On Oct 21, 2008, at 3:36 PM, Wayne Eddy wrote: > Has anyone thought much about the future list? > What it will be or should be like in 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 years time? > Are people joining & leaving at an accelerating, decelerating or > constant > rate? > Is its demographic changing over time? > Has its purpose changed over time? Should its purpose be > restated? (I > haven't noted a lot of Discussion about the Killer B's or Vernor > Vinge since > I joined.) > Should it move to a newer type of platform? Facebook or a wiki maybe? > Does the list have a life of its own? Does it somehow attract the > type of > member that will enable it live forever? Are monotonous posts and > trolls > and heated discussions the way it has found to survive? > > Regards, > > Wayne Eddy
There's an interesting sort of social dynamic to successful online forums that seems to have been fairly constant since the dialup BBS days -- I notice a lot of commonalities between an unusually successful local BBS I used to frequent back in the dialup days, and many modern social-networking communities and e-lists like this one. Based on that, I think the medium the forum resides in is only a superficial aspect of the community -- focus on the people, and on bringing in people who are both the kind of people you want to attract and, to some extent, the people who attract others of that type as well, and most of the other problems solve themselves. It may just be the fact that I've lived close to Internet-related technology for a lot longer than most people, but I've never seen the technology itself as a raison d'etre for an online community. The technology facilitates communication, but never perfectly, and never in such a way that there isn't room for improvement. Email is a good medium for writers -- the one population not particularly vulnerable to email's known limitation of filtering out nonverbal communication cues that keep offhand humorous quips from being treated as hideous insults and mortal threats -- and literate readers, whom I tend to think of as just extremely non-prolific writers in disguise. But there are other media that would work equally well. (Facebook probably isn't one of them, from my experiences with it, as it tends to provide a sort of "canned sociality" that facilitates social activity between people who have difficulty navigating both the technology and the social conventions, but tends to get in the way of more meaningful social interaction by reducing it to a sort of video game. Same complaints about Myspace, never liked either of them much. LiveJournal stays out of the way somewhat more, and as a matter of fact, at least two of my favorite communities are LJ communities, but again, it's only a medium, not the message.) LiveJournal does provide an article/comments structure that e-list communities handle more in terms of email threads (and some mail reader clients don't handle those as well as others, and sometimes servers regurgitate old posts, etc.), so that might be a good model to look at in terms of better supporting the *style* of communication the community prefers, but still, people first, technology as needed to support the people. IMHO, trolling and monotonous posting are self-limiting problems. I've dealt with them in e-list communities in which I've been a mod or owner, and while new members may be more inclined to feed trolls and pour fuel on flame wars, for the most part, these are behaviors that mature community members eventually learn to help control, if by no other means than ignoring the posts/comments that tend to generate more heat than light. Media that provide more tools for depriving a flame war of fuel (like placing the more intemperate commenters on temporary moderated status, etc.) can help somewhat in that respect, but can also make it hard to strike the delicate balance between moderation, facilitation, and censorship. I'd rather live with the signal/noise ratio and decide for myself what's signal and what's noise than have someone try to protect my delicate little ears/eyes .. the latter is often a hallmark of *unsuccessful* online communities, and tends to kill successful ones too when it's over-applied. That's for starters. I've thought about this for at least 25 years, so there's a lot more in my head that hasn't bobbed to the surface yet .. :D _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
