The evolution of online communities.
- Thread starter TeeJay
- Start date
strung out
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irrelevant wanker 
Kid_Eternity
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
TeeJay said:
Ok, look, I don’t know why you want to drag this small element out but I’ve already said it does and will inform my opinions on the subject and that I’ve no interest in going into detail. I aint trying to “kill the thread” or derail it either.
I wasn’t at all suggesting that we can get away with piss taking because of the traffic levels of these forums. I was joking that these forums tend to be less paranoid of postings (or posters intentions). There aint no need to be so fearful.
No with that said, let’s just drop the wrangling on how this thread should go eh?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Tedix said:irrelevant wanker
Are you talking about phil? Yes, he is an irrelevant wanker.
TeeJay said:Come on then phildwyer:
Stage 1:
Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
Over to you
TeeJay! How delightful to meet you again. You might remember me from some other threads, my name's Phil. I must say its wonderful to find you discussing a topic so close to my heart. Only last night I was saying to myself, "Self" I was saying, "I really wish someone clever and funny would start a thread about how interesting it is that on-line communities invariably go through exactly the same cycles. That would truly be a fascinating discussion, that would. I wish that nice TeeJay was around to do it." So you can imagine my delight when I logged on this morning to find my dreams had come true. I'm really looking forward to this, let's go.
Will that do? What comes next?
newbie
undisambiguated
I think this stuff is interesting too.
Notice the date of the Rheingold book, 1993. That's before the web, or indeed the internet was available outside academia, IBM or the military. It was concerned with communities who couldn't really fragment because they had nowhere else to go.
It's not quite true to say that if Cix (in the UK) or the Well (US) had fractured there was no alternative, but it's not far off the case (Compuserve was never really a community in the same way). Yet by 1993 both had been running longer than Urban has now, and both are still going strong, indeed both are still bigger than Urban (er, I'm a bit hazy about the Well). So it's perhaps worth wondering what makes them different, apart from the fact that they're paid for.
The answer is that any user can create and moderate their own conference at will with full moderator rights. For open conferences, the most common type, any member of the community can join. Conferences can contain hundreds of people or only 3 or 4 who want to discuss the more obscure topics.
Any user can be expelled by the moderator if they break whatever the local rules might be. In their own conf the mods rule is absolute, they write the rules, change them and enforce them. But note that a mod in one conf is a normal user elsewhere. Everybody can be a mod, everybody is a normal user.
Egotistical mods with dictatorial habits find their confs empty as users drift elsewhere. If the moderatorial style in the (lets say) football conf irritates the users someone will start an alternative and pissed off users can shift. Occasionally wars break out: the community as a whole may notice the reverberations but is not really affected.
Expulsion from one conf does not mean expulsion from the community.
That's the key. In the 15 or so years I've been using Cix only a handful of people have been expelled from the community, it's just not necessary. If a group of mates get sick and tired of other people they start a conf, exclude the outsiders, pat each other on the back and slag everybody else off. And when they've got it off their chests they can come out and carry on.
To my mind all of the webboards I've ever met are a huge step backwards. People being thrown out of the community as a whole is awful, for them and for the community. Splits and fractures are worse.
there's a lot, lot more to a properly set up discussion board which webboards lack, but that's the most pertinent to the community aspect, the rest is largely technology.
Notice the date of the Rheingold book, 1993. That's before the web, or indeed the internet was available outside academia, IBM or the military. It was concerned with communities who couldn't really fragment because they had nowhere else to go.
It's not quite true to say that if Cix (in the UK) or the Well (US) had fractured there was no alternative, but it's not far off the case (Compuserve was never really a community in the same way). Yet by 1993 both had been running longer than Urban has now, and both are still going strong, indeed both are still bigger than Urban (er, I'm a bit hazy about the Well). So it's perhaps worth wondering what makes them different, apart from the fact that they're paid for.
The answer is that any user can create and moderate their own conference at will with full moderator rights. For open conferences, the most common type, any member of the community can join. Conferences can contain hundreds of people or only 3 or 4 who want to discuss the more obscure topics.
Any user can be expelled by the moderator if they break whatever the local rules might be. In their own conf the mods rule is absolute, they write the rules, change them and enforce them. But note that a mod in one conf is a normal user elsewhere. Everybody can be a mod, everybody is a normal user.
Egotistical mods with dictatorial habits find their confs empty as users drift elsewhere. If the moderatorial style in the (lets say) football conf irritates the users someone will start an alternative and pissed off users can shift. Occasionally wars break out: the community as a whole may notice the reverberations but is not really affected.
Expulsion from one conf does not mean expulsion from the community.
That's the key. In the 15 or so years I've been using Cix only a handful of people have been expelled from the community, it's just not necessary. If a group of mates get sick and tired of other people they start a conf, exclude the outsiders, pat each other on the back and slag everybody else off. And when they've got it off their chests they can come out and carry on.
To my mind all of the webboards I've ever met are a huge step backwards. People being thrown out of the community as a whole is awful, for them and for the community. Splits and fractures are worse.
there's a lot, lot more to a properly set up discussion board which webboards lack, but that's the most pertinent to the community aspect, the rest is largely technology.
Excellent! Jolly good show what, what etc...phildwyer said:
Stage 2: Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
I think its worth emphasise that I disagree that any discussion of a behaviour pattern ends up replicating that behaviour pattern, that I don't think there is any inevitability about what happens on a forum or other online community or that it has actualy be shown that they do in fact all go through exactly the same cycles.
I'm also wondering why you seem to be mocking me for starting this thread when you yourself stated that "I've written about it myself". What exactly did you write about? Was it specifically about the dynamics of online/virtual communities? How do these dynamics differ from real life group dynamics in your opinion and why? What factors or variables do you think influences these dynamics - for example do the type of rules a forum has influence these dynamics?
Velouria
Long time lurker
Interesting post newbie 
Another interesting point is that, none of what you say is *technically impossible* to do with vBulletin (or most other board software), however the whole focus of it is on a small, narrow set of predefined forums and to enable 'user' forums in vBulletin would require minor-to-middling rewrites of parts of the admin code to allow per-user forums with per-user moderation. I also have my doubts whether the database model it uses would scale very well (how well would vBulletin cope with 20,000+ forums?).
I can't see the mods ever going for that one though Technically I can see how it's possible (allowing every user to create a forum - that's just permissions, you'd link that forum to a usergroup and make the creator the usergroup admin, etc etc... the standard permissions model would make it possible without a great deal of additional programming) but can you imagine what it'd be like...! As we have existed in a culture of more or less openness and transparency, closed forums would be a nightmare to police until the community got used to it - which it never would.
But I like the CIX model. That'd be cool
IRC operates along similar lines to CIX, but it's a chat based medium (Anyone's free to go and create their own channels on most IRC servers (including Urban's). Your trick then is getting people to come to it
Another interesting point is that, none of what you say is *technically impossible* to do with vBulletin (or most other board software), however the whole focus of it is on a small, narrow set of predefined forums and to enable 'user' forums in vBulletin would require minor-to-middling rewrites of parts of the admin code to allow per-user forums with per-user moderation. I also have my doubts whether the database model it uses would scale very well (how well would vBulletin cope with 20,000+ forums?
).I can't see the mods ever going for that one though
Technically I can see how it's possible (allowing every user to create a forum - that's just permissions, you'd link that forum to a usergroup and make the creator the usergroup admin, etc etc... the standard permissions model would make it possible without a great deal of additional programming) but can you imagine what it'd be like...! As we have existed in a culture of more or less openness and transparency, closed forums would be a nightmare to police until the community got used to it - which it never would.But I like the CIX model. That'd be cool
IRC operates along similar lines to CIX, but it's a chat based medium (Anyone's free to go and create their own channels on most IRC servers (including Urban's). Your trick then is getting people to come to it
I'm wondering if the cix model is anything like everyone having their own blog - and lots of blogs writers posting on each other's blogs. Obviously each person has total control of their own blog and the discussion on it, but there is a kind of wider "community" when lots of people link to each others blogs.
I can't say if this is in fact an accurate description because I haven't got into it myself - I've only really used fairly standard phpBB and vBulletin style forums plus a bit of IRC.
The issue of what exactly constitutes a "community" becomes an issue tho' - members of a forum have all signed up and could be seen as showing their "membership" by continuing to post, whereas all the channels on an IRC server just all happen to start the same host but apart from that may not interact with each other at all, so can hardly be called a "community".
I can't say if this is in fact an accurate description because I haven't got into it myself - I've only really used fairly standard phpBB and vBulletin style forums plus a bit of IRC.
The issue of what exactly constitutes a "community" becomes an issue tho' - members of a forum have all signed up and could be seen as showing their "membership" by continuing to post, whereas all the channels on an IRC server just all happen to start the same host but apart from that may not interact with each other at all, so can hardly be called a "community".
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
It's a mistake to limit this sort of discussion to bulletin boards - to properly talk about internet communities you need to consider
- persistent chat areas, like certain areas of AOL or Yahoo, or some IRC channels
- newsgroups obviously
- more immersive online environments, either game-driven like MUDs or MMORPGs, or less so like MUSHes or Second Life
- social/community sites like MySpace, Friendster and Livejournal, where individuals mostly have their own space but are provided with easy interaction tools
In my experience it's communities which have a clear, defined purpose apart from their own existence which have the greatest chance of success. A board has to be about something apart from the people who are there, be it cars, anime, football etc. A MUD has goals, games, things to strive for. Livejournal has posting up stuff about your life and song lyrics and stuff.
Sites which purely concentrate on the people there and their interaction with each other degenerate too quickly into infighting and squabbling to survive long enough to get a solid userbase; they become too cliquey, too insular, the atmosphere drives off newcomers and either relationships within the group degenerate so that only three people are left who all know each other's MSN address anyway, or everything stagnates into a bunch of mates who chat on the board because it's more convenient than a group chat on IM.
- persistent chat areas, like certain areas of AOL or Yahoo, or some IRC channels
- newsgroups obviously
- more immersive online environments, either game-driven like MUDs or MMORPGs, or less so like MUSHes or Second Life
- social/community sites like MySpace, Friendster and Livejournal, where individuals mostly have their own space but are provided with easy interaction tools
In my experience it's communities which have a clear, defined purpose apart from their own existence which have the greatest chance of success. A board has to be about something apart from the people who are there, be it cars, anime, football etc. A MUD has goals, games, things to strive for. Livejournal has posting up stuff about your life and song lyrics and stuff.
Sites which purely concentrate on the people there and their interaction with each other degenerate too quickly into infighting and squabbling to survive long enough to get a solid userbase; they become too cliquey, too insular, the atmosphere drives off newcomers and either relationships within the group degenerate so that only three people are left who all know each other's MSN address anyway, or everything stagnates into a bunch of mates who chat on the board because it's more convenient than a group chat on IM.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
That's what I mean when I talk about Livejournal being a community site. It's not a POV that I've seen other people claim, but I am absolutely certain that it is a far better one than Friendster; whilst it may not have been meant to be one, the extensive group, commenting and friending tools turned it into one. You don't have to be involved at all but you can be if you want to, it's grown into a community or communities far more organically than a designed solution, and that makes it intrinsically more stable.TeeJay said:
I should imagine that "Online Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Games" OMMRPGs (just for anyone who feels excluded from the jargon) and online games in general have a very different dynamic - I doubt they go through the same lifecycle proposed in the first post do they? I haven't played many (only one 'rpg' style one - "Neocron" plus other 'shooter' type ones like Counter Strike: Source) but I get the impression that people join and leave mainly because of game issues, although some people stopped playing the original Counter Strike because of there being too many annoying wankers playing).FridgeMagnet said:
Although the seeming unlimited freedom and autonomy of having your own channel/forum/etc seems to have no downside the problem is always trying to get more than a tiny handful of people using it.
There is a trade off therefore - giving up freedom to simply "do what you want" in return for being part of a larger community - a bit like real life in a way?
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
The thing is with MMO(whatevers) is that at the moment they have very significant startup costs. It's not like anyone can just start one, you need investors, big fat servers and so on. Thus you start up with a fairly significant customer base, because you have to have a lot of interested people merely to get funding. (There are open-source 3D world systems that are being developed but it'll be a few years before those are practical.) That eliminates some of the problems of starting boards.
I do know many people who've left immersive 3D games because of other members, though. I'm most active on Second Life, which isn't really a "game" and has a much more social element, and people leave that all the time because they're sick of the behaviour of other people. Players do leave WoW because they're sick of a bullying campaign or apparently tolerated but offensive behaviour, say, but it seems less common because there's always something else to do rather than interact.
Limited-time online games like CS aren't really communities, there's little interaction within them, but communities can form around them, with clans and so on.
I do know many people who've left immersive 3D games because of other members, though. I'm most active on Second Life, which isn't really a "game" and has a much more social element, and people leave that all the time because they're sick of the behaviour of other people. Players do leave WoW because they're sick of a bullying campaign or apparently tolerated but offensive behaviour, say, but it seems less common because there's always something else to do rather than interact.
Limited-time online games like CS aren't really communities, there's little interaction within them, but communities can form around them, with clans and so on.
newbie
undisambiguated
TeeJay said:
there are actually three sorts of conference available:
open: listed and available for anyone to join;
closed: listed, need moderator permission to join;
confidential: unlisted, invite only.
I've never been aware of an open 'racist and neo-nazi' conf, nor heard of a closed one. I've no idea about the contents of confidential ones.
The community is far more techie and less explicitly political than around here, but not, IME, going to tolerate anything like that. Why do you think somewhere I've hung out for that long might be like that
Because you were singing the praises of people have absolute moderating rights in their own conferences and kind of implying that there were no rules aboiut what people could do within their own conferences.newbie said:Why do you think somewhere I've hung out for that long might be like that
If you had open access boards with a broad and general membership and political discussion going on I think it would be inevitable that you would get extremists of various types appear, either the genuine article or some rebellious kiddies taking the piss and seeing how far they could push things.
You don't have to go too far on the internet to find people discussing fairly extreme stuff (porn and gore being the obvious examples) or much further than that to have the occasional extremist spouting hate.
I am not suggesting that this is what cix is like, but I would expect anywhere with "freedom of speech" as its central principle would have at least a share of these this type of stuff.
Just to mention the Delphi forums here - not entirely sure if they really are completely "freedom of speech" but they do host a wide range of forums and seem to operate a "if you don't like it then don't sign up to or visit it" approach: http://www.delphiforums.com/
newbie
undisambiguated
Velouria said:
20,000 forums is a bit ott: Cix has iro 11,000 at the moment, but that's after 20 years of a userbase of between say 1,000 and 5,000 logging on daily. Only a fraction are in regular use, but almost nothing from the messagebase ever gets deleted, so the (collective) memory is huge (and unique).
I doubt the current Urban userbase would evolve to more than 100 forums tops, many of which would languish unopened after an initial flurry. By no means everybody wants to be a moderator, nor can many aspirants create the right atmosphere to seed compelling discussion.
As well as serving to diffuse conflict and separate inxcompatible interests or temperaments, there is also the ability for sub-communities to hive off and start something fresh.
For instance, someone once started a conf called tenneramonth to see if there was any interest in punting £10/month on an bizarre idea. There were only a few people involved, but out of that came the first UK consumer ISP, Demon Internet. An idea like that floated here would fall off the front page in a few hours or days, never to be heard of again. Electronic communities should liberate the imagination and enable its use, but tbh I really think the technological forms serve to limit possibilities, not open them up.
[/QUOTE]I can't see the mods ever going for that one though
Technically I can see how it's possible ........... but can you imagine what it'd be like...! As we have existed in a culture of more or less openness and transparency, closed forums would be a nightmare to police until the community got used to it - which it never would.But I like the CIX model. That'd be cool
[/QUOTE]It is very cool, I know it works and works well, because it enables users to act as grown-ups, rather than being part of a community which is beholden to all-powerful moderators at each turn (a reality of every webboard, moderated newsgroup or blog I've ever come across).
I'm grateful for you confirming what I've long suspected, which is that technically it's needn't be that hard to implement. But there are issues- what you call 'the mods' who 'police' this community don't really translate into Cix terms. There TPTB- The Powers That Be- are the management of the system, adminstrators who play a relatively minor part in community life (far, far less than moderators here), dealing mostly with technical issues, but since legal bucks have to stop somewhere they also have a role in eg libel. But they're not moderators and have no day to day involvement in the running of 99% of user confs.
TPTB are paid by the subs of members, and I don't know if such a scheme could translate into a system free to users like Urban. I don't see any fundamental reason why not.
newbie
undisambiguated
TeeJay said:
I see what you mean now. There was certainly a fuss about confidential 'adult' confs sometime in the early 90s, which TPTB closed down amidst upset about the boundaries of freedom of speech. I don't recall any incidents involving nazis, but obviously it would be possible. Personally I'd not want closed or confidential conferences, not only for the reasons you're suggesting but also because in the long run they've been rather too damaging for the community- cliques form and hide away and it all gets a bit unhealthy.
I don't personally think the potential existence of a few 'extremists ' should be a bar to reasonable people forming a workable self-managed community.
I though delphi vanished years and years ago. I think Murdoch bought it, 10 or more years ago, and smothered it with his dead hand.
edit none the wiser about whether it's the same delphi, but god it's horrible.
I think there is a key stage missing.........in between 4 and 5.
Kid_Eternity
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
There is?
I'd argue that there are lots of different dynamics that you could add in and not everything happens in a sequence...Sesquipedalian said:
...for example there will be some parts of a board or community where people are bonding, making new friends and groups, creating stronger links between each other (I'd argue that this kind of thing often happens when a bunch of people finds they share a taste in something - such as ceratin music or an author, or a specific hobby etc)
...at the very same time there may be another dynamic going on - between different people or on a different thread or to do with a different issue - where people start to have an argument that gets worse and worse, which carries over into other topics and pulls in other people (I'd argue that this often happens when people identify others as "the enemy" - for example as people buying into a political ideology or viewpoint that they hate (be it left, liberal or right) or a certain party or group they dislike)
These are two very obvious "dynamics" but there are probably a whole lot more based on far more obscure things. These don't have to happen in a sequence or happen all the time - there can be trends and phases where these things come and go - a kind of "ebb and flow" as it were.
I am sure that there is some very interesting stuff to be written about all this - maybe there has been already and I just haven't heard about it yet? The two books (both available to read in full online - see links in the OP) discuss lots of other things apart from this "lifecycle" idea, and while they still stand up very well I am sure that there have been a few developments over the last decade as more and more people have come online.
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
it is true though. urban ain't the first bulletin board to have a breakaway faction. i used to be involved *hides* in transformers fandom, and jesus fucking christ the levels of argumetn and breakaway factions there put urban to shame. hence not being arsed anymore.
i've been here for years. people come, they go. i'll go to when it stops being fun, as will you dear reader. fun, however, is a value judgement.
i've been here for years. people come, they go. i'll go to when it stops being fun, as will you dear reader. fun, however, is a value judgement.
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