• Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact

  • Online Community Aging

    October 4th, 2011
    tech
    Internet communities fall apart, and when the people move on the archive remains. Reading through archives is a bit like wandering through a ghost town; there are all these people captured in lively discussion, but they're not really there any more. If I think they overlooked a point, or want to know what they would think of a current development, there's no longer anyone to talk to.

    It's not as simple as a community being either continuing or finished, though. My experience is that declining online communities lose active members slowly, perhaps ending with a discussion on whether to close the list. I made some graphs of postings per month for four declining (or declined) lists: the boston contra community, shock level 4, swil's chit-chat, and python's diversity list.




    (chit-chat's archive only goes back to when they switched to mailman; the list itself is much older)

    You can see in each of them that there is much less discussion than there used to be, but there still is some. Are these communities dead? Only kind of. Because mailing lists make stuff show up in your inbox even when you've stopped reading, it's possible for an interesting posting to draw attention and comment. Most of the time, though, people are making their interesting postings elsewhere.

    I would really like to see data on how people move through online communities over time. We don't have position online, but we do have lists, blogs, and forums on which we can participate actively. A visualization showing the late 2000s slashdot to reddit flow, the friendster to myspace to facebook migration, and the rise of blogs would be really cool. I don't think I can get this data, though. It's locked up in the server logs of huge numbers of small communities, if it's anywhere at all.

    Comment via: google plus, facebook

    Recent posts on blogs I like:

    A Big Problem With The Going To Bed Book

    One day my dad was reading this book called the "Going to Bed Book" to my sister Nora. The book is basically about a bunch of animals who are getting ready for bed on a boat. They go down the stairs, take a bath, hang their towels on the wall, find…

    via Lily Wise's Blog Posts September 18, 2023

    Investing in boundaries with young kids

    Putting in some work to get the behavior you want The post Investing in boundaries with young kids appeared first on Otherwise.

    via Otherwise August 15, 2023

    Self-driving car bets

    This month I lost a bunch of bets. Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 2023. Then I made similar bets a dozen times because everyone disagreed with me. The first deployment to pot…

    via The sideways view July 29, 2023

    more     (via openring)


  • Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact