Slashdot Mirror
Building Online Communities
chromatic writes "I've published an essay about building online communities on the O'Reilly Network. It pulls together several thoughts gathered from observing sites like Slashdot, Everything2, and Perl Monks."
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>> Regular users will develop a sense of community ownership. As a whole, their content contributions probably outweigh yours.
This has to be one of the facts that I've had to face, going into my third community site. You create and direct when the community is starting up. Once its established, your role becomes more understated and less direct. You guide and influence. You don't direct.
For quite a while. FreRepublic and DemUnderground have been around for a while. FR since 1997 anyway.
And let's not even harken back to the BBS days. They were much more community-like from messaging to games. If you want to build a community, it takes lots of time. Lots of time.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Is it just me, or does the article read like a HOWTO for acting like a civil human. I don't know about you folks, but I've long awaited such gems as... "Like any community, your group will have spats and factions and frictions. These must be handled wisely for the community to survive." or perhaps, "Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before. The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users." It could be just me, but doesn't this whole article boil down to people are different, so dont be a dick.. ?
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
Community seems to hold it together.
Community is the same reason that people stick with services that suck (AOL) - they build relationships, and while they may actually grow, in knowledge, past the use of a specific service they still maintain the service in many cases because of the warm fuzzy feeling that community provides.
Secondly would be the community of reliance types of organzations - Ebay - where people rely on seller and buyer ratings as much as anything else to feel comfortable making a purchase in an environment that is otherwise risky.
R
Homer: Facts are meaningless, you can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true!
It is interesting when you post a message and read the moderation to see the true views of the people. There are some moderators who will moderate up or down if they agree with the statement or not and there are other moterators that are more fair. Some interesting moderateration messages includes the following.
The Poster Beleaves in God (Even better if the poster admits that he is a practicing Roman Catholic) Insightful 3, Overated 1, Troll 1, Flame 1
Advantages of Windows, and sometimes Solaris over Linux. Instering 2, Insightful 1, Overated 3
Not liking PC Hardware and archecture. Insightful 2 Interesting 1, Troll 2, Flame 1
Python v. Perl or Perl v. Python. Interesting 1 Overated 1
So just like real comunities there are different point of views and an attempt to opress free speach even on slashdot. Wich makes it insterin to know that you can be a outcast amoung outcasts.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
An OK read, but it was mostly obvious and did not get into the difficult issues of community building -- maintaining subject, tone, reputation and control without becoming unpleasantly authoritarian.
Slashdot does not present these issues in as acute a form as, for instance, a commercial product-users community site. One of the advantages Slashdot has as an online community is that it does not have much of an agenda -- sure, a large portion of the active participants are pro-Linux/anti-MS, vaguely libertarian, etc., but Slashdot itself is not trying to accomplish anything extrinsic to Slashdot and not trying to sell us anything (which is one of the things that makes it good).
Moreover, because of the overwhelmingly young-adult-male audience of Slashdot, there is little that can _really_ offend most people -- as much as we hate to accidently see or click through to the gentleman from the Christmas Islands, a stray repellent posting or link that gets past Slashcode is not going to cause large numbers of viewers to abandon Slashdot, write to Congress, think ill of Slashdot/OSDN/VA or boycott their products.
A commercial site (for instance, a company-sponsored owners group for a particular model auto), however, has more to lose from rude, disruptive or off-topic posts. Additionally, there are difficult issues that a commercial or agenda-oriented site must face -- how does one deal with dissent, with criticism of the product or agenda being promoted or with support of rival products or agenda?
Of course, one reaction (probably that of most Slashdotters) is to hell with those who are trying to exploit "community" to make sales, but I would guess that a good portion of the audience for chromatic's Slash book are interested in the commerce-oriented potential of communities.
At first, I was going to respond to the grandparent to say that /. is a community, but on further reflection, I think I would say it is both. You can read /. for interesting links and such and never really see or experience the community aspects. Or you can skip the headlines, and 'cruze the journal circuit' as you suggest.
Clearly there is a lot of diversity of opinion, although moderation tends to reward certain viewpoints closer to the center of the bell curve. The community values as expressed through moderation are not mainstream, and I would say it is defined by a high level of tech knowledge, but I wouldn't say it is fringe.
I love /. because it has a similar feel to netnews in the early days, and the moderation tends to push the trolls and flames further away. It's also pretty clear that most slashdotters have not been around since those early days, so they might not even know what I'm talking about here, but they have the same in-your-face, prove-your-assertion attitudes that were present all along. That's what is cool about it, it bridges between generations of hackers. Some came of age after HTTP and HTML revolutionized the technology of online community, and others were part of the hobbie computer movement that started it all. Moderation means I don't spend nearly as much time reading through BS arguments and other drivel as the old days (essential since the wider ready of the modern internet means even more people who would disrupt things just for attention).
The problem I've found in online communities is censorship. In a community ran website like Everything2
(and even Slashdot, to a lesser degree), censorship is at the whim of the people in power. If they don't agree with what you say, most times you'll have your stuff cut, edited, or removed all together. I had this problem on E2 late last year, and I haven't been back since (A friend of mine logged onto my account to check something, but that wasn't me). I had an opinion that didn't mesh with what the editors of E2 believed, and I was cut as a result. Now in the issue of fairness, I want to point out that my node was about how George W. Bush is the rightful President. It was filled with evidence and fact, not speculation and conjure, but it was still yanked nonetheless. Why? Because the editor that k-lined it didn't agree with me, and they didn't want anyone else to read it and possibly side with me. I've gotten over it, as I said I haven't contributed or returned to E2 since the whole thing happened, but when you advertise a broad, diverse online community where ideas can thrive you must consider that not all the ideas will agree with you, and in the true spirit of open thought one should allow viewpoints from outside your method of thought. And from my experience most online communities don't allow that.
--Reverend Raven
Desperate days demand dire deeds.