>>/40948/
Gonna start this post with a fun line, a quote:
So there's this question "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends." I'm hoping to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.
Here's the Three Things to Accept:
1. you cannot completely separate technical and social issues - well, for developers
2. members are different than users - there's a core group that for me seems to be self-organizing, they are the ones who really care about the place and the group, everyone else is basically a passerby, even those who use the place regularly
3. the core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations - basically it's liek a citizenship, anyone newcomer can't just have a say in the local politics, change shit for their leasure, else a bunch of newcomers could outweigh the locals and destroy the community
He calls these things to accept because a functioning group will present these on it's own. It's not something a developer has control of, users find a way.
He also lists Four Things to Design For:
1. handles - we might call these personas, basically the fictional person that comes to be around usernames
Here IBs differ. He says: It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said
what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. Not on chans it's don't. But here we can connect the above point: sometimes depending on circumstances people become recognizable.
2. make it possible to recognize good members - on IBs let's say those posters who put OC up there, but chans aren't the places to gather kudos, since ideas are more important than identities. But you all know this, karma and upboats.
3. barriers to participation, a cost to join or participate - this also falls at imageboards, here anyone anytime can chime in and this is consciously part of the design
4. spare the group from scale - conversations need dense two-way conversations, otherwise the flood of stimulus and interruptions kills the conversation; this is partially true for IBs, because meaningful exchange of thoughts can be done even at the pace of 4chan/b, tho not very long; indeed quantity will kill quality. People can and often do have the need for the first one, but not everyone and not always. He draws some analogy with IRC, and we can too, here on End a couple of boards are used in IRC style.