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Joel on Community Forums
Evil Grinn writes "In Building Communities with Software, Joel Spolsky starts with a lament about the lack of real-life community among programmers, but rapidly seques into an explanation of why he thinks his own forum system is better than Usenet or Slashdot. I really don't participate in Joel's forums enough to comment, but they are pretty basic. No registration system. No branching (you can only add comments to the end of a conversation, not reply to comments in the middle). No mod points. Quoting in replies is strongly discouraged. All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features."
I think this should be the only thread.
No branching, please.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Slashdot isn't perfect - but it's gotten wide recognition for being a news outlet for the technically minded.
Tens of thousands of users... active discussions daily.
Joel may not think this format is ideal, but nothing succeeds like success - and Slashdot is successful as a discussion format.
All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features.
ha ha ha - That's what I tell my boss too. No undo button? Yeah, mmmm, that's part of the system. Yeah, that's the ticket!
Best Windows Freeware
OK, here's the deal-breaker for me with forums:
;-) ) participation skyrocketed.
Forcing the reader to click to read every new comment.
See ZDNet Talkbacks for an example. I'm sorry, if I wanted to invest that much effort I'd be doing work instead of screwing around online. That mentality of maximizing page loads should be left to fan reviews on teenage overclocker sites, where it belongs.
See dot.kde.org for a good example. Like most Squishdot sites, it used to collapse threads on any story with more than some small number of posts (ie, anything interesting). When Navindra made it possible to change that threshold (due, in part, to my whining about it
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
But then again, I haven't spent much time at his community.
Slashdot is a very different type of community since there really aren't any persistent "boards" or discussion forums -- the forums are the articles and they last a very short period of time. This is fine -- slashdot is about "news for nerds" after all.
When I spend time at other forums, I want most of the features that were removed. I agree quoting can go too far, but most boards I've been on don't seem to fall prey to to this like email messages easily can.
I like threaded discussions, but not everyone does. I've noticed some systems (i.e. ubb.threads) have some nice technology that allows the user to switch between them.
Overall, this article wasn't too interesting. I'd rather see an article that reviewed a number of the different community systems out there (ahem -- how about looking at my story submission someone???)...
Evolution: love it or leave it
All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features.
When did these become mutually exclusive? Just beacuse something is intentionally left out doesn't mean it's not missing. Wether the features being missing is a good thing or not is the only thing that can be up for discussion.
No branching (you can only add comments to the end of a conversation, not reply to comments in the middle).
Is there locking for posting in-depth, correct, messages, or if you spend lots of time presenting a well thought out post do you just get bounced when somebody else has already replied while you were typing? You can't restrict branching in a high traffic forum without some sort of syncronization, and you can't allow syncronization to be open to untrusted users without denial of service. Sounds like a broken decision to me.
All Joel's comments are geared towards small forums that are attempting to grow. Wouldn't work here - I don't know about anyone else, but I dont want to have to page through 50k of "BSD is dying" before I get to something relevant.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
That's because an undo button is universally recognized as a useful thing.
But the things "missing" from Joel's forums are not universally recognized as good things to have. (Obviously, otherwise he wouldn't have thrown them out, Q.E.D.) Hell, they're not even universally recognized on slashdot as good things to have.
I would go look up the name of the logical fallacy you just committed, but I've decided not to.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
A conversation is made better by minimizing quoting? I disagree; a discussion can be made more precise with quoting. I also feel it can eliminate flamousness, because you give context to comments that might otherwise be misconstrued. This isn't to say that quoting doesn't encourage skilled trolls to take posts out of context to make a warped point.
Branching distracts? Quite the opposite; the very structure of USENET threading and threading on Slashdot allows me to ignore irrelevant branches very easily.
Previewing posts isn't good? Sorry, but previews are good for at least two uses in my experience. I get to see my post and reconsider the structure of what I have to say. Also, it allows me to reconsider if I'm about to flame the hell out of someone, or more often remove language that could be misconstrued because of poor word choice.
I really feel that Joel has an idea of how he can force non-technical users to deal with online forums. And that may be fine for his purposes if he has a lot of non-technical users. But forcing users to jump through these hoops does not encourage them to become more proficient users of what I see as more sophisticated, forums. And, in the sense of organizing information, I find the kind of forum he's pushing to be amazingly inefficient, since the idea of a thread of a discussion can be completely destroyed (without draconian topic splitting by moderators).
Honestly, though, it's as if he took every design decision that's part of current forums and decided to provide a contrary view, for the sake of argument. While I think it's great to discuss those structures that we take for granted that might be improved, this seems intentionally controversial without any suggestions for better organizing information.
Ah well. I disagree with his idea of a productive forum, but then I'm a long time USENET user. (This post previewed several times to elaborate on my original two paragraph post. Oh, and I corrected some ambiguous language. And, believe it or not, I kept the original story in another browser tab so I could refer to it, although I didn't quote from it.)
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
...then the design sucks, too. -My other sig is sour.
I think his solution is workable for small groups but without social norming things get out of hand pretty quick. Modding is just a form of social norming.
Don't use the non-word "seques" if you don't know what word you should be using. You're trying to show off, but showing off your ignorance. If you stick to bread-and-butter words, then everyone's happy.
The correct word is "segues". From the Italian, and ultimately from latin, where the root word did have a 'q' (same root as 'sequence' etc., and if you really want to trace it back, you can go all the way to pIE without too much of a leap of faith.)
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Joel's message boards are trying to build community, not just be simple forums. Notice that what many of the posters to slashdot have said is all these features make it easier to jump in, get the good stuff and get moving with life. Community on the other hand is about people sticking around and having a conversation.
From the article:
"On IRC, you can't own your nickname and you can't own a channel -- once the last person leaves a room, anyone can take it over. "
Bullshit. That's not a feature of _IRC_, that's a particular feature of the particular irc net he's using. Many smaller networks have nameservs, so that you can own your nickname, and it's also perfectly possible to have registered channel management on an IRC network too.
His criticisms of Usenet and the '>' disease are equally bogus. It's _idiots_ who don't know how to trim quotes, and idiots can make any system annoying. The higher quality newsgroups tend to slap good posting style into newbs fairly swiftly, and you therefore don't read the same thing repeatedly.
If he believes his system is inherantly superior, then perhaps we shoudl all run over, and act like annoying newbs on his fora, and he'd soon see that his setup is just as flawed as any other, if not more-so.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
The thing I *really* don't like Joel's system is his policy of not showing the policies. There is an incredibly obvious and rather fatal flaw that is inherent in this.
Say some jerk comes to the message board and starts doing mean things like trolling. So you punish him or her appropriately. However, then one of your established users begins to start trolling, so you go lightly on him or her, because he or she is respected and had a bad day. Well, that's not good. Inconsistency in punishments is something that drives people away. In the business world if you treate one person differently than another, you have lawsuits on your hands!
So who is to know what is allowed and what isn't when the rules don't exist? I think that this is the actual reason for Joel not wanting to post rules. This way he can punish whomever he wants and selectively decide to enforce the rules.
This coupled with his policy of deleting "off-topic" and other things that he "doesn't like" leads to a really bad "community" with something akin to secret police patrolling the message board, silently taking out those who don't conform and whatnot. How bad.
First of all look at this /. thread
at -1 nested look at the scoring in that story: -1: 489 comments
0: 270 comments
1: 216 comments
2: 113 comments
3: 49 comments
4: 22 comments
5: 9 comments
there was robomoderation (script?) of comments starting at +2 down to -1 offtopic several days after the story was posted
where's the freedom at?
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
...why it is always front-page news here when Joel S. opens his mouth? Is someone who runs Slashdot pals with him or something? He seems to be about as astute about software as, well, your general slashdotter...which is just kinda okay really (I mean, his ideas aren't always terrible, sometimes their good, sometimes stupid and bad. I'd rather hear from, say, Bruce Shneier though, to pick another random qualified software-pundit). I don't get it.
Ha
I don't think joel has been on irc for a long, long time.
I developed and help admin a private forum of people who met on the net. When I was developing it I asked what people wanted. They unanimously did not want multiple forums, "hidden" replies (forcing you to click on each one) or limits to replying (it's fully threaded). People don't like anything that they interpret as limiting what they want to do.
Within a really good community you can let the community keep itself in order. When someone steps out of line or a newbie does something... newbieish... then the community straightens it out before a moderator needs to step in.
To create strong community you must create a strong friendship, or at least a strong commonality, among members.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I don't know...
...to me Joel kinda lost his credibility after the whole 'Joel on boys' scandal. But I guess whatever floats your boat.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
I usually appreciate Joel's views, but this article is way off base. He would do well to study group psychology and collaboration before making comments like this.
In one breath he wails about the lack of "community", and in the next distinguished between "newbies" and "old timers" on a usenet group. These categories emerge strictly as a result of the community building process, whereby it is difficult for a newcomer to enter a (social) group on an equal footing to existing members.
The idea that quoting is a "disease" is misguided at best. Because a single e-mail or post represents several parts of a conversation, indicating the context to which you are referring is essential. This is even more true in the case of online systems that will be used in the future as archive and/or reference material, where it will be difficult and time-consuming to follow the entire conversation from the beginning to the point of interest. While quoting of entire posts is indeed a curse, selective quoting to indicate context is necessary for meaningful communication.
When it comes to e-mail notification, Joel is even more far gone. All literature on the relatively new field of active collaboration indicates that people have less time to do more things, and the best way to achieve collaboration is to tell them what they need when they need it. I used to spend plenty of time and bandwidth browsing to Slashdot to find out if someone had replied to my comments; now I know when this happens, and can follow up in a reasonable period of time. Conversations that may have taken days and stagnated can now be more meaningful.
Branching? Let's thing about this for a moment -- there is a lecture theatre with (say) 100 people in the audience; after a short speech (the "initial post") there is a break for discussion. Does each person insist on an opportunity to stand at the podium and give their 5c, or do they go and huddle with other people and discuss their views and interpretation. And which system is better suited to communicating and increasing group knowledge, assuming all conversations are recorded and archived?
While Joel's commented on Slashdot may be warranted, it (Slashdot) is nevertheless the closest thing on the public Internet to Active Collaborative Filtering (ACF). The idea of ACF is that there is too much content for you to process (filter) on your own. Instead you can leverage the processing (filtering) of others (experts in the field and/or people you trust to be like-minded). Slashdot's moderation system is a simple implementation of ACF, assuming you trust all geekdom to be like-minded. The ability to assign additional moderation to particular users progresses the system more towards true ACF. In any event it is a more reliable system than moderation by a number of pre-selected moderators.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Kuro5hin seems to foster the tightest knit group of users. Would anybody like to make a guess of why that is?
My own guess would be three factors:
(1) The community written and edited stories with following plebiscite seems draw people in. Users want to participate, and they come to associate the views with the writers. They take more pride in a cite that is truly community built, in part by them.
(2) The comment moderation system allows people to become known. Since any user can rate any comment at any time -- and his name is attached to the rating -- users become known. Also, this fosters user participation because people are not limited to either writing comments or moderating.
(3) The continuously scrolling diary section creates a valve for outbursts or simply a location to write about qoutidian life. It has generated a subculture of its own.
I think the point is that the features are missing from the design (or the requirements), rather than from the implementation. Which leaves the choice to omit them, and the rationale for their omission, as what's really up for discussion.
;)
In this case, the rationale of these choices is to guide the development of the community, from how people interact with it, to how people participate in it, to which people even both with it at all. In glancing though the article, Slashdot is mentioned several times, generally as a compare/contrast example. There's no question that Slashdot works (and works well, in my opinion), but there are definitely some characteristics that could definitely be improved. I'm sure that the Joel on Software forum works as well, but in a slightly different way.
And I'm equally sure that other forum implementations don't work for sh!t, but they manage to get lots of participation anyway (most of which is a waste of electrons that could be better spent lighting an empty closet). Then again, I don't waste my time with those, which is a fine example of design choices influencing the community.
Yet another slashdot ripping to shreds, (it does seem to be a good forum for that). Like attracts like, slashdot attracts anti MS, lame jokes, with the occasional flash of inspiration. The moderation system while good at filtering out the dross can help keep the party line. I just had two years away from slashdot at it seems to have dropped in quality. Two years ago reading at 4/5 would give me the most interesting comments, normally about 10 which is enough to really cover most points in a discussion. Now your typical item is getting 30-40 in the 4/5 level. And I never get to the end of the list as I get board by the repeated discussion. Have a look at the number of comments in Do You Write Backdoors? thread. 37 at 5, 52 at 4, 86 at 3, 220 at 2, 368 at at 1 and 531 at 0. The ratio of these are 37/52 = .7
52/86 = .6
86/220 = .4
220/368 = .7
So 70% of posts with 4 get moderated up to 5.
We see a big drops from 2 to 3 and small drops from 4 to 5.
I'd like to see a sharper drop, so its only
the really good comments which get to be 5. This is possibly achievable by reducing the
number of moderation points around.
I'm with Joel on quoting. I almost never quote
and do not enjoy the pickyness in usenet.
This may be my personal preferance, I tend to
prefer quick overviews to small details.
He's certainly right on how small design changes
affect the type of discussion. I've done
several small changes my own
discussion board at
Plants For A Future
(which is really a means for adding corections
to pages rather than a true discussion board).
Originally you had to go to a new page to add
a comment, I wanted to encourage more posts
and also to make it easier for people to add
links to other sites with related info.
So put the reply box right there on the page
and add a box so people can easily add a link
without having to know about all that <a href
stuff. Sure enough number of links went up.
Just thinking of my dream discussion board software. All these small changes could be
easily configurable so that you create the
kind of discussion you want.
Now I'm going to go away and remove that
followup link from my board. The feature
never worked well anyway.
ttfn Rich
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Yet another slashdot ripping to shreds, (it does seem to be a good forum for that). Like attracts like, slashdot attracts anti MS, lame jokes, with the occasional flash of inspiration. The moderation system while good at filtering out the dross can help keep the party line.
I just had two years away from slashdot at it seems to have dropped in quality. Two years ago reading at 4/5 would give me the most interesting comments, normally about 10 which is enough to really cover most points in a discussion. Now your typical item is getting 30-40 in the 4/5 level. And I never get to the end of the list as I get board by the repeated discussion. Have a look at the number of comments in Do You Write Backdoors? thread. 37 at 5, 52 at 4, 86 at 3, 220 at 2, 368 at at 1 and 531 at 0. The ratio of these are
- 37/52 =
.7 5 vrs 4
- 52/86 =
.6 4 vrs 3
- 86/220 =
.4 3 vrs 2
- 220/368 =
.7 2 vrs 1
So 70% of posts with 4 get moderated up to 5. We see a big drops from 2 to 3 and small drops from 4 to 5.I'd like to see a sharper drop, so its only the really good comments which get to be 5. This is possibly achievable by reducing the number of moderation points around.
I'm with Joel on quoting. I almost never quote and do not enjoy the pickyness in usenet. This may be my personal preferance, I tend to prefer quick overviews to small details.
He's certainly right on how small design changes affect the type of discussion. I've done several small changes my own discussion board at Plants For A Future (which is really a means for adding corections to pages rather than a true discussion board). Originally you had to go to a new page to add a comment, I wanted to encourage more posts and also to make it easier for people to add links to other sites with related info. So put the reply box right there on the page and add a box so people can easily add a link without having to know about all that <a href stuff. Sure enough number of links went up.
Just thinking of my dream discussion board software. All these small changes could be easily configurable so that you create the kind of discussion you want.
Now I'm going to go away and remove that followup link from my board. The feature never worked well anyway.
ttfn Rich
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.