Building Online Communities 112
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."
Simply put .. well said. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Political sites have been doing this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
uh (Score:4, Insightful)
No Matter How Repulsive the Service (Score:4, Insightful)
Community is the same reason that people stick with services that suck (AOL) - they build relationships, and while they may actually grow, in knowledge, past the use of a specific service they still maintain the service in many cases because of the warm fuzzy feeling that community provides.
Secondly would be the community of reliance types of organzations - Ebay - where people rely on seller and buyer ratings as much as anything else to feel comfortable making a purchase in an environment that is otherwise risky.
R
Re:Simply put .. well said. (Score:2, Insightful)
Community Moderation. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Poster Beleaves in God (Even better if the poster admits that he is a practicing Roman Catholic) Insightful 3, Overated 1, Troll 1, Flame 1
Advantages of Windows, and sometimes Solaris over Linux. Instering 2, Insightful 1, Overated 3
Not liking PC Hardware and archecture. Insightful 2 Interesting 1, Troll 2, Flame 1
Python v. Perl or Perl v. Python. Interesting 1 Overated 1
So just like real comunities there are different point of views and an attempt to opress free speach even on slashdot. Wich makes it insterin to know that you can be a outcast amoung outcasts.
Re:uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think that's a concept we all could hear more often. Maybe it would sink in.
OK, But Didn't Address Tough Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot does not present these issues in as acute a form as, for instance, a commercial product-users community site. One of the advantages Slashdot has as an online community is that it does not have much of an agenda -- sure, a large portion of the active participants are pro-Linux/anti-MS, vaguely libertarian, etc., but Slashdot itself is not trying to accomplish anything extrinsic to Slashdot and not trying to sell us anything (which is one of the things that makes it good).
Moreover, because of the overwhelmingly young-adult-male audience of Slashdot, there is little that can _really_ offend most people -- as much as we hate to accidently see or click through to the gentleman from the Christmas Islands, a stray repellent posting or link that gets past Slashcode is not going to cause large numbers of viewers to abandon Slashdot, write to Congress, think ill of Slashdot/OSDN/VA or boycott their products.
A commercial site (for instance, a company-sponsored owners group for a particular model auto), however, has more to lose from rude, disruptive or off-topic posts. Additionally, there are difficult issues that a commercial or agenda-oriented site must face -- how does one deal with dissent, with criticism of the product or agenda being promoted or with support of rival products or agenda?
Of course, one reaction (probably that of most Slashdotters) is to hell with those who are trying to exploit "community" to make sales, but I would guess that a good portion of the audience for chromatic's Slash book are interested in the commerce-oriented potential of communities.
Re:Users will surprise you... (Score:2, Insightful)
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:
He's talking about a site-creator's experience with users, so most of your translations don't make sense.
Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before.
Translation: If you're a newbie, you will get flamed
How about, "Just like in real life, people's behaviors are not always what you would expect. And if you haven't been analyzing what has happened to other online communities, then you will be even more surprised by their behaviors." 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.
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.
How about: "Users may have different agendas, motivations, or purposes in visiting your site than you had in mind. Thus, while you online community may have at one point been geared towards just promoting Open Source software, you may find that someone starts complaining about security problems they are having with Windoze, and your site suddenly becomes a #1 resource for people to discuss and fix security problems with Windows, and it become the most discussed topic on your site.
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.
They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics.
Trans: like first post, links to prOn, and the like...
This is where you get closest. First Posts are definitely one of the "strange characteristics" of Slashdot. I don't think links to porn are a strange characteristic, any more than some guy who's drunk too much puking in the street is a "strange characteristic" of a college town. It's not a particularly pleasant part of the community, but it doesn't represent a community "flavor". Generally, people who post links to porn aren't users in the usual sense. They're spammers who go to every community site that allows anonymous posts and put up links to their sites. Thus, they're not really "users" of the community, although they are users of the site. 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..
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...
How about: Some people won't surprise you. Or they will surprise you somewhat, but the issues you find important will resonate with them. Etc., etc. Basically, this is one of those "I'm covering my ass" sentences. He doesn't want to sound like users will always behave the way he has described, so he's allowing for other possibilities too. A lengthened YMMV.
Maybe an Anti-community? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
(and even Slashdot, to a lesser degree), censorship is at the whim of the people in power. If they don't agree with what you say, most times you'll have your stuff cut, edited, or removed all together. I had this problem on E2 late last year, and I haven't been back since (A friend of mine logged onto my account to check something, but that wasn't me). I had an opinion that didn't mesh with what the editors of E2 believed, and I was cut as a result. Now in the issue of fairness, I want to point out that my node was about how George W. Bush is the rightful President. It was filled with evidence and fact, not speculation and conjure, but it was still yanked nonetheless. Why? Because the editor that k-lined it didn't agree with me, and they didn't want anyone else to read it and possibly side with me. I've gotten over it, as I said I haven't contributed or returned to E2 since the whole thing happened, but when you advertise a broad, diverse online community where ideas can thrive you must consider that not all the ideas will agree with you, and in the true spirit of open thought one should allow viewpoints from outside your method of thought. And from my experience most online communities don't allow that.
Re:Simply put .. well said. (Score:1, Insightful)
A weblog does not a community make... (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess the problem is the signal to noise ratio...or rather the interesting info to RMS/MSFT rant ratio.
Yes, but, what about wikis? (Score:2, Insightful)
In "The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet" [amazon.com], Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (c2.com) describe two ways of interacting in a wiki : content pages (as found on wikipedia [wikipedia.com]) and discussion threads (there are many of them on MeatballWiki [usemod.com]).
Most wireless communities [personaltelco.net] use wikis. And it is fun!
But, I agree,
Worse than that.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Worse than that, the entire article presupposes open, public "communities". What if I want to do community-building within my place of employment? I certainly am unconcerned with attracting drive-by interest from the general public. What if I want to do community-building amongst my geographical neighbors? I actively want to discourage participation from people not in that demographic.
The rules of the game are very different when one isn't building a public community. Frankly, "closed" or "private" communities are a lot more "community-like", because they aren't a bunch of strangers, and often have shared resources and projects.
That is one crucial thing which he failed to mention at all: one of the reasons that Open Source project-based communities are so strong is that the members aren't just shooting the breeze, they actually have shared interests in a common good and project (e.g. the code they are working on). It is not totally necessary for a community to have a shared work, but it is a real boost.
Nor, for that matter does he differentiate between a vital "community site" and a vital "community". Consider all the argument about whether /. is a community. Clearly /. is a vital community site with an enormous amount of traffic. But it's not really much of a community in that, I think it is fair to say, most people here are unconcerned with the day-to-day lives of the other people here.
A big rolicking on-going discussion does not a community make. It's one part of the whole, and it may be the foundation on which a community can bloom, but a community is more than conversation.