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."

Comments

Food for thought

[CaptainAlbert]

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? :)

Re:Study Too Deep

[Mahrin Skel]

Sociology spent too long with nothing really new happening, 99% of the really important insights for the field were made 75 or more years ago. Since then it's been mostly mental masturbation and ancestor worship. This is just starting to change, as the internet has made the creation and dynamics of communities a way of doing experimental sociology (in the sense of developing disprovable theories).

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

Re:Community

[sielwolf]

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.

PerlMonks

[dan dan the dna man]

PerlMonks is a fantastic way of showing how an online community can run. It makes /. look like a war zone. By turns it is funny, helpful, the XP system keeps people interested in posting and it allows everyone a degree of metamoderation past a certain XP level.

Now its been mentioned on /. that quite little backwater of perl lovers is in danger ;)

Not all online communities are websites

[TheTick]

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.

Re:Political sites have been doing this

[AppyPappy]

Democrat Underground is Here

Users WILL suprise you!!!

[mustangdavis]

They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed.

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!

They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics.

Tell me about it! I have one guy that called himself Pizza da Hutt ... he made a web site about his battles and used Star Wars analogizes in EVERYTHING he posted. Everyone he fought was Jedi (* fill in the blank *). We even had people looking up our company's phone number, just so they could say "Hi" to us by viewing our domain name registration information. We have a couple of users that call us, long distance, on a daily basis, just to report people breaking the rules or to see if some of us are going to be playing War Craft. But I can't complain too much. They keep us on our toes ... and they are not even half as bad as some of the everquest people I've seen :)

Re:Censorship

[Drachemorder]

One thing you do have to keep in mind is the goal and purpose of the community. If you have a community dedicated to mechanisms of evolution, for instance, you might want to ban creationism in order to keep creation/evolution debating from disrupting the overall purpose of your community. I don't really see anything wrong with that (and I'm a creationist).

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.

slow down cowboy!

[Gizzmonic]

They feel too much of an urge to speak quickly, making them say embarrasing or stupid things. The addition of a keyboard and a delay slow down the communication and allow us to speak our minds.

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.

Common Oversite?

[phil-is-math]

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.

And who might this be?

[Malcs]

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.