The Evolution of Online Communities

1
The Evolution of Online Communities

• Bjorn Townsend
• COM 538 Final Presentation
• December 2, 2003

2
What is a community?

• Webster's Online
• A unified body of individuals
• An interacting population of various kinds of
  individuals
• A group of people with a common characteristic or
  interest
• Joint ownership or participation

3
To be covered

• Introduction The Idea of Online Community
• Part I The Good Ol Days of Text
• Interim The Endless September
• Part II Online Communities and the Web
• Part III The Future

4
Then what is an online community?

• A group of people who communicate via an
  electronic network
• Similar to Webster's definitions, though free of
  ties to a particular locale
• Most often gathering over common interests,
  shared resources or joint projects

5
What does an online community need to function?

• Kollack and Smith in Communities in Cyberspace
  (2001) state the following
• There must be a means of establishing identity
• There must be a social order
• There must be a means of enforcing that order
  social control
• There must be a community structure
• Also important
• The ability to communicate either asynchronously
  or in real time -- the technology behind the
  community this is a given
• The balance between freedom and control

6
Part I The Good Ol' Days

• UNIX, the earliest online community
• Email listservs
• USENET, or aaaaaaaaanarchy
• Internet Relay Chat
• MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, et cetera
• We will look at how each of these systems
  approached the necessities of community laid out
  in the previous slide.

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UNIX Systems Designed To Create Community

• Dennis Ritchie, early UNIX OS developer UNIX
  was designed as a system around which a
  fellowship would form.
• Designed to be used by more than one person at
  once
• Multiuser nature required that system resources
  be shared by the user community
• Tools were created to manage both those resources
  and the community around them

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Fig. 1 Who's out there?

• eriktown_at_freya w
• 005208 up 1 day, 1102, 5 users, load
  average 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
• USER TTY FROM LOGIN_at_ IDLE
  JCPU PCPU WHAT
• arie pts/1 192.168.33.202 Mon13 1443m
  130 130 irssi
• freya pts/2 asgro6S.1 Mon13 4402
  1.17s 1.08s pine -i
• freya pts/3 asgro6S.2 Mon13 229m
  0.19s 0.19s /bin/bash
• fnord pts/4 iao.kallisti.com Mon13 1437m
  0.09s 0.09s /bin/bash
• eriktown pts/6 12-228-148-33.cl 0052 0.00s
  0.07s 0.01s w
• eriktown_at_freya finger eriktown
• Login eriktown Name
• Directory /home/eriktown Shell
  /bin/bash
• On since Tue Dec 2 0157 (EST) on pts/0 from
  12-228-148-33.client.attbi.com
• No mail.
• Plan
• Finish my COM 538 presentation!

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Other tools

• talk command allows users on the same system to
  have conversations
• Email permits asynchronous conversation
• write command and the Message of the Day
  allow messages to be sent to the whole community

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So how does UNIX deal with community?

• Identity is fixed user accounts are given out
  by the system administrator
• Social control is centralized to the system
  administrator, users run to teacher with
  complaints
• Whoever owns the hardware has absolute power
  this holds true in any online community
• Caveat I Mass action can sway superuser
  decisions
• Caveat II Decentralized systems avoid this
  issue hence peer-to-peer networks

11
Email listservs

• Asynchronous communication
• Can have open or closed membership
• Communities intended for discussion and
  notification
• Not centered around common resources, though they
  can be used to discuss those resources or notify
  of changes more dedicated toward interests

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Email listservs cont'd

• Identity is determined by email address easily
  spoofed/faked, but few people bothered
• Social control is centralized the moderator or
  moderators determine policy and have full
  administrative control
• Community structure is usually a round-table
  discussion, with people jumping in and out of
  conversation at will

13
USENET

• Originally a network unto itself
• Evolved into a set of Internet-based discussion
  groups on every subject imaginable, from
  comp.os.linux to alt.sex.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bo
  rk
• Virtually anyone can create a newsgroup
• Moderation optional many communities lack
  moderation
• Anarchic, self-policing, some vigilante groups

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USENET continued

• Identity Fluid, often dependant on writing
  style, opinions and hacks
• Social control virtually nil except in moderated
  communities
• Individual users had the option to ignore or
  killfile posts from people or on topics they
  objected to
• Very social introduced the concept of the
  meetup

15
IRC and MU

• IRC was almost purely social
• Though sometimes used as a real-time
  communication tool for continuing discussions
  originating in email or USENET
• Organized into channels, what we think of as
  chat rooms
• Administered on a network basis, a server basis
  and on a per-channel basis
• Complex system of warnings and social controls,
  but often overused

16
MU

• A text-based virtual world
• Used for social interaction and games
• Could be very complex
• Precursor to todays massively multiplayer online
  RPGs
• Had a superuser with absolute power, but
  additional rights and powers could be granted to
  individuals deemed worthy

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Interim The Endless September

• Origins of the term unknown immortalized by
  stopspam.org, later incorporated into the Jargon
  File by Eric S. Raymond
• AOL opened its portal to the Internet in
  September 1993, unleashing a flood of new members
  into the greater Internet community
• Previously, online communities had the luxury of
  slowly indoctrinating new users into the
  community culture, explaining to newcomers that
  they needed to read the FAQ and lurk to get a
  feel for things before posting
• The old guard was badly outnumbered by the
  newcomers, who were often ill-behaved
• Communities were forced to evolve and develop new
  tools as a result

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Communities and the World Wide Web

• How did the rise of the Web affect online
  communities?
• Examples of several different types of web-based
  community
• How did these sites use the Web to fulfill the
  communitys needs?

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The Webs benefits and drawbacks for online
communities

• User-friendly!
• Multimedia!
• Searchable!
• Enhanced ability to collaborate!
• Can be simultaneously synchronous and
  asynchronous!
• Wider range of tools available to determine (or
  create) identity, perform social control, led to
  more complex community relationships
• Problems slow, clunky, unreliable, user-friendly
  (offensive to old-guard Net users)

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Example Interests In Common

• Slashdot.org
• Aggregates science and technology news stories,
  particularly IT-related
• Very active user community centered around
  discussion of each story
• Strong community biases pro-Open Source,
  pro-downloading, anti-Microsoft

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Slashdot continued

• Anyone can submit a news story, but stories are
  accepted or rejected only by the site owners
• Identity is less important
• Anonymous discussion permitted but slightly
  frowned upon Anonymous Coward
• Self-moderated each post can be rated by
  registered users of the site on a -1 to 5 scale
• Site owners and designated higher-level
  moderators are the only persons able to remove
  discussion posts
• There is no manifesto the communitys values
  grew out of the stated opinions of its early
  readership eldership is always prized

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A collaborative community

• Everything2.com
• A self-editing global knowledge database the
  point of E2 is to fill it with literally all
  human knowledge
• Anyone can contribute, but only designated
  individuals can edit the work of others
• Very complex Strong social groups, cliques,
  infighting, political arguments surrounding what
  kind of content belongs/does not belong, user
  rights, metadiscussion, meetups, in-jokes

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Everything2 continued

• Identity Anyone can view, but must create a
  unique user identity to add content.
• Reputation is tied to identity and is vitally
  important an experienced user with high
  reputation can get away with creating poorer or
  less relevant content
• Reputation is tied to the number of positive
  votes your content has received every three
  positive votes on your content gives you one
  experience point
• Particularly high-quality work can be flagged for
  greater attention
• Social contact Real-time messaging as well as
  asynchronous web chat and IRC
• Social control Users can be put in time-out
  periods in the chat rooms. Designated editors
  can alter or delete content this is not done
  without notifying the contributor. Editors are
  individuals with extremely high reputation
  ratings who have sought the position and been
  approved by the board of existing editors.

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Social Communities

• LiveJournal.com a blogging site where users can
  create community blogs
• Friendster.com Networking
• These often most closely resemble physical
  communities and are often made up of people who
  have relationships in meatspace
• They tend to be more ad-hoc than any of the other
  online communities

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The future and beyond!

• Technology
• Identity
• Control
• Community Structure

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The future and beyond!

• Wikis, Everythings and other Web-based
  collaborations will become more common
• There is a general trend toward making it harder
  to conceal your online identity
• National ID cards backed by Larry Ellison of
  Oracle will we need to show ID to get online?
  Will this conclusively tie our online identities
  to our meatspace identity?
• (Inter)nationalization of the Net Will it (and
  the digital communities it hosts) fall under
  tighter government control?
• The rise of streaming video and voice-over-IP
  will people expect to see your face when you sign
  in?
• Virtual reality and virtual worlds the next
  step?

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(end of line)

• Thank you for coming!