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.
It pulls together several thoughts gathered from observing sites like Slashdot, Everything2, and Perl Monks."
Here's the link to Slashdot for anyone that needs it...
Although it isn't really a community, Slashdot does serve a very important purpose.
Many, if not all of the people here are socially not too great at real in front of people communication. 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.
Without the likes of Slashdot, whole swathes of youngsters would be unable to comunicate at all, and would be unable to fit in, and would end up jumping off a bridge. So online community saves lives.
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
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
Translation: If you're a newbie, you will get flamed
The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users. They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed.
Trans: you may still be a loser even if you run a successful weblog, or more mildly, there is always someone who knows more than you about how some random chip inside some old hardware REALLY works.
They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics.
Trans: like first post, links to prOn, and the like...
Not everyone will exhibit every behavior, but these are general trends in every community I've observed.
Trans: there are some people who put a lot of thought into what they say. Thanks be to God/Allah/Buddha/Krishna/The TCP/IP stack/etc...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
For anyone interested, this months Linux Journal has an article on OpenACS (page 12) which reads, in part:
"It's easy to say that OpenACS is a toolkit for creating on-line communities. But what does that mean? For starters, it means that OpenACS comes with working versions of most of the applications you're likely to want on a community web site. It handles user registration and administration, forums, FAQs, group (including a rich permission scheme), news updates, file storage and distribution, personal home pages, surveys and a we-based calendar. As you might expect from a modern system, administration of the application is done almost completely through the Web, with only a few configuration files."
From OpenACS' frontpage:
WHAT is OpenACS?
OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. If you're thinking of building an enterprise-level web application, OpenACS is a solid, proven foundation that will give you a 3-6 month headstart.
My
Limekiller
Why can't we make better use of the communities we already have? All this constant building new communities does nothing but add to the suburban sprawl that is already a blight on our landscape. ...oh wait... no, yeah. That's right...
FREE KEVIN!
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
If you notice my sig, you'll see that I run an online community dedicated to OpenGL programming (and the many facets thereof). I started the community back in March 2002, and I love it to no end. It's relatively small (especially compared to Slashdot), but its an awesome place to hang out and talk with other people interested in OpenGL, game programming, and Linux. Now, enough about my community, here are my ideas about the article.
:)
Regular users will develop a sense of community ownership. As a whole, their content contributions probably outweigh yours...
This could not be more true. Running my site is a full time job (along with school). I rarely get to answer the questions that my members have. Luckily, I've recruited some top notch moderators who answer questions and keep the forums inline. If it weren't for them, members wouldn't come back. Adding to that, I must say also: a lot of your members will know more than you do! Get over it, learn from it. I'm only 18, and have had a limited time using OpenGL, whereas I have many professional programmers in my community. Most people love to help.
Besides letting community leaders and members perform administrative work (content production, content moderation, software development, content rating, the donation of hardware or bandwidth fees)...
This is crucial for a site to survive. At my site, we have tutorials. So far, I've written all but 3 of the tutorials. Tutorials, especially ones as long as mine, take a long time to write. One idea I thought up was to ask members to write tutorials. You'd be surprised how many members want to write tutorials and get work displayed, and on somebody elses website no less! If you need help paying for the site, set up a donation link (PayPal is easy, even with all of the warnings). Many members are willing to contribute something to the site, especially if they see it become something tangible (like prizes to a contest).
Encourage community archives. Provide a way to address individual bits of history (messages, chat logs, event histories) in finely-grained units.
This is a must. New members will want to research to see how the site came about, and things that occured during the sites lifetime. I think that people are very interested in history. They want to know about the past. Keeping archives is not very hard, especially if you can set up an automated system.
You will never please some users. A few will stick around only to see your next mistake. They tend to be vocal. Their pessimism doesn't make them wrong, but it can be grating.
Again, this is where moderators and other regulars to the site come in. When someone on the forums posts something degrading or offensive (yeah, sue me for censoring people, there are some things that are not appropriate for an OpenGL forum. I don't want my forum to be full of SPAM), the moderators immediately step in and either edit the post or delete it entirely. If a user is being particularly harsh, and I am not there to quell them, a moderator will say, "Hey, listen, Vic works his hardest on the site. He's not perfect, and he'll take care of you. Just have some patients." It's a very rewarding feeling when people want to help you with your site without pay. Occasionally, when I make a news post, I'll thank my moderators for their hard work so they know their work is appreciated.
Simplicity may appeal to some users. The lack of sophistication (reply notification, searching, revisions, and access controls) may put off some users, and an ugly or awkward user interface may get in the way sometimes, but a community can grow in spite of the mess.
This is very true. Thus, I approach my community two ways. There is the main news page, the main page of the site, and then there are the forums (similar to any message board you see now). The main page (and subsequent sub pages), are very simple. A DIV in the middle of the page is all that is needed for news. I use style sheets to control the data in there, and all in all, it comes out very nice. I am currently redesigning the main page to add a few more visual controls, but its still very basic. However, when you click on the Forums link, you go to the much more "complicated" forums. There, you can post messages, be alerted of replies, send private messages and email, search for past posts, etc. It doesn't hurt that my forums looks particularly nice.
Finally (I promise, this is my last point), you need something to keep repeat visitors. There must be a way for visitors to interact with the site. No one wants to just read news posts and view a few tutorials. When they are done, they won't come back (I feel this was an underlying assumption in the article, though). Two more ways to keep visitors: Contests! Yes, they cost money, but yes, people love them. Especially when they can get a free Radeon 9000 or 256MB of Crucial RAM (hint hint) from entering it. Even better: use the donations other members made for this. The second way is to give visitors free stuff without you having to pay for it. For example, anyone who is a member of the forums, have more than 10 posts, and contribute well to the community can have their own subdomain on the site (and an email address and a free MySQL database/PHP support). This is better than a lot of hosting plans. Members can use the subdomain to show off their work or write tutorials on a different facet of OpenGL. I require NO ads, but I casually suggest that if they want to link to me, I'd appreciate it.
Well, thats all about me and my online community experience. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
-Vic
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
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).
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)