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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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
There's a reason Slashdot doesn't have just one big thread (or maybe two--"News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters"), and it's the same reason there are more newsgroups than misc.misc. Topics are useful for both finding what you do want to read and avoiding what you don't. No matter how big a "section of the community" wants to violate the community's norms, reducing signal/noise is still wrong.
Think of it as getting out the body armor and tear gas because the regular cops on the beat can't handle the riot on their own.
Why do you think the admins would reject this topic, just because they minimized vandalism in a completely unrelated topic?
If you want K5 you know where to find it. Slashdot exists because the audience thinks the admins' selections are worth reading.