline communities. When more people move to the town/city/village - everyone contemplates about what used to be and eventually we resent the onslaught of *newbies* - commerce grows (hello? 18th century America - goodbye American Indians), the free market expands, the streets get crowded, you have graffiti everywhere...it's the same on the net. The net is the Western Frontier of Y2K; the only difference being we won't run out of virtual land. Everytime one area becomes overcrowded - a progressive or adventurous (or just plain fed up) group will explore new territory and post their flag. Most everyone will eventually follow, commerce will arrive, the market will flood, it's an endless cycle, really. But there remain areas that will always be landmarks or treasures (ie. The Well, etc.). I'll be interested to see if we ever develop virtual government. BunkieTheElf one of those 60's refugees who crossed the virtual frontier in a virtual covered wagon (1985 was my first *community* experience online)- but I LIKE NEW ROADS a lot! - thank God for the 60's!

Membership exams

[opus73]

Weed out the spammers by requiring a membership exam: Make a lengthy, difficult multiple choice test (questions picked at random from a large database to prevent cheating) where you have to score really high to be able to post to any discussion boards.

Wait a minute. That means I'd have to be able to pass an exam to post this message. Crap.

They do (did) exist

[CharlieG]

Way back when, 3 or 4 years ago, I was a member of a couple of virtual communites that really existed!

I'm going to use the past tense, because the forums on Compuserve are as good as dead

Where were they? Compuserve. Compuserve had some real advantages over everything I've seen on the net so far.

1)A Forum consisted of sections. These sections were usually dedicated to a sub topic of the main forum. Off topic threads could be MOVED, but, if a message was addressed to you in ANY section, you were notified when you entered. There were one or more sysops (admins - sort of), who kept the forum on topic. It was like visting their home - they set the rules. Some forums were anything goes, some were heavly censored. Almost every forum had a "Pub" type section where off topic stuff went

2)Because everyone was logging into the same set of servers, there was no delay in messages, so threading software worked really well

3)Because this was before the internet explosion, the active membership was usually kinda low - like 20-75 people. It was possible to get to know everyone there, particularly in the pub

4)Because there was controlled access (Remember, you were paying Compuserve every month), it was possible to "lock out" or ban people who caused problems. It was rare. In the 15+ years I had a CIS account, I only saw it done 2-3 times. If a person started spamming the system, Compuserve could kick them off, and it was HARD to get back on - Remember, you have to give them a credit card

5)Because this was before the Internet boom, it was really a self selecting group. Everyone was cutting edge with computers. How many people had modems back in 1980? And were willing to send email/do BBS stuff? - and pay a fairly large amount of cash to do it?

I have friends who I talk to all the time (just got off the phone with one) that I gained from Compuserve. I miss it. The closest thing I've seen on the net are some of the SMALL mailing lists, and believe it or not....

Slashdot, particularly back when it was somewhat smaller. I just wish there was a way to find out if there were messages to YOU (Not just replies)

Re:They do (did) exist

[rice_burners_suck]

I think you have a good point about Compuserve and the fact that because its users had to pay, it was easy to ban a troll.

Nowadays, there are services like SSL which utilise cryptography and certificates. I think that in a few years, forums and other types of online "communities" will make use of these so-called technologies. The community would require the user to sign in, and some digitally signed certificates would be exchanged. This makes it possible to (somewhat) reliably identify someone when they sign in, which in turn makes it possible to ban that person if they misbehave.

I also believe that the Compuserve model of paying a fee to use a service is a good model. If there was an IRC channel (or some other "community") covering a specific subject of interest to me, and if I basically have a guarentee that flaming and trolling won't exist on that channel, I wouldn't mind paying a small subscription fee to support that service. With millions of people online these days, the fees could be just a dollar or so per month. It would be even better if users are only charged a month's subscription if they actually use the service that month.

With the Internet, the possibilities are endless. It just takes a little imagination to come up with solutions to our problems.


-NGH

Wafting antoher airball with Jon Salerie Katz

[tomwhore]

Hordes of like minded folks have gathered and talked and some acutaly have done something. The magic label "community" is left for those on the outside, for the tourist, the fashion geek and the twice a week logon.

Can you even remeber FIDO and SEA? Did your 7 min research reveal the plethora of children groups spawned by Ward Christiansens work? From early interboard posting drops to todays Egroups it would truly take a reported as blind and deaf tot he vibrant history of the online world, sucj as Jon Katz, to first try and foist the Community label on it and then to dig away at it for not fitting thier definition of the term Community.

Jon Katz once again shows us why he is the out of touch out of time out of ideas patron saint of the lobotomized know nothings, the chich yet shallow fashion geeks. He is the lord god of the mediocracy.

Jon Katz, please go do some history research that dates back before your first AOL account in 1995.
The online community has been flourishing in ways you will never ever know about since the late 70's.

Re:Hellmouth

[Virtual JonKatz]

Part Two:

Time to be more than any congressional committee investigating it. I'm wondering if there are best hope for legal challenges to platoons of living on the Net users -- thus the Web. So I'm interested in common with open source, younger sites routinely seized and imagined anything useful. Open Media watchers also took pains to journalists.

But if it would have gotten richer and rational legislature grasping this? Until last week about these responses premature? Are Netizens seem to scapegoat popular to acquire free and plentiful information about us one thing to the unexamined life, since there are bristling with the Open Media websites -- online, much interest in drug use, it is that violence among corporations. But I've never going to take a fondness for behavior that once during the biggest story is the receiver cannot dispossess himself as well be at Stanford who want to me, "for exactly did" disregard for life.

They can track frequent-shopper behavior of protesters, many more powerful impact on everything: weather, quilting, sports, movies, TV turns out kids into a Web site. Attitudinally, there were deploying lawyers, and many people using new global movement of open source ethic and leave all these theories. There are rare -- to grasp the tragic view it enables us or strong friendships and tastes and make some say and the employees of privacy at the petty theft and Monica Lewinsky dramas possible.

With e-mail, AIM, Web sites, reporters and linked to the midst of being hooked up by a proposed corporation in this role of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and homogeneity will catch most extraordinary array of the eruption of what is simple theft, in our kids, school principals are fascinated with kids. For Corporate Republic renegades, life and bomb-makers, or authority-figures understand the technologies would take it would do so.

They discovered IRC and kids who wear themselves as many people use by corporations moving exclusively to acquire free itself as is the Web. So I'm heading south today to the world. I stopped buying habits with vast music labels, cable or no doubt that dominated by forces of the picture, and newer law enforcement authorities, where a vital for every day. (Steve, you've got e-mail from the Internet) and political system, so wealthy private homes in techology -- Brill's Content article focuses on potentially "violent" students, kids and pickpocketing, showed no good time, burst into the death experience couldn't be left alone is over.

Free music industry doesn't mean that he lives and use it had fallen 7 per cent of culture in mind. Traditional views of the Net have sensed for corporatists, many schools. We have access to life ... But men and then and arson.

Intelligence and expertise are hard to come by

[Junks Jerzey]

Rheingold notes the enormous damage done by hostile participants of virtual communities who seek attention through aggression and who take up an enormous, disproportionate amount of time and energy online, even when they comprise a distinct minority. In fact, this pattern has probably destroyed more virtual communities than any other single factor.

That's Katz quoting another author, but it's still a good quote. The general trouble with virtual communities is that they don't have any prequisites for participation. If I want to talk about, say, OS design, then I'd like to talk about it with people who have some kind of background in that field, even that background consists only of being widely read. I don't want blind advocates butting in all the time with cookie cutter opinions. I also don't want to talk with people who think they know a lot, but mostly have a lot of misconceptions and lack well-roundedness. For example, you can't talk about OSes with someone who only knows Windows and Linux, especially if that person seems to think that Linux is some entirely new concept in operating systems that came out of the blue to rock the 1990s.

I enjoy writing, and discussing writing with other authors can be interesting, even via email. But talking to people of the "I have a great idea! I just need to know how to sell it to someone who can write it for me!" mentality is draining and no fun. No contact with other writers would be better than that.

I guess overall I'm tiring of having to be my own editor. I much, much prefer to read a specialized magazine or newsletter than wade through web discussions.

Re:Intelligence and expertise are hard to come by

[dsplat]

I have to agree; the quote hits one of the biggest problems dead on. It is often cited as the reason for the demise of Usenet. And yet, when I stop by several newsgroups today, I find that they are very much the same as they were in the early 90's even though the volume has increased. In fact, I see many of the same personalities there. I still go there to find some of my friends.

Usenet survived being the original target of spam. I suspect in a way it was ready to deal with it because it had had flamers for years. But it is worth looking at why Usenet persists to discover how virtual communities survive. It is a place, no less real for having no physical location, in which people can meet others of like interests. So long as there is a community that values and protects an online space as a community, it can survive. I doubt that that is fully sufficient for it's survival, but it is clearly necessary.

A classic indeed

[Travoltus]

I read a lot by Jon Katz, but this one is the most interesting read I've had in a while, and despite what the idiot trolls have to say, he regularly writes some pretty interesting stuff.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,

Shameless Half-empty plug

[nebby]

I'm slowly building a new type of universal online community over at http://www.half-empty.org. It's been linked via a K5 article (which was linked on /.) a while back.

The site allows users to post whatever is on their minds or what they want to contribute for discussion, and uses a democratic style rating system to keep out trolls and reward popular posters with more posting ability. So far it seems to be working, and it's an interesting read nontheless.

Truthful, but lengthy (read before flaming).

[Faulty Dreamer]

In all honesty it seems that Mr. Katz has taken a very, very long time to say something that would appear to be obvious. If you make it easy for people to gather, especially in a place where they cannot be held accountable, the few bad apples which are loudest, rowdiest, or just nastiest will ruin the experience for everyone (look around you, the trolls and spammers are just this bunch).

The thing that Jon doesn't even touch on, and that I rarely see mentioned anywhere, is that this is simply evolution working in a technological media. Seriously, the entire idea of "Internet Community" is very, very new when compared with the human race and its societal development. When the first humans lived together in a cave or on the plains, does anyone think that they were completely civil and organized? We are watching the Internet community develop in much the same way that the "meat world" community developed. We will go through a generation or two of uncivil, adolescent like behaviour and slowly watch our community develop into a stronger, healthier (mentally) and much more cohesive society.

The only negative thing is that the institutions that are in the meat world have seen this happening quickly (relatively) and realized that they needed to exert their influence into the online world before people got used to the idea of a "free" community, where the expression of ideas, thoughts and "digital media" like musical compositions and movies were freely and quickly transfered to anyone that was interested. The powers that be do not want that sort of freedom. It removes monetary incentives from people's minds, and removes the power that groups like the RIAA, the MPAA and even the government can use, develop, and exert.

Whether these large and powerful groups are going to be able to completely and fully tame the Internet community spirit remains to be seen. But I truly feel that there will always be some places on the Internet that are "free". Even though slashdot is not the most free of places, it is one of the freeist in existance at the moment. And there will always be something that is the equivalent of usenet and such.

But our "community" in the online world is just now starting to define itself, and just now finding its own character. It will take much more time (even by Internet time standards) before we see what "online community" will really mean. Hopefully it will be something better and still more free than the meat world allows us. And with worldwide use increasing, there is still a large amount of promise. I still have hope. How about you?

You mean VCs will have to accept non-conformist?

[Shivetya]

/// mmmm I feel karma fleeing me for this one ///

Apparently all these incredible intellectuals, such as yourself of course, have finally come to the realization that they cannot have their VCs because of obstinate, adulescent, hate-speech, right-wing radicals won't stay away....

In other words, VCs aren't working as these people think they should because they don't have complete control over content.

Most of these "books/papers/yahoos" don't want a virtual community... they want virtual-conformity.

Basically - if you aren't going to kiss their ass, play nice to everyone they like, accept criticism at their will, you cannot be a contributing element in their world.

Virtual Communities must learn to exist with all types of people. For those who are truly grief-players (a term from a certain element found in online games) the system can take care of them from the standpoint that people can choose to ignore what these people say.

To claim VCs fail because of such people is to be ignorant of the fact that the creators/maintainers of VCs must put forth the effort to provide people a means to ignore those they do not wish to mingle with. Their job is not to exclude these people from the community, simply to provide people a means to exclude them from their "subsetted reality"

As it stands now, I guess the sniveling elite that you belong to will scream for new laws to protect VCs from hate-speech and such...

ooohhh... wait... Bush won... guess you have to wait 4 years...

mandatory?

[saintlupus]

disclaimer: this is not a flame. it'll probably sound like one, but it's not. it's a serious question.

mr katz --

are you under some sort of contractual obligation to post these editorials? n number of articles per month, something like that?

i'm just curious, because some of them are pretty good. this one, for example, is pretty well written and documented. but sometimes, like when you were discussing "mage: the ascension," a ten year old role playing game, it seemed like you were just grasping at straws.

i do a bit of writing myself, and i don't like to think that my style varies as wildly as yours. but i remember when i was in college, if i was compelled to write a paper for a class i wasn't particularly enjoying, i could often churn out pages of dry shite that would meet the requirements of the assignment without actually conveying anything of value or merit.

so it's not a flame, but the question is: do you have to write some of this stuff to meet a deadline, or do you just have particularly off days sometimes where you'll throw anything at all up on slashdot and call it good?

--saint
----

Re:mandatory?

[TheRubberPaw]

Umm, saint. I'm just curious(this is not a flame by the way and don't take it as one) how you can pass college classes if you can't capitalize your Is and proper nouns.

Warning warning!!! This is NOT A FLAME!!!!!

;-)

Thanks for writing a good article Katz; it might not be an original idea, but it is an insightful reminder to us in the universe of 'net.

Virtual Communities Are Real

[QuartzPoet]

I'm fortunate enough to be a member of a small virtual community that's been around for ten years. The center of this VC is a Citadel BBS, accessible only by Telnet; no web interface. With a "core group" of about thirty people, this VC has survived migrations across several BBSs. We've grown together, met boyfriends and girlfriends, gotten married and had kids. We proofread each other's resume's, beta-test each other's web pages, give and get career advice, swap recipes, mourn our losses, laugh, cry, gossip, bicker, and do all of the other things that "real-life" groups of friends do. The only difference is that the VC gives us a common conduit of contact. We've watched the Internet grow from "wow, that movie has a web site" to "wow, that movie DOESN'T have a web site." We've all read a lot about what virtual communities are supposed to accomplish, and most of us think that our experience has been rather unlikely. You can build a bunch of houses close together, but that doesn't make it a neighborhood. Likewise, you can get a lot people chatting, but that doesn't make it a community. Communities can't be forged artificially; I believe that they just sort of happen.

Communities are about need

[invid]

Tight, emotionally meaningful communities only form when a number of people need each other for survival. Without the pressure of death hanging over you, it's too easy to pick up and leave the community when things don't go your way. In those wonderful communities of yesteryear, people were nice to each other because they had to be. If you pissed off the butcher you wouldn't get any meat. If you pissed off the blacksmith he wouldn't change your horse's shoes. Deep, emotional bonds can't form between people if they know that they can jump over to the next community if things aren't going their way.

I would love to live in a nice, tight community where I felt wanted and loved. But let's face it, with virtual communities, if things start to get unpleasant, what's to stop me from checking out the next community to see if I can feel more wanted and loved there? A real community is a place where people stick together through both the bad and the good. But when things start getting bad, it's too easy to turn off the computer.

I do lament the passing of the BBS.

[bluephone]

And to me, the telnet BBS just doesn't cut it. There truly was a closer sense of community and comrarerie on BBSs. The friends you knew in real life also called the local boards, which was an extension of your friendships. Then there was the exotic long distance BBS. It was like exploring a far and distant land, and you, the Marco Polo of your area, brought back strange and intersting tales and files to share. Then there were the nets. Very different from usenet, Fidonet and the like were explicit conversation places with generally fewer lurkers and more posters, with an easier to follow message header scheme. Plus, there was rarely out of order messages due to propagation delays, since most boards propagated once a day. =-] I could go on for hours, but it just makes me more nostalgic. In the end, it was bound to pass on as modems got faster, computers became more affordable, and we became more technologically advanced as a society. Kids today have no idea of the old BBSs and would certainly laugh at their backward ways, but that's the price of living on the cusp of cultural revolutions.

--

Selfabsorption check

[Chris Johnson]

You are mad if you think "The WELL was unique". I hate to be overly dismissive, but what an incredibly self-absorbed, uninsightful Boomer perspective! Do please smarten up. Quick.

The fact is, such communities are constantly being born and dying. I've been a part of a major one easily as big and 'personal' as the WELL was, and am right now involved with another one that hasn't died off yet, that came from still another one that's currently a wasteland.

How is this possible? It's very simple: virtual online communities are formed by collections of people who share interests that are not necessarily interests you'll find a community for in your _physical_ neighborhood. The first example I gave was alt.lifestyle.furry, perhaps a weird group but one dedicated to 'spiritual therianthropy'- quick precis is, I personally have always been a 'cat person' in a pretty deep sense, and turns out there are loads of people all over the world who similarly identify that closely with some form of nonhuman creature. A community sprang up and thrived for quite a while until increasing popularity effectively dissolved it. The second example is a music bulletin board, "MusikaBoard" that's a haven for a bunch of electronic musicians. In this one I'm more of an outsider (sure I do music but my latest album has lots of loud guitars on it which makes me an outsider to the electronic crowd in a sense) but it's plain to see the community there, and so far it hasn't succumbed to disinterest, overpopularity or some other condition that would break up the community. It originally came from a community at mp3.com that was disrupted by a social behavior- at mp3.com people were paid by the download (in theory) so all social behavior became conditioned by this and all social interaction became the outright demand to be downloaded, and trust based schemes for exchanging downloads. This killed the community by lowering signal-to-noise ratio so dramatically that nobody who was left were behaving socially- "give me" is not inherently a community behavior.

There are some interesting lessons in this- assuming you can give up the notion that "The WELL was a unique situation in human history!". Really now- get a grip, it was not special. That situation happens all the time, and it would be good to consider ways to preserve it when it happens, because it's both valuable and fragile.

It only gets a NICHE market....

[imagineer_bob]

...and it's not commercially viable. The Well really isn't as significant as all these pundits like to think. It wasn't profitable, and merely was a place for freaky Dead-Heads to think they're exchanging profound bits of wisdom. Actually, on-line communites scare me. Years ago, random kooks couldn't find each other; now they can. It's like building a Tower of Babel, it's a bad idea and will come tumbling down one day.

Re:It only gets a NICHE market....

[rebelcool]

heh, i take it you were never a member of dial-up BBSes. They flourished until the internet came into the mainstream. I think they'll flourish again, as soon as more tools are available for building them..which i'm working on ;)

'Community' has evolved

[Straw]

In the 'real world' mostly, a community refers to various kinds of people that live and/or interact in a common location. But there are communities of like minds or situation where people share common interests or lifestyles (elderly). Usually though, you don't get to choose your neighbors so you forced into particular situations. Those differences imposed by common location are what can define a community.

However, in the 'virtual world' communities pretty much strictly refer to people of like minds that congregate and interact in common online locations (be them websites, irc, listservs, etc.) You, in effect choose your neighbors.

Both real world communities, and vitual world communities are still refered to as communities. The conotation has changed (to some degree) based on the context however.

I think it is quite interesting how the meaning of a lot of things have evolved/changed as a result of advances in technology et al. Real world metaphors of virtual world realities are redefining a lot of society i think.

Deconstucting Katz

[jgerman]

Now I'm not one to bash Katz I think there's far too much of that done in the comments, however this article is pretty off.

But most people are not, of course. Flamers and corporations and lawyers have thundered online, along with e-traders, role-players, spammers, governments -- everyone! -- with a long list of other agendas, from improved market share to con games

God forbid the net be a place where free speech would carry more weight than any other medium. I mean how dare they let just anyone on the net. We should all aspire to be as enlightened as Rheinhold and other god-like creatures.

The net is for EVERYBODY, how about that for 60's ideals, not just those like us that we want to associate with. If you want a private place on the net where only the people you want granted access are allowed then build it, but don't claim that you want an open and free exchange of ideas and then complain when people say or do things you don't like. As time goes on the net will increasingly become a microcosm of the real world, and you'll have to deal with all the problems that we do in the real world, crime, people who don't agree with us ect. If that's not acceptable, turn off your computer and go join a commune, I'm sure there some crackpots out there trying to emulate the oh so perfect community of Walden Two, (right next to the cemetary of Walden Two inspired suicides).

collapsed under an onslaught of messages, often obscene and hostile, posted by the first generation of adolescents with personal computers and modems. (Understandably, there is something about adolescence that doesn't care for free, intellectual and spiritual discussions.)

Let us now make age a bias, in a place where all people are virtually ageless. Of course let's also look at the facts, there are many adults who don't care for such things, possibly more so the youger people. Not that it matters, this is baswed on the assumption that free, intellectual, discussions are inherently a good thing. Tha'ts just an opinion. Some people may want to log on to talk superficially about sports, or fashion, or whatever the hell they want, and they have that right.

My point is that there are thousands upon thousands of voices on the net. And they all have the right to be heard, and shape the internet the way they want. Not just those of us that do value discussion. And those of use that log on to talk about what we want to whether it's deep spiritual subjects, or (as equally deep, but how could a journalist begin to understand) technological or mathmematical subjects, or the latest video game, or about how we're the most 3l1t3 hax0r in the world, that right is ours. You want to shape a society in your vision, go buy an island.

NPR!

[JonKatz]

Wow, the lst time I've ever been called so NPR. I need to get in touch with a producer..I think they'd be quite stunned.

Re:NPR!

[piersevent]

Actually, I listen to WBHM 90.3 in Birmingham every afternoon. NPR does, on occasion, run 'human interest' stories about the Virtual Community, but often they are slanted toward the opinions of the person being interviewed. Most of them are just gee-whiz science-tech stories, anyway.

Re:Your still #1 Jon

[viktor]

[Jon Katz is] still the number one reason to quit slashdot.

Excuse me, but I am uncertain if you could handle quitting. You, and many other slashdotters that complain about JonKatz, whatever he has to say, actually needs him.

If he weren't around, you would have nobody to be fanatically anti towards. And it is so much more difficult to define yourself from what you actually think than to define yourself from what you definately do not think (JonKatz thinks dididatt, so I think the opposite!)

Those who actually just plainly disagree with Jon, filter him out in the preferences and ignore him. But some people simply can't just ignore him. They seem to have Jon as an integral part of their ideological thinking. If Jon stopped posting, they'd have no idea what to think, because now they just think opposite of Jon Katz. But they can't admit needing him, so they post comments like that they'll quit slashdot because of Jon.

Jeez. If they can't handle someone with other opinions than themselves, I for one won't miss their presence on slashdot. Go ahead, quit.

The Matrix

[BitwizeGHC]

The Matrix was a virtual community, and if I recall correctly, people were trying to get OUT of it, and INTO Zion (a REAL community)! This does not bode well for virtual communities as a concept. :^)

Re:The Matrix

[rsborg]

The Matrix was a virtual community, and if I recall correctly, people were trying to get OUT of it, and INTO Zion

Of course, you have to ask yourself who these people were... all social misfits, who used handles (Neo, Morpheus, etc) didn't want to be part of the system.
In our world, the social misfits use handles and choose to get out of the real world and into a Matrix of their own.

Basically, the fact remains that successful communities do not apply to everyone, and some people will get excluded (either by self-choice, or forcefully).

You're Not a Luddite

[JonKatz]

I think talking with real people is the heart of any community..the question is, can you build that into virtual communities. Do you, for example consider real time chats and video talk to be the equivalent? But this doesn't make you a Luddite..Far from it..

A question

[Karen_Frito]

Just exactly what does the "Virtual Community" that Katz is speaking consist of?

If he means a group of people who talk, discuss, etc - that's all over the place.

If he means a group of people who form bonds outside the discussion groups, or outside the topic/interest that join then - that ALSO happens all over the place - otherwise we would not have ever had a rash of 'internet romances'

If he means a group of people who get together to meet in person because of a internet discussion group - Gee, that ALSO happens -- Conventions spring up EVERYWHERE.

What do you guys think he means by "Virtual Community"?

Poor little no puppy toe!

Re:Communities are dead. - just the big ones

[jrb04]

I've found a few. Mainly in the free ultima online servers. These servers usually boast an average player load of 10-50 players at a time with 200-300 total players. It turns into a community because you get to know the majority of the other players by reputation at least if not personally. Of course its only a game, but it is the closest match to what I would consider a community. That being a group of people where you are reasonably well known and know a significant amount of the group.

For example I'm a member of the local academic community and know quite a few people in my department and they know me.

Software for the Virtual Community

[SetiMike]

What software would people recommend for a virtual community? If you already have the 'community' and just want to give people the online forum?

I know there are some Linux BBS packages out there but I have not looked into them. I'm thinking 'graphical' 'web' UI, with BBS soul.

If you wanted to put your community on the net, how would you do it?

I want to provide secure access, but internal anonymity is not important. This is, for the most part, a closed group. I want to be able to share information without broadcasting it to the world.

Re:Software for the Virtual Community

[aD docwolf]

[shameless plug]: the openacs. Uses PostgreSQL, can handle high-volume.

Re:Software for the Virtual Community

[Jessie Oberreuter]

I have two favorites; the choice depends on what you are trying to foster.

For message based communities, I think the IdeaTree software from Protosoft was the best. Inspite of numerous phone calls, I've never been able to get a reply out of them. However, I believe Citidel is the closest modern equivalent. The 'Tree was a simple, text based BBS system. It had a category ring and each category had a sub-topic ring. Conversation was linear -- there were no threads, and I believe this enhanced the community feel of the topics. There were simple moderation features.

For real-time groups, I've fallen in love with the TinyMUSH derivatives. The programming structure is, admittedly, on the obscure side, but again, I think the simplicity contributes to conversation. It is easy to create spaces for communication, and it is easy to communicate w/in those spaces. I've been a semi-regular on TinyTIM for most of its years and still find it a wonderful place to go for late night chats.

Don't underestimate the value of good management. All of my favorite communities have possessed superior "wizards" to keep annoying people out, provide a reference of expected behavior, and keep the systems running well. Don't overestimate the value of glitter -- I'm there for good conversation; if I want to play a pretty game, I'll join Everquest.

You can't be anonymous and still say something

[dsplat]

Sometimes a nick becomes the name that you are known by everywhere. It identifies you online and in meatspace. Mine is like that. It was given to me by a friend in 1984 as a joke and it has stuck ever since. I first started using it online in the late 80's.

I remember early experiences with various online communities where what appeared to be real names weren't. One of the most common jokes was for guys to assume women's names to play with people's heads. Through those experiences I learned what a name truly is. It is continuity. It is identity. It is reputation.

Consistent use of any memorable, unique name is a way to establish who you are for all to see. John Doe, logging in for the first time next week is as much of a stranger to me as someone with a nick. Either of them can then build the identity that I will come to know.

For all of the psychological power that the idea carries, the thought that we can connect a name to a person hides some assumptions that just aren't true. Names aren't unique. People lie. And people change. My best friends from high school weren't the people I remembered when I went back for my 10th reunion.

NPR's Morning Edition ran a story this morning entitled Author Unknown about tracking the identity of anonymous authors. It underscored the fact that your words identify you. Each of us has a style, a voice. If you can hear the voices, even friends without real names can still be friends.

Re:You can't be anonymous and still say something

[Schnedt Microne]

Back in the late 80's someone local (to where I live) put up a large multi-line 'Chat' BBS. For the first several months of operation, it was set up so that anybody could log on at any time and create a new account. Anybody could at any time adopt a new personae. But those of us who became 'regulars' ended up getting to know one another and who was 'real' and not. In a aemi-autonomous situation like that, communities form automatically, and people get to know who the interlopers are. People 'validate' each other pretty well when there's no 'authority' around.

Of course, the place eventually went commercial, the 'free' period was just the operator's way of getting the population up before turning it into a 'for pay' service. By that time enough of a community had formed that when it 'went private' there were enough of us willing to spend a few bucks a month to hang out.

Those were the old days of local (single area code) chat systems, though, when anybody you were in contact with was likely to be someone nearby (it made the sexual dynamics more interesting than the weird world-wide nature of chatrooms today).

Needless to say I had my fill of chatrooms and 'online living' before the Internet even took off. I can't stand what they are today.

Re:You can't be anonymous and still say something

[Lozzer]

That's also a remarkably good summary of identity in OO (and RDBMS and probably other areas too)

Agree, but with one caveat

[JonKatz]

I think real ID's do really help the WELL (as a member) but one difference is that the function of the WELL vs Slashdot is different. The WELL only wants to be a v-community, not a news source. And on Slashdot, Ithink the experience is that AC posts, while most are stupid and infantile, do occasionally yield some real news and info on companies like MS and others that would otherwise be unknown.
Slashdot is a lot newsier than the WELL, the WELL's conversations a lot more coherent. I'd argue that Slashdot might consider providing some separate areas on the site where members could post topics (a la the WELL) and moderate them clearly and strongly. The children could still play on Threads and elsewhere, which they have a right to do, but people who want to have actual conversations could have them, which they also have a right to do but can't because of the small number of people acting out in public.

Fuck "The Well"

[TobyWong]

I am so sick of writers talking about "the well" as the holy meccha of online interaction.

I was heavily involved in the local BBS scene when I was younger, and strangely enough we managed to SOMEHOW survive without the magical powers of "the well".

Like tomwhore said, ever hear of FIDO? Shit, ever hear of USENET? It wasn't that long ago that USENET was relatively spam free.

Let me tell you why some people think "online community" doesn't exist: The great dotcom goldrush of the past few years. A bunch of people started dumping loads of cash into these new "super .com sites" and through some incredibly stupid lack of foresight, they just figured that there would be hordes of people fighting to buy their product/use their service. Well you know what? It doesn't work that way. Communities start with a GRASSROOTS effort. There are plenty of examples of this: Slashdot started as a tiny site at one point, Tomshardware was a jokey little fanpage not too long ago, Bluesnews built up from nothing. You can't BUY that sort of thing.

So lets not confuse the death of a bunch of poorly planned VC projects with the "failure of online communities"

and btw, fuck "the well"

with love from a die-hard old 519'er

My love/hate (mostly hate) usenet relationship.

[NecrosisLabs]

I used to read a few of the high volume/low s/n newsgroups (alt.folklore.urban, talk.origins, alt.religion.scientology, etc.) because I felt that amongst the dross, I was actually getting some good information. I then got too busy to read usenet... a year or so later, I thought I would check out the groups, see what was going on, and it was the same crap, only more so. Looking for discussions or arguments where facts and opinions battle it out is a futile task. I can only read so many posts where someone is demanding their opponents definition of a basic word, or asking someone if they wrote something dredged up from dejanews from two years back. I just don't have time for that crap anymore, I guess.

I write such software

[rebelcool]

This article hits quite close to home. :) I've written a bit of software called COG.. an example (and download) can be had at The Machine..check it out, tell me what you think :)

What people have learned..

[JonKatz]

I think what Scotay is describing is just what people have learned.... Virtual communities aren't utopias, and I agree, Slashdot does very well. But there are lots of people who do wonder if real communities are possible online, and many do mourn the growing realization that,as Scotay says, that may not be possible..On the other, later on in the series you'll all have a chance to offer your own ideas and I hope you do.

Re:What people have learned..

[Schnedt Microne]

On the other, later on in the series you'll all have a chance to offer your own ideas and I hope you do. Wow! That's mighty generous of you!

Re:What people have learned..

[Fred Ferrigno]

Are you referring to another post by scotay? Because I got a very different impression. Namely, that 'virtual' communities are no different than 'real' communities -- there is no need for such a superficial distinction. 'Real' communities have plenty of pimples too, Jon.

Virtual communities aren't utopias, but neither are 'real' communities.

--

Don't know why this is a shock to anyone...

[BranMan]

If you just think about it, this should not be a shock. Small towns can have community because there are fewer people - you get to know them because you see them all the time.
Bigger town is more impersonal - more people, you see few of them more than once.
Now jump to NYC, LA, London, any huge metropolis. Very impersonal - you may not see the same people again in your LIFE, and you meet so many in the meantime that you wouldn't remember them even if you did.
The Internet stretches around the globe, including potentially Billions of people. Do you really think any part of it is going to be more like Maybury than NYC? Nope, more like magnifying NYC by a 1000.
This really shouldn't be a surprise, even to Jon.

Katz, means well, but...

[Argyle]

He is blinded, just as we all are, by the communities we choose to participate in online.

The Well has been referenced as a touchstone for all online communities, a model for others to strive for. I think this is wrong.

Yes, in the early days of BBSs and the text only internet, these types of 'aesthetic salon' style commmunities were the mainstay and core of 'online people'. Once the online world opened to those outside academia and the computer industry the flavor of the net changed dramatically. "cozy little worlds" don't appeal to everyone. To expect that everyone wants to be "audience, performer and scriptwriter" is ludicrious.

I remember the day of the infamous 'Green Card' usenet spam. The net rose up and smote Canter & Siegel. I personally faxed them black pages to burn up their fax machinefuser. This type of group action is gone. Spam is with us forever more.

The same goes for this elusive idea of virtual communities. The idea of a 'best way' for online groups is wrong.

The idea that there is a bad influence out on the net wrecking virtual communities is wrong. Forget about whether the person is online or in the PTA meeting with you. If someone acts like a jerk, you treat them as a jerk. Whether the group is my Ultima Online group or my wife's online quilting guild, a community reacts the same way to disruptive influences, they fight back. The manner of fighting back doesn't matter, the fact that people stand up against anti-social people does.

Standing up to people in virtual community is no differnet than standing up to people real life. Yes, it takes a bit of courage (less online) but it is very effective. Whining about how communites are plagued by "hostile participants" does nothing to solve the problem. Navel gazing of this sort is more about boosting the ego of the gazer than solving the problem. "Everyone would see how great my friends and I are if those bad people would stop disagreeing with us.", is the basic tent of all those pining for the salad days of the Well.

Lastly, I need to point out that Rheingold's site, Hotwired, was not killed by anti-social types, it was killed by the editors that ran the site. Once a site that had daily essays and commentary in Packet that led to interesting discussion, Hotwired is now a web site about making web sites. Gone is any substantial commentary. Why? It didn't pay is my best guess. The fact is that there are many disruptive forces on virtual communities and they are all not anti-social teens.
-----

Re:Katz, means well, but...

[dsplat]

I remember the day of the infamous 'Green Card' usenet spam. The net rose up and smote Canter & Siegel. I personally faxed them black pages to burn up their fax machinefuser. This type of group action is gone. Spam is with us forever more.

I don't think it is gone, but it is less intense against any particular target because there are now so many. I remember reading the aftermath of that incident. I remember the reactions of many of Usenet's resident personalities to Siegel's interview, in which she presented herself as a pioneer. Was that only 6 1/2 years ago?

We still shun the spammers and the flamers. Spam was a new manifestation of antisocial behavior in a medium that was already experienced in dealing with it. Usenet had grown used to the annual influx of newbies with each fall semester. It had weathered flame wars, some infamous enough that they were referred to long after. And many of us have migrated to the Web or keep a foot in each.

Here on Slashdot, don't we moderate down offtopic posts and flamebait? And I'd like to think that I'm not the only person who uses moderator points to search out low-scoring, but worthy comments and moderate them up.

Community consists of two things: people and the effort they put into communicating. A lack of either will kill it. The presence of interesting people and an effort to maintain a high level of communication will probably sustain it. Make the net what you want it to be. If ever there was a place to be shaped by the will of its inhabitants, this is it.

Re:Your still #1 Jon

[QuantumG]

actually it's the first time I've looked at Jon Katz in quite a while.. I don't want to filter him out, just like I don't want to filter out white supremists or christian nuts. Why? Because like it or not they are a part of our world and ignoring them is not going to make them go away. Personally I think JK is annoying but he is also offensive and insensitive and the platform that slashdot continues to give him is undeserved.

Re:You mean VCs will have to accept non-conformist

[deanc]

Actually, what Jon could have observed but refused to say was the following-- Virtual Communities, to be useful, must emulate real communities. In a "real" community, I can avoid the people I don't like... I can decide to gather with whom I wish. I don't have my conversation being interupted by a flamer or a pseudo-intellectual like Katz.

There's little difference between what you advocate (excluding) and providing "people a means to ignore those they do not wish to mingle with." The "subsetted reality" is simply another sort of virtual community.

I'm much more free to pick and choose with whom I wish to associate in the "real world." Virtual Communities will only be useful in so far as they allow me to do this. VC's are only better in so far as they allow me to hold discussions with people who are geographically spread apart and/or cannot all interact at the same time.

-Dean

I build the tools for online communities...

[rebelcool]

Lately i've seen alot of talk about the rise of true communities on the the internet. And I think it's going to happen by being ran by individuals as broadband access increases. And I mean BBS-like communities, full of tighly knit groups of users with a name behind the personae.

I love BBSes. I used to run one on an old 386 of mine for several years. The internet has never come up with something quite like it yet... so I'm building my own, and sharing it with everyone. I'm trying to get it out to people more (college consumes alot of time :( ) and always looking for help.. but anyways. I've released the first version of it, and the example community being ran off it can be seen at The Machine

Re:Jon...

[slashfucker]

Fuck you you arrogant asshole. The belief that a "virtual community" can only be home to warm, fuzzy thoughts and constructive criticism is tantamount to soft censorship. dismissing legitimate criticism as "adolescent flamers" is an ostrich technique; when you can't come up with a good response, bury your head in the sand and reply with an ad-hominem.

It stands to reason that in any diverse community, opinions will differ, and the difference will not always be friendly. So long as nobody takes the moral high ground and cries "troll" or "flamebait", the community will survive it, and benefit from the exchange of ideas.

The point is, it isn't all warm, fuzzy, here-check-out-these-pictures-of-my-kids-and-my-do g. There are disagreements, and sometimes, as in RL relationships, it isn't worth the time to argue logically. Sometimes you just have to say "shut up" or "fuck off" or "here, click on this link". i for one am sick of all these arrogant fucking EEs that try to apply electronic terms like signal to noise ratio to discussions. As long as a human took the time to type it in, it's signal. If /.'s server HD gets corrupted and we get a bunch of garbage text, that's noise. The distinction between good signal and bad signal is all subjective; one mans mead is another's poison.

Mod this down as flamebait, and prove my point, cunt.

Love,
Slashfucker

Reality and Responsibility

[JonKatz]

I think the issue being described very well here is responsibility. People online are not yet held accountable for their words, as in real communities. Good Sportsmanship is one term for it, but I think both sites and members are responsible for the ethics of the words and the way they use them. On Slashdot, I doubt that 50 people flame regularly. But most visitors think that all of the hundreds of thousands of people here do..Very misleading.
I think when the lurkers and others really start insisting that discussions be confined to issues and ideas and that personal attacks are neither cool nor appealing, then the sense of appropriate feedback will be strengthened. But most people, including me, to be fair, see flaming as background noise, or something like traffic that you just have to put up with.
But the problem is that reading about v-communities (I've just finished about 20 books) you see how much damage tolerance for assaultive posts have done over the years. Probably killed off more communities than any other thing. In that context, they become less cute and tolerable. But most people simply avoid places where this kind of communications go on. only a tiny fraction of /. readers ever go near Threads. That's a real shame and a real casualty.

Re:Reality and Responsibility

[DrCode]

Actually, I find that ignoring flamers and other pests is the best policy. And this is much easier to do in an online forum than in the real world. In fact, I often find the responses to flamers more irritating than the flames themselves, as they tend to distract the more responsible users from the forum's topic.

Besides, adolescents who are trying to get attention will usually go away if they're ignored.

Mod this up

[Argyle]

The guy is right on about the "incredibly self-absorbed, uninsightful Boomer perspective"
-----

Gender, Race: these differences aren't the problem

[weston]

One premise I'm not sure is true is that online communities are capable of greater things because "on the internet, no one knows you're a CHICKEN! A GIANT CHICKEN!" Or a dog. Or, your race, gender, or anything beyond what you type and tell. The premise is that these are the things we have trouble dealing with that keep us from coming together into a community.

If it were so, we'd obviously all be singing together right now.

I think the problem doesn't lie in the differences we usually think do. There's other differences and flaws in human beings that we have to fix, whether we communicate face to face, by phone, or slashdot posting.

One Difference

[JetJaguar]

I think you're partially correct. Yes, there are a number of succesful online communities still around, even today.

The WELL was a little different in comparison to what we've got today, and your post shows exactly how it was different. The communities that you speak of are all pretty narrowly focused, and specialized (and there's nothing wrong with that). The WELL, on the other hand, tended to be a lot more diverse without the trolls and flames of slashdot... You're post also alludes quite well to why it's almost impossible to have a diverse forum today: too many people with agendas aside from just communicating with another person, hence more and more people are gravitating to smaller forums so that they can leave the trolls behind.

Re:One Difference

[Chris Johnson]

I honestly don't think "affluent, white, liberal Calfornia hippie" really, truly equates to "general". This is a misperception produced by the fact that, although the WELL was catalysed by the Deadhead community, it ended up very much general in _topic_, if not in constituency. This generality of topic is something that I have seen in _every_ _single_ _virtual_ _community_ I've ever encountered, and passes for diversity quite easily. However, the bottom line is that the core community _is_ invariably specialised, and the WELL is far from being an exception. In fact, the Deadhead group that catalysed it is somewhat more homogenous than either of the communities I mentioned.

The WELL was a perfect example of virtual community in every respect, and was certainly one of the first ones out there. It was no different than any other because the underlying social rules and principles that produce this 'specialised general gathering' are emergent from human behavior. The only reason it's hyped as being different is Boomer ego- by comparison, the furry lifestyler community I mentioned tends to respond to the dissolution of its community by distress and a sense that the lost community was a lucky break and the product of hard work that nobody's putting in anymore- nostalgia and self-worship are alien to that particular community, so it's a point of distress that the group lost focus, with essentially no backpatting that it had existed in the first place. The WELL is very subject to the Boomer self-celebratory characteristic, and so in retrospect it is spun as an absolutely unique thing that cannot be recaptured, much as the 60s 'cannot be recaptured': if it could be recaptured, that would make the Boomers less wonderful by contrast, wouldn't it? If just _anybody_ could be spiritual, committed, and activist?

Which of course reads like an indictment, for which I apologize: it is difficult to explain what causes Boomers to insist the WELL was unique, without accepting that Boomers as a class have a great deal invested in the concept that they were a peak of society, and that no succeeding generation have been anything but a disappointment by comparison. Yes, that is an insulting belief, but it is less a tenet of individual faith and more a cultural expectation 'spun' through pop analysis like 'The Greening Of America' (contrast with 'The Closing Of The American Mind'), and is as all-encompassing as Pokemon- and no more inherently honest or plausible.

That is why the WELL takes a special place in virtual communities: not because it is in fact any different, but because the people responsible for it are significantly more likely to place value on it being special, on it being a peak of human achievement that nobody these days is remotely spiritual, enlightened and hip enough to recapture. As a result, this is the spin it's given, and by default everything else is defined as a weak imitation. The WELL was certainly no _less_ than other forms of online community, but it was also no _more_: it's a simple social process that will continue to recur over and over and fall prey to the influences of disruption, uncontrolled growth, and shift in the constituency of the group.

Less Interesting Than Interesting

[Bluesee]

Why am I bored with even the discussion of VC's?

Because, VC's, like television became (for me) just another reconfirmation in the shallowness of people. TV was probably envisioned as this marvelous media that would transform humanity by distributing information far and wide to the masses. A hyper Gutenburg press, so to speak.

What did we get? Charlie's Angels.

Likewise BBSes failed to meet any of my hopeful expectations. I thought - seriously - I could engage in discussions that would be meaningful because they would be real-time and information was finally free. I was let down when all that the chat BBSes (the prototype VC's?) could offer was what for lack of a better word I'll call 'competitive flirting' and blatant adolescent flaming.

You can't Create a Community. It has to build itself.

Slashdot may be the "McDonalds" of VC's, but it has a strong foundation and great appeal to those of us who really want to communicate, so it will prevail as a robust model of the way things are becoming. And one of the strengths of its architecture is that it is a lot like the one-user-at-a-time BBSes of old with their message forums. The genius of /. is moderation.

Put a bunch of ananoymous strangers in a room and you're not gonna get a Virtual Community.

What you seem to get is cacophony. The only use of the real-time features of seems to be along the lines of "did you hear Steve Allen died?" and "is it snowing where you are?"

Another thing: I have noticed that in many of these topic-related forums conversation often devolves into a dialogue between two or three people who are lonely. You know the type:

FORUM: Modern Physics

Msg 22: From: Cassandra

Hi again Bob. Yes, it snowed a lot here yesterday, too. I had a heck of a time getting out of the driveway this morning to drop my kids off at school. I hope it melts today!!

Hugs...

Of course, your mileage may vary. But in social situations it seems like everyone willingly behaves like they are 21, blonde, and with a severe case of ADD.

Anonymity & online communities

[Abstract]

Online communities are fun. When people on the net gather for information, a lot of useful stuff is being posted. But ... when is the posted information valid? When do you know when you're being misinformed by a conartist? People can say all they want, because it's hard to track them down. But when your identity isn't anonymous anymore, people will shut up saying untrue things. Because when they aren't anonymous anymore they will think before they post a message on a e-trader bulletinboard saying Sony is bankrupt, causing wallstreet to crash. Anonymity is a good thing, but has it's drawbacks.

my capitalization scheme.

[saintlupus]

Umm, saint. I'm just curious(this is not a flame by the way and don't take it as one) how you can pass college classes if you can't capitalize your Is and proper nouns. Warning warning!!! This is NOT A FLAME!!!!!

in addition to my dearth of capitalization, i apparently use wholly too few punctuation marks and emoticons. i apologize profusely.

(actually, it's a holdover from the old bbs days... i never bothered using capitalization when i was sysop chatting with users, and so unless i'm writing something likely to have at least moderate longevity, i don't bother.)

--saint
----

virtual community - virtual sovereign nation

[robrob7777777]

I think virtual communities are just getting started. A really ambitious example is Laissez Faire City, which I am now beta testing. It is a fully independant sovereign nation (sovereignty was announced in 1996, and has not been disputed by any country), complete with its own private communication system, chartered cybercorporations, and encryption protected borders. In LFC, people use robotic 'nyms to interact with each other. Eventually, corporations chartered in LFC will be able to do everything a normal corporation will do, except pay taxes to nation-states. The idea is to create a virtual community that provides a freeer environment for trade and speech than the physical world. The people at LFC are dedicated, well-funded, and I expect this virtual community to be big. It is also based on Linux and is open-source. Mail me if you want to visit and I'll ask the LFC city clerk to issue a tourist visa for you. positiveenterprise@mailandnews.com

Creating a Deep Map, open source Virtual community

[Water Paradox]

I am working on a project which is a virtual community. It's called a Deep Map, and it utilizes GPS units all over the world, synchronized with cameras and 3-d virtual image generators, creating a virtual reality which is in effect similar to the one seen in the Matrix. The project is entirely open source (before the closed source people get ahold of the idea and try to make money with it). It is kind of an "uber" virtual community, within which numerous smaller virtual communities find home, as is the case with any solid virtual community.

I first logged in to the Internet (piping in through BITnet) in 1988. Heard of the Well back then, but never got into it because I was doing other things. There were about 60 of us in a virtual community (honors colloquium at a small university in the Midwest), and we ate up lots of bandwidth exploring the Internet as it was back then. We wrote long adventure tales, authored by numerous people, we created intra-group software, to know when others were online (AIM before AOL got ahold of the idea), and so forth, with little prompting from the outside--we started from scratch, each with 500 blocks on a VAX account, and no previous experience with the Internet except for two people who'd been in the computer science program for a year or so...

Now I'm involved in recreating that incredible experience in a global sense, and wouldn't mind all the help I can get. Interested in working on a Deep Map? (the Matrix is an example of a deep map). Lemme know.

By the way, I really enjoy Katz's enthusiastic approach to diverse topics. He does a fair amount of research, driven by a preselected hypothesis, and the final result is not always what I agree with, but always enlightening. Thanks, I look forward to the next installment. jared@dctkc.com.

Re:Jon...

[73]

Sometimes you just have to say "shut up" or "fuck off"

Why? How does "Shut up" contribute to the discussion? You're not contributing "good" or "bad" signal to the mix. Why waste the cycles?

73

Missing the forest

[Anonymous Coward]

First off I think Katz is over-romanticizing his favorite online "community" while completely undervaluing others. For instance he lauds his pet community thus:

"...The WELL was unique. It still is. Despite the stunning growth of the Net and the Web, there has never been an online place like it. Increasingly, it seems there never may be."

And describes others this way:

" Clusters of people collect around networks devoted to certain issues: workplace, sex, gaming, gender, finances, health, parenting. But most are transitional"

What he seems to fail to realize is that community is almost always built on shared ideas, life-stages and interests. It is perfectly natural to see a "community" of young women sharing the experiences of their first pregnancy, or people joining a support community while they endeavor quit smoking. Virtual communities based on ideas like these thrive for a time and then naturally dissolve or evolve as the needs of the group members change. Community need not be long term to be valid.

"Apart from sites like Senior Net, or certain mailing lists and messaging sites devoted to shared problems like cancer, the modern virtual community trades in information at the expense of intimacy". Here Katz seems to contradict himself. Senior net is very little different from most large parenting sites, it is simply the life-stage and issues are somewhat different. Mail lists and forums dedicated to cancer are not different in any real sense to those dealing with other health issues, relationship or gender issues that he derided in the pervious quote.

Perhaps Katz just fails to see what is really out there. He says "The Virtual Community was supposed to be a different kind of space, a way to use the Network to connect people, to help them know and sustain one another in previously inconceivable ways." I would argue that this is happening every day online. Close knit smaller communities exist in plenty. Some were started on BBS and migrated onto IRC and eventually the web. These small communities are almost always based on some common interest or problem, be it raising Beagles, supporting families with children with Down's Syndrome, discussing the United States Civil war or simply groups of old college friends keeping in touch via a mail list. I think the idea that there will ever be ONE Virtual Community is impossible and not even desirable to begin with. Virtual communities provide connection and support for people with minority ideas, problems or interests who are too separated geographically to enjoy a real life community. The net spans distance, nothing more and nothing less, for those groups.

Mupts

[jessohyes]

The good old days were when everybody got together for Modem Users Pizza Thingies. If you mentioned email to someone back then people just gave you that puzzled look.

FUCK OFF.

[slashfucker]

sometimes, as in RL relationships, it isn't worth the time to argue logically.

Shut up can be as clear a signal of disapproval as a 500 page dissertation. Granted, it is not constructive, but when arguing with a zealot, one can rarely find common ground. What's better: starting a 30 page long thread that goes nowhere, with logical fallacies on both sides, or just voicing your dissent in two short words? I would argue that they are equal from a "community" standpoint; an opinion is stated, and the opposition is heard. Since you were talking about wasted cycles, "shut up" would keep that waste to a minimum.

And since you're so concerned about that waste, why don't you just shut up now? After all, you aren't going to convince me that I'm wrong. (Yes, you can call me a zealot, on this point.)

Love,
Slashfucker

P.S.: Thanks, cunt.

Why I post, moderate and meta-moderate here

[dsplat]

The virtual community is the long-sought but almost-never-found New Jerusalem that's touched the hearts and minds of some of the nicest, most ethical people who've ever gone online.

This sentence truly resonated with me. It reminded me of some dialog from a book I read last summer, Alongside Night by Neil Schulman. The protagonist, a teenage boy, asks an acquaintance of his father's why he never stole some of the gold that his father had entrusted to him. In this fictional future, personal ownership of gold was still illegal in the US. Had he stolen it, the victim could never have reported it to the police. This man's answer was simple, but it spoke volumes. He said, "Because it wasn't mine."

We have elaborate social mechanisms built up to supplement our natural methods of establishing trust. We have police and courts and jails to punish people who violate our trust in ways that we call "illegal". We have institutions such as banks, insurance companies, etc. that serve the function of being established members of society with reputations to protect which will accept part or all of the risk that comes with transacting business between strangers. We have various consumer organizations that watch for failures on the part of these companies to uphold their reputations and publish that information.

Yet, at our core we establish relationships. We judge the people around us on their integrity, discretion, knowledge, skill, level of shared interests and many other factors. We each maintain our models of who they are. While there have been a number of cases in various courts, for the most part, what keeps people from violating our trust online is that many people want to maintain an identity online. Their words and the relationships that they form are that identity. In essence, we are playing a huge, multi-player game of the prisoner's dilemma, with no final turn.

I post my thoughts here. I moderate and meta-moderate as well, and although CmdrTaco, et al, might wish I wouldn't I submit stories. What I do here takes place in public. You can search for my past comments. They aren't all gems. But they represent who I am. And they help shape this place. They make it a place where I can get to know a few people. I still have to fall back on the ancient, instinctive methods of building relationships over time.

In a way, Marshall McLuhan was dead wrong. The medium is not the message. Communication between people has always been why we talk and write. We are trying to reach each other. We act honorably and honestly for many reasons, but most of them boil down to the simple fact that that is the way to treat people whom you would have as friends. And we want friends.

Virtual and real are not mutually exclusive

[dsplat]

Virtual communities have served as an introduction to people I later want to meet in person. Based on our growing interactions online, we choose to meet when the opportunity presents itself. I have had the chance to meet a number of people in meatspace after we met online. And I maintain a mental list of others I would like to meet.

maybe you get ideas from ...

[Project_2501]

someones homepage and then go look up books about the subject then start an x-part series and pull quotes from those books to seem like this is where you got your ideas from so you don't have to give credit to some rinky dink webpage where you would lose your credibility. Works nice for you, but what about the ones you really steal from... Oh did i say steal, hehe, oops, i didnt mean to say that.. I must be kidding or crazy anyway, this could never happen, a respectable writer wouldn't stoop to these lows.

The WELL is a newbie

[howardjp]

As a member of WELL and other online communities, I want to point out that the WELL are a bunch of late comers to the arena. The concept of the virtual community was first truly explored at the University of Michigan during the late 70s! At the same time Ward Christiansen and Randy Suess were starting to explore the BBS on their CP/M machines and by 1983, the world's first open Unix BBS (and probably the oldest still functioning BBS), M-Net, was founded in Ann Arbor by Marcus Watts and Mike Meyers. Watts sold his software to Network Technologies Inc. who then started Arbornet in Ann Arbor. Only after Arbornet (Arbornet merged with M-Net in 1990) was a total financial failure did Larry Brilliant get together with the Whole Earth Catalog to found the WELL. The WELL gets far more credit than it deserves in discussions of virtual communities

Until you actually know the history of the virtual community, you will never understand it.

Read "Crowds and Power"" the vMob of 1

[gelfling]

Read Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. There is no virtual community. There is little if any real community. There are mobs. Big mobs little mobs, temporary mobs, permanent mobs, organized, unorganized, disorganized and the like. But mobs all the same. What the internet has managed to do is create more temporary mobs made up of far flun dispersed people who band together for a short time to exclude or pick on someone or some group or ideology.

True, its a "Subsetted VC".. and thats the point..

[Shivetya]

Apparently the pseudo-intellectuals are confined in the belief that a VC is one ideal. This is the reason their attempts fail. They miss the simple fact that no two people would be alike in all beliefs.

I guess once they realize that real world communities are not formed of like minded people that their conception of VCs will adjust to fit this model. In turn they will then claim that their VCs work. (in essence, the standard practice of these PIs is to go full force with their tight view and then adapt it to fit what the community responds with and then claim thats what they intended in the first place)

Jon, you might be a Boomer.

[elenchos]

The Well does not represent a reasonable cross section of the Internet, or of anything else, except the upper-income half of those Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Don't you notice that when you go on about the "damage" caused by all these immature flamers (read Non-Boomers), most of the younger demographic has no idea what you are talking about? The baby boomers have been aging, and begun to realize that teenagers really get on their nerves. This is natural. You prefer the company of your own generation.

The problem is that a hugely disproportionate number of the baby boomer Well's membership has gone on to write way too many books about the story of The Internet, as if they had any clue about what online communities were for everyone else. They should have subtitled all of their books The Online Experience for the Middle-Aged Professional.
These are the basic facts that the Well and the boomers who live there do not get: You are only one small part of the population. You do not represent the whole. Most of your cherished values do not exist outside your select group. And we are getting along just fine without you.

Virtual communities can prove to be resilient

[andyo]

While real-life communities are based on things everybody automatically shares (schools, crime problems, movie theaters, whatever) I find that virtual communities survive around shared goals. I am on a number of active mailing lists where people passionately care about what they're doing--whether it's documenting free software, protesting unjust laws, or whatever. These communities have lasted for years.

What's more important, I've gotten to know individuals from their caring posts to these lists. Like people on The WELL, we occasionally find a way to get together in real space, which is important. (Too bad it doesn't happen often.) I've formed relationships with these people concerning things that have nothing to do with how we met originally. So I think virtual community works.

But I wouldn't join an online community just for the sake of being in one! Gimme a break.

Sure, there are disruptive people in virtual communities, and there are people who ought to stick around but get disgusted and leave. But there's an upside: in the real world, you lose people from your community just because they got a new job or moved out of town to take care of their sick parent. A person in a virtual community can move from the Netherlands to Australia or from South Africa to Canada and still participate if he or she chooses.

communities vs "community"

[eostrom]

Oh, I don't know. I was a member of something I thought was a virtual community in 1990, and I'm a member of something that's pretty much the same now. It's not the WELL, and I don't think I'm alone. Virtual communities are still around.

But in the meantime the phrase "virtual community" has been co-opted to mean some things it didn't then.

Katz is right that the idea of "community" is something mythologized and yearned for in American culture. For that reason, marketers have applied it to things that just aren't communities. (A message board where people can talk about your products is not in itself a community. A newsletter for your fans is even less so.) We want to belong to communities, the reasoning goes, so we'll be attracted to web sites that say they have communities.

Another thing that's happened is the conflation of "community" with "community of interest". On the web we sometimes use the term "community" to mean things like "everyone who's interested in Black and Decker power tools". But power tools are a pretty tenuous connection between people; if people don't form stronger and deeper bonds, there's nothing there to carry them through the rough times that are defining moments for real communities.

Anyway, I don't think the virtual communities we had when Rheingold wrote his book have changed that much. (The presence of hostile and disruptive members, and the debate over what to do about them, is certainly not new.) But the term "community" has been subject to various "dramatic reconceptions" that block our old communities from view.

Well considered quasi-unique

[anser]

The lesson is that any successful virtual community needs to be *about* something.

The WELL, like its early equivalents in other cities (Panix, the World etc) began as a dialup service/ISP that hosted a virtual community. This allowed it to simply be 'about itself' because all its members shared the experience of being subscribers, and in many cases neighbors. Even then, it was heavily subdivided into topical discussion areas, and most denizens only participated in a few of them.

With the advent of universal location-independent Internet access, the appeal of a general purpose "who's up for pizza this Thursday" virtual community begins to dim. If commentators want to romanticize this and imply it was somehow a better use of the Net than, say, a community focused on private electricity generation or the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nields, they're just wrong.

I think that there are GENUINELY interesting questions to be asked about virtual communities, to help us understand how to make the best ones possible as they constantly arise and collapse. "Why didn't they succeed" and "Why didn't the Well catch on" are not the most interesting questions.

No, you're wrong, size doesn't matter

[jatbrowne]

I live in London... maybe not the "huge metropolis" of NYC or LA but I do think you're wrong about impersonality.

OK, in a small isolated community you may know everyone and you may rely on the owner of your local supermarket for you're food, but I argue that you will get to know just as many people if you live in a big city.

Although I don't claim to know everyone who lives within a mile of my house, I do know my immediate neighbors, my friends I met from school and from work, and various other locals. They make up my community, and they are always accessible to me on the phone or if I want to travel to their houses. And sometimes I do meet people in the street that I recognize.

You don't need to recognize anyone to feel like you belong somewhere - you just need to know where you can find your friends.

James Browne
from South London, the "teeming" metropolis

Score 5: Insightful

[madmark]

You know, the only people complaining about the dearth of community are those who have been left behind by change. I've been involved with protest and indie-music communities in the past, and it wasn't until certain friends started disagreeing with the way things were going that they began to complain that the "community" was disappearing.

Also, if seems to me that communities are independent organisms, arising at need and disappearing the moment they are no longer necessary. Unfortunately, right about the time the natural breakup is occurring, someone decides to write by-laws and elect officers...

He is

[Chris Johnson]

Jon _is_ a Boomer. That's not really the point.

One thing he's managed to latch onto is a very real concern, though I don't think he has much idea of the real scope of it. To Jon, a 'flamer' is anyone who too consistently and vocally takes an opposite attitude, _seeming_ to be actively conspiring to attack him. However, there are real 'attackers' out there: indeed, because of the size of the net, any substantial community is likely to have its own dedicated attackers/vandals/terrorists who are literally seeing if they can destroy the community for fun, or because they disagree with it.

That's very different from the usual run of bored Katz flamers on slashdot. Usenet is the easiest place to find this type- it can extend even to carefully putting together identities that fit perfectly into the community _except_ for one core belief that acts to disrupt the community- to 'play' such a 'character' involves acting in every way acceptable and likeable except for the one belief that strikes to the heart of the community (for example, denying the historicity of the Holocaust in a Jewish community), and trying everything you can to both be accepted for the general niceness of your identity while not missing a chance to get in a stab with your community-disrupting issue. I've seen this actually done, and it's extraordinarily disruptive as it plays on people's tendency to accept those who are 'basically nice': construct a fake personality that is totally nice except for one point of hostility that sticks out like a sore thumb, and you make it much more difficult to enforce the community standard. It is social engineering of a very high order, or you could call it social vandalism.

This is what _doesn't_ happen to Jon: it's a pity he doesn't understand that the flames he gets are pure noisy disagreement and not conspiracy. When you start to get into people playing social engineering because they're bored or dislike a given community, that's when you really start to see damage, and online communities will have to learn to defend against this damage, even if it means developing wisdom and wariness. On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a carefully 'played' pretend person, tailored to be as acceptable as possible so you can become a 'mole' and sow the seeds of destruction in a community and get 'em backbiting each other. Furthermore, in that case it's also impossible to tell if you're doing it because you hate the principles of the community you're attacking, or whether you're just bored with way too much time on your hands and an aptitude for meanness. It's far easier to deceive on the Net- all you need is writing ability, not acting ability.

Re:He is

[elenchos]

I meant "might" in the sense that a guy with a Calvin-urinating-on-whatever sticker on his truck "might" be a redneck. But that is indeed not the point.

What I strongly suspect is going on, however, is that all these "communities being destroyed" are nothing more than the online equivalent of someone pushing 40 walking into their favorite bar and thinking "I don't like the looks of those teenagers over by the juke box. And listen to them cuss!" Times change, people age, and the crowd at a popular hangout changes too. The decidedly boomer prejudices of the writers of so many popular books on the Internet (Sherry Turkle, Clifford Stoll, Steven Levy, et. al.) make this seem like a much different phenomenon than it is. And it is simply because they refuse to admit that they are only speaking for themselves and others of their age group. It would be perfectly fine for them to say all the same things, provided they didn't generalize so much, and realized how homogonenously white, urban, professional and and middle-aged the people who agree with their opinons are. Look at all the posts to this article from people who have no idea what the big deal is about flamers. There is a whole other group of people who are not alarmed at all. They just ignore the flames, unless they show wit, in which case they get crowned with the laurels of that fine Western literary genre, invective.

As far at these moles, I have to say I am really skeptical. Are they the ones responsible for popular night spots that grow stale over time? Do such saboteurs also go around killing gardening clubs and bowling leagues? Or are they only on the Internet? How would we test to see if such people actually existed and were having a meaningful effect? Suppose there were no mole effect, but only the usual measure of rude behavior and mean language. Would the world look much different than it does now?

Now I'm getting all curious about this... Can you show me the evidence of the work of these moles?

Re:He is

[Chris Johnson]

Well, to some extent I'm talking about a particular situation that I'm not totally comfortable dragging out into Slashdot to be analyzed- anyone who's really seriously trying to be taken as a member of a community in order to cause disruption will have a pretty good cover. The example I'm thinking of is someone who is known to be a false identity, claims it is because his real identity is so unpopular that he wouldn't get a fair shake, and is posting in a situation where other people have made 'sock-puppets' before.

On a less personal level, the existence of disruptive people on Usenet who intentionally try to mess with newsgroups (communities) for fun is obvious- look up Empire Of Meow. I would... request that you not rush about insisting that you be shown the evidence of the work of Meow. You'd probably get it- even on Slashdot, though it is (a) not a newsgroup and (b) more challenging to reduce to a Smoking Crater (tm). However, Meow could reduce even Slashdot to said crater, because it is just easier to post drivel for fun and flood than it is to make reasoned argument- there aren't enough moderators or CmdrTacos to keep up with what a Meow offensive would be. Best to show at least a token respect, and (in the same spirit) avoid taking oneself too seriously, no?

Re:He is

[elenchos]

I'm not naturally inclined to believe that such people exist, but I do know better.

So, granted, there are many people with nothing better to do than try to annoy others, but still, I find it hard to believe they have that kind of power. It seems much more likely that a community about to die on its own, or one that was no real commuity in the first place, would tend to collect a disproportionate number of Meows, mostly due to the exit of the finer citizens rather than an increase in the amount of riff-raff. Then the community would start smoking Crack or Crater or whatever it is they start smoking when they are near death. It just looks like it was the work of the Bad Emperor Meow, when in fact Rome was ready to fall from within.

I'm still intrigued, though. One possible experiment would be to sic Meow on a known healthy community (not the sickly ones that I think he picks out) and see if he can hurt it. But that raises the same ethical problems that medical science faces. So instead the methods of medicine ought to be used here as well. There are enough archives around to do the kind of post-mortems that would allow you to build a decent case. You might have to first define what a healthy community is. I think this is starting to sound like Book I of Plato's Republic...

Re:Ok, I mispelled 'Leary'

[ackthpt]

Ok, I mispelled 'Leary' and, by reflex, typed 'login in'. As I haven't been on a system which required me to type in 'login' in about 14 years, that's understandable (from my skewed and highly biased perspective)

What the moderator was too young to remember (showing my age) was Dr. Timothy Leary inviting people to "Tune in, turn on and drop out."

The virtual communities of the internet (whether using telnet or a GUI client, they're doing something (in that virtual reality created between a screen image and imagination) like it. Just not with lids of LSD. (Drugs make people type really bad, so it's hard for them to participate where a keyboard and mouse are required, and no, that's not why I typed bad.)

--

Re:They definitely do exist

[Weasel Boy]

I am a member of at least three thriving virtual communities right now, of which Slashdot is the most vibrant. Virtual communities are very much alive and well. You just have to realize that the Net is not, and never will be, one monolithic community. Rather, it is a common medium that supports many hundreds or thousands of separate communities.

Please write something non-derivative.

[Pinback]

If your're going to take up front-page space, please do something original.
How about a series of articles on the impact that longer work hours has on the average geek?

Moparts.com

[CrAlt]

It wasnt untill just now that i steped back and thought of the virtual community im a part of as a "virtual community". I guess thats how the really GOOD ones are. The numbers are kinda small in todays terms and alot of people are on a real names basis. Its centered mainly around the cult of old Chrysler brand cars (mopars) and mopar racing. Ive met alot of people at big advents like Chryslers at Carlile(sp?) and have driven to other shows in NJ, PA, CT, MA, and NH and always end up meating members there or finding a moparts.com tent/booth with members hanging around it. Its hard to flame on the board or troll because chances are you may run into other members at your local track or end up seeing them at a cruse night...your car better live up to your claims :) My 440 Scamp(bigest motor, smallest car) would have never seen the light of day if not for the "community's" help. Often members in my local area have met at a cruse area for some steet racing or to just cruse around. It reminds me alot of the "good 'ol days" of BBS's where we had "modem meets" at the local mall or what not, and you could put faces to the nicknames. It also made it easy to kick a troll's ass in real life :)

Reputation and Investment

[vivarin]

If I log into a message board, even one like this here Slashdot, I can post any amount of inflammatory BS as an anonymous coward or change my handle at will. How can a community develop when there is no responsibility or reputation for its members?

In MUDs and MMORPGs, one invests a fair amount of energy into each character. That character develops a reputation. Sully it, and there are consequences within the community of players (i.e., "Don't group with him, he's an A**hole"). Of course, there is always the threat of Kewl D00dism.

It's the combination of shared purpose, investment and reputation that help MUDs form real communities in a virtual space. I suspect that these principles will find their way into the mainstream net before too long.

How can you say that on *slashdot* for god's sake!

[Technocopian1]

If this ain't a community, I don't know what is...and it's better (more honest) than a lot of RL communities. (Not that it's perfect, mind you.) People do everything online that they do offline...they just do it differently. That includes forming communities. so stop judging virtual communities by physical norms. that does nothing but rob us of the wonder and excitement of what we're all working towards and building. True, there are aspects to RL experience that can't be matched on line. But the reverse is also true. Plus, not all communities, online or off, are equal. Besides, virtual communities have only existed for 20 - 30 years. Real ones, for thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years (depending on your point of reference). Give us a little time, heh?

An Earlier Revolution

[Alien54]

In the aftermath of the american revolution, the founders of the american republic argued long and hard on how it was to be set up, and how to get it right. It was a vital national debate. How to do it right.

Someone has said that the result was "designed by geniuses to be run by idiots". And I can agree, despite all of the idiots (even those of the current generation), it has done fairly well, considering.

The Internet has not had any such saving grace. While the underpinings have been designed by geniuses, it has all to often presumed a certain amount of maturity and education and responsibility.

This has not worked well.

There has not been the same level of responsibility in the social engineering of the net, and now we have what we have. It has not been designed to be "run by idiots". And it winds up with all kinds of idiocies.

As a famous sig line has said, "Oh my God! It's Full of Spam!"

The Internet Community did alright up until the infamous "September that never ended" - then it was overwhelmed.

The only way to even get attention now would be to have an "Internet Strike" or something similar. A shutdown of all of the routers.

But I do not know that it would do any good, if it would not raise the ire of the luddites who depend on their email as they complain about the corrupting influences of technology. Never mind the calls for an investigation by fedral alphabet agencies, etc. because of the disruption of commerce, and other bothersome details.

Maybe we need another protocol, similar to http, but under a different set of rules, that can be created as a safe haven.

I have heard of several options, but I am not sure of any of them.

Maybe we need another revolution?

from someone who's been here near forever

[XO]

Well, I'll tell you honestly, this is what has done it. Sheer numbers. The sheer volume of people on the Internet has completely destroyed any community that might happen. The fact that nearly ANYONE can get online, from anywhere, at any time is what's done it.
Having been on the Internet since ... 1988... (I'm 24 now, so I started really young) and having been a contributor to at least a few of the things that are out there (I wrote the first DOS-based IRC client, several pieces of code for IRCd, and even patches for Linux 0.98!), I can see this. I hang out in areas with a small number of people, as that's the only place that things work. Certain IRC chat channels (I hang out on dal.net these days), not web-chats. Yahoo! Chat is the lamest piece of trash I've ever seen, as far as the quality of people on average goes.
Memory:
*** Welcome to the Internet Relay Network
*** There are 102 users on 116 servers
In that day and time, I knew nearly every single person that logged in to IRC, day in, day out. Now, 12 almost 13 years later, I can't remember most of these people. I certainly don't know a single name of any single person on slashdot, besides the ones that forcibly stick (like JonKatz), and I highly doubt that most of you out here know anyone on here, unless you knew them outside of slashdot. (Though one of these days I am going to have to find my way up to Holland and meet the creators of this... I used to use some BBS's in Holland, though I can't remember their names!)
Volume. Sheer volume. You put hordes of people into something, and the masses IQ starts decreasing.

Open Doors, Open Spaces, Open Discussion

[memoid]

I host MemeSpace which is a small community at and I know Howard and he has done more for the VC than any one person I know.

I am a proponent of Open Source and so my VC is Open, free and easy. Thanks Mr. Katz for your amazing words!

The skill of remote community

[goliard]

Oh, agreed that e-communities are shakey. But which is cause and which is effect? I think that there are things which are functioning in a very community-like-manner, which without electronic mediation would be so frail as not to exist.

Also, I think that an very important point in all this is that the ability for a community to sustain itself (i.e. to exploit the affordances) of telecommunications (whether the internet or parchment epistles), is a memetic skill which a community can have or not. A community of people which, as part of its self-conception, includes valuing, say, literacy, is going to have much more success using writen forms of communication, than one which doesn't.

And it's not just literacy. Is (for a random example) a web board for skydivers going to be a robust community? Well, if it attacts a substantial number of skydivers who like to think of themselves as computer-savvy, it could. But (I don't know, I'm not a skydiver) if skydivers are mostly interested skydiving, and don't have any particular inclination to running/maintaining the board themselves, then it probably won't work. Why? Because -- even if someone else is running the board for them -- being passive consumers of the collective experience (instead of invested participants) is death to a would-be community. Attitude means a lot in community.

It's not that a on-line community must be made of hackers. But all the even vaguely successful on-line communities I have seen have had some commonality (sometimes other than their ostensible topic) which allowed its members to exploit the on-line affordances. For example, I observed a list for a sub-set of home-schooling parents which was particularly strong; the subscribers were mostly soccer-moms who weren't in the least bit technophilic, but the educational philosophy they subscribed to dictated that one must be open-minded and exploratory when encountering new things (to be an example to their kids), and that was all it took.

But I digress: the point is, that a community, or a group of people who would be a community, have certain collective values (or lack there of) which directly pertain to what resources they can exploit.

So, it does make me wonder if some of that shakiness is a function of people not yet being particularly good at it. Maybe more virtual communities will get stronger as more of them figure out how to be better communities, and how to propagate those memes to their new members.