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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Mostly obvious, but mostly good.
:)
It would have been nice to see more said on the topic of anonymous posting though. The number of times you see AC posts on slashdot which are people with "real" accounts talking about their employers (for example)... this didn't even get a mention.
But I liked:
> Discuss the Community Openly
If I say this is a good idea, do I get $rtbled?
These sigs are more interesting tha
Unfortunately, most sociologists are not prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. It's become such a "soft" science, so channelled into the idea that nothing can really be proven, and dependant on the advocacy model of academic discussion, that it's institutionally unprepared to switch gears and behave like a hard science.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be outsiders and young students. There's been some really interesting ideas coming from synthesis with network theory, and Nick Yee has done some really good work treating the populations of online games as subjects and doing comparative studies. But it's not yet being taken seriously by the greater community of sociology, which seems focused on finding ways to make the new tools give the old results.
--Dave
Although it isn't really a community
Eh... I don't think so. Not anymore with the advent of the zoo.pl. I mean, just look at the Fort Knox community: about a hundred or so people within two or three degrees of separation of Fort Knox. Most of us folks now spend most of our time cruizing the journal circuit instead of the redundant discussion topics. It is a much more personal and thus a community experience.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Now its been mentioned on
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
The internet (not just the web) allows minds separated by meatspace commune as if they were right next door. It is within this mindspace that communities emerge and evolve.
[I'm intrigued by the common root of commune, communicate, and community. It seems to me that an online community is, in many ways, a truer community than that which we generally think of as a community in meatspace.]
Although usenet (really an accretion of communities) is mentioned in the article, there are other entities, many predating the web, that are more communal than the typical web-based "online community". MUDs, MOOs and their ilk are particularly interesting not only because their members interact in something like real time, but also because the "reality" of the community is a consensual construct of the members themselves. Of course, I'm thinking more of the "building" aspects of M**s, than the "game" aspects.
I recommend this article for another examination of online communities.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Some researchers are actively investigating online communities. At least ones where the reason for the community to exist is educational.
The Collaborative Software Laboratory
Electronic Learning Communities
I think the "reason to exist" for many communities is so members can learn from each other. Thus, this research should be widely applicable.
Disclaimer: I am a student at Georgia Tech, but not associated with either of these labs
Democrat Underground is Here
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
This is an understatement!! I have been running an online gaming community (http://www.coldfirestudios.com) for the past 3 years, and I can honestly say that the games my friends and I create would not be nearly as good as they are today without the ideas and input we got from our users. Moral of the story: LISTEN TO YOUR USERS!! Sometimes, they know your product better than you do!
Tell me about it! I have one guy that called himself Pizza da Hutt
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Now, I agree with you that if you have a community that's meant to be diverse, censorship in any form would definitely violate that principle. But some communities have more specialized purposes, and it might be valid to expect them to take steps to keep their communities on topic.
it doesn't slow a lot of people down enough. if you are building an online community, i would emphasize the art of not posting unless you have something significant to contribute.
unfortunately, i find that many people on slashdot are so eager to prove their intelligence, they plunge headlong threads they know nothing about, providing "facts" that they half-remember from another slashdot thread posted months ago. (yes, haven't we all been guilty of this).
the off-topic moderation is also not used nearly enough. i have seen threads with hundreds of responses (many modded up to +3 or more) that started when one person made an incongruous computer/car metaphor, and then another one decided to correct him with his own incongruous metaphor. Finally, the thread degenerates into Ford vs. Chevy.
moderation in general is less a measure of the "quality" of a post and more about tone. sound authoritative, you'll get the mods +. sound unsure or angry, and you'll get the mods -.
now i don't mean to whine too much about this, but come on. i can't read about some new PDA because someone decided to make an inappropriate comment about how a palm pilot is like a ford festiva and an iPaq is like a gran turino. the lameness filter probably can't get smart enough to catch those.
the "zoo" doesn't help much either, because someone who makes a boneheaded comments in a discussion about PDAs might be the world's biggest genius when it comes to embedded devices-marking him as a foe might cause me to miss something that actually is in fact, "+1 informative".
what's the solution for this? currently i read at -1, and make my own choices. But-in order to provide the best online community possible, i propose that slashdot extend the "2-post a day rule" that it currently exercises on low-karma posters to everyone. this would gently encourage the experts to save up their posts for a topic where they could truly educate others.
think about it won't you? thanks.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Gosh, I really hope you were intending this to be a funny post, because otherwise you're just being an ass and not really looking at the article in its true context:
I was hoping it would be funny, I can't believe at this moment that it is modded as +4 insightful. I think that is purely due to the phenomenon that I managed to post reasonably quickly. Indeed, if you are karma whoring you do need to get in quick - but it's not just about karma points. It's about being seen. If you take too long to post something and really think about it, you are less likely to get read than if you send a halfbaked joke idea which you haven't properly developed. That's what Slashdot is really about - it mirrors real life. You have to shout louder and earlier than everyone else to be noticed, but the true geniuses are the ones who quietly work in a corner and have less need for recognition. Their time will come.
He's talking about a site-creator's experience with users, so most of your translations don't make sense.
Fair point. You got me there. I did shift the perspective towards site users, rather than the creators. Appealing, perhaps, to those people who use mod points up immediately on new articles rather than properly searching posts for the true insights. That's why your comment, which deserves points, didn't get modded up yet, whereas my less worthy post did. Perhaps a delay in mod points for the first few posts might help even that out - until a threshold of a number of posts is reached, do not apply mod points. Sure, the disadvantage is that many mod points would be "wasted" on modding up articles that already have 5 points, but it would give more chance for the cream to rise to the top from those people who might have a bit more time to type something more intelligent. Indeed if you sort by the number of points, the DB could remember those who got modded up much more and put them up at the top, overriding the chronological fallback for posts with equal points. That would probably change my attitude to posting for the better.
Maybe the surprise will be that your site becomes the first place people go to in the morning, and becomes so successful just by word of mouth that one morning when their is a big news event (i.e., 9/11), your server becomes totally overloaded. Maybe the surprise will be that two members of your online community fall in love, get married, and invite the whole community to their wedding party.
You're dead right here. Somehow the sum of the parts becomes bigger than the whole. Lots of people I meet in IT see me surfing slashdot and have a "wow... that's what I do each lunctime, too" kneejerk reaction. I'm not quite so sure how people then make a link to really feeling like the readers are part of a community where they then feel like inviting them to their wedding, at least for Slashdot.
I think your mistake here was assuming that because two people have different interests, one is a dork with serious brain damage, and the other is a supergod hacker who thinks programming in Assembly is taking the easy way out.
I think you're using hyperbole to prove your point here. I didn't really suggest that. What I'm trying (badly) to get at is that even the leaders in a particular field can suddenly be surprised by peer review - a guy in India with a minimal "classic" education has really done his research, and his post back to you suddenly makes you feel very small. This is a wonderful effect of Slashdot.
This is where you get closest. First Posts are definitely one of the "strange characteristics" of Slashdot.
At least you're not going to hammer everything I said then :)
I'd say examples of "strange characteristics" on Slashdot include the contents of people's sig files, the proliferation of "Funny" comments, and an obsession with putting random links everywhere [aol.com]. Also, let's not forget Karma Whoring..
As I have already touched upon before, Karma Whoring is much more complex than just hitting the 50 point barrier. This is why I think Karma: Excellent is not improving things in this department. The point is that you have to be fast to get seen, and if you come in too late but have something very valid to say, and can put it properly too, then you are not going to get seen. I have already admitted that I am a wannabe, I think we all are. We need to be seen and read, because we feel that we have something valid and important to say (at least sometimes) but can fall back to a "points rush" on a slow afternoon when there's a nagging problem to fix on a server someplace but the motivation just isn't there yet.
For the last point, "cover my ass" phrases are those that I get most bad reactions from. Hence putting it in my sig. It takes time to craft language into the true nature of your thoughts, indeed even a well written piece doesn't get beyond scratching the surface of what you're really thinking. And the same goes for some things which are so clearly ironic for me (I really cannot imagine anyone being so dumb as to truly believe some of the things I type) that I am shocked by people's replies letting me know how dumb I must be.
All in all, cheers for replying. I appreciate that more than all the mod points I have ever got.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
What I don't get is in all this talk of Online Communities there is never a refrence to the very real affect they *could* have in offline communication and community building. Slashdot, may or may not provide and example for this. As far as I know there are no real offline communities of slashdot readers? Maybe a LUG or something. There is great potential in bringing together people, who live in the same area and have the same agendas, with online communities. I think people are seeing the internet way to globally, and not realizing it can be used locally. I've been involved in communities with both an online and offline aspect. The effect is immeasurable, you see the users having a GREAT sense of ownership and accountablity for their actions. Comments made in forums are often catalyst for real world events. Good and Bad. People are connecting in ways that they never could. Constently. The growth and progress of a community is logged through the online aspects, every user builds the history of the movement/group/whatever with their comments. New persons to a geographical area, can ease into the community, as they have the not so duanting option of just posting on a message board! Maybe it's b/c geeks would prefer to sit at a keyboard .. but I don't believe that stereotype. Look at the growth of the LAN party phenomenon. Online community with games and IRC, offline events to bring together that community. It's a simple concept that could be applied anywere, but isn't.
I believe we can harness this power in every aspect of society. Then will we be using the internet to it's potential.
I'm extremely interested in this topic these days actually. If you can point me in the direction of material or would like to explore this idea with me. Feel free to contact me.
Word to me.
As the builder of towerofbabel.com , I think the most fascinating thing about building an online community is that it's like throwing a party and not knowing who is on the invite list, let alone who is going to show up. It completely short circuits every societally sanctioned way of meeting people and really cuts to the chase when you're looking for interesting and intelligent conversation. Of course it helps if you have a wealth of good content as a base for the community. It just goes to reiterate the quote that a neighbor is not a geographic term, it's a moral term.
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
It's very hard to be objective in evaluating your own work. That's why there are so many editors in the world.
Now, you say "It was filled with evidence and fact, not speculation and conjure", but I've heard similar claims more often than I can care to admit. The truth is, nine times out of ten it was an opinion piece, where the "facts" were largely interpretations of fact, or worse yet interpretations of "facts" that were themselves a matter of opinion. I mean, let's face it, you describe the writeup like so: "It was a fact piece about how G. W. Bush is the rightful president". That's an opinion piece, okay?
If you're writing about a controversial topic, you've got an ethical obligation (IMHO, anyhow) to lean pretty far over backward in trying to be fair and objective.
So: You say it was deleted "because the editor... didn't agree with me", but naturally you have no hard reason to believe that. The editor probably gave you a reasonable explanation similar to what I just gave you above. Rather than listen, you just decided that it's easier to assume that he's evil than to accept the possibility that your writeup might have had shortcomings. You decided to blame your failings on somebody else's evil schemes (sounds a lot like a certain Democratic candidate who lost an election in Florida, eh?). You are offering your opinion about his motivation as an alleged "fact", which sheds an unwelcome light on your claims w/r/t the Bush writeup.
It's just as well you left E2, if all you've got to contribute is (frequently rather paranoid) opinions which you believe to be "fact".