Reflections on Online Communities

On IRC, you can’t own your nickname and you can’t own a channel -- once the last person leaves a room, anyone can take it over. That’s the way the software works. The social result was that it was often impossible to find your friends when you came back the next day, because someone else might have locked you out of your chat room and your friends might have been forced to choose different nicknames.

This is true for some IRC networks (especially EF-Net) but is not true for many others. In some IRC networks (such as Freenode) one can register one’s nickname using a service named NickServ, and one’s channels using a service named ChanServ. This eliminates most of the bot wars that plague other IRC networks.

I’ve been chatting on Freenode for many months now, and the presence of these services, and its general atmosphere, make talking there an absolute joy. I have had very few problems there.

Could you make a feature where I check a box that says “email me if somebody replies to my post?”

A. This one feature, so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun’s LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups

Despite what Joel said being able to monitor the replies to one’s thread by E-mail is a very useful feature that should be enabled by default. Otherwise, people may forget to check what they posted. Also, his argument is weak, because once someone visits the page to see the reply, he can also do other things.

For forums that aim to give help with a technology, such a feature is a must, because a person should be notified when something happen, instead of having to visit the forum times and again. (As someone on the Joel on Software forum noted.) But even for community software it is a good idea. I know of several flourishing forums that have this feature.

The problem with Joel’s argument is that people cannot monitor O(N) communities, i.e in proportion to as many as they like. Instead, it is much more scalable to monitor a constant amount of resources - normally your E-mail inbox and RSS feeds. Recently I started to rule out various forums because they don’t provide RSS feeds or have an email feature, and I believe most people do too.

Q. OK, but can’t you at least have branching? If someone gets off on a tangent, that should be its own branch which you can follow or go back to the main branch.

A. Branching is very logical to a programmer’s mind but it doesn’t correspond to the way conversations take place in the real world. Branched discussions are disjointed to follow and distracting.

Some forums I frequent have a lot of branching and they are very nice. That way, replies to posts are answered as branched posts, instead of as replies to the topic that come after many other replies.

Q. Your list of topics is sorted wrong. It should put the topic with the most recent reply first, rather than listing them based on the time of the original post.

A. It could do that; that’s what many web-based forums do. But when you do that certain topics tend to float near the top forever, because people will be willing to argue about H1B visas, or what’s wrong with Computer Science in college, until the end of the universe. Every day 100 new people arrive in the forum for the first time, and they start at the top of the list, and they dive into that topic with gusto.

The way I do it has two advantages. One, topics rapidly go away, so conversation remains relatively interesting. Eventually people have to just stop arguing about a given point.

Two, the order of topics on the home page is stable, so it’s easier to find a topic again that you were interested in because it stays in the same place relative to its neighbours.

I wholeheartedly agree. Forums that promote topics with the most recent reply to the top, are incredibly annoying, and I usually stop frequenting them after a short while. Usually, my conversations there disappear to oblivion.

Q. Why don’t you show people their posts to confirm them before you post them? Then people wouldn’t make mistakes and typos.

A. Empirically, that is not true. Not only is it not true, it’s the opposite of true.

Part one: when you have a confirmation step, most people just click past it. Very few people reread their post carefully. If they wanted to reread their post carefully, they could have done it while they were editing it, but they are bored by their post already, it’s yesterday’s newspaper, they are ready to move on.

Part two: the lack of the confirmation step actually makes people more cautious. It’s like those studies they did that showed that it’s safer, on twisty mountain roads, to remove the crash barrier, because it makes people scared and so they drive more carefully, and any way, that little flimsy aluminium crash barrier ain’t gonna stop a 2 ton SUV moving at 50 mph from flying off the cliff. You’re better off, statistically, just scaring the bejesus out of drivers so they creep along at 2 miles per hour around the hairpins.

I disagree here, especially when the forum is using markup. (see below). Previewing the post allows one to check if the URLs are OK, and not too long or that they have dangling characters, and to review the post. A good posting mechanism should have an optional preview feature.

During my time, I had and still have to deal with a lot of idiosyncratic forums. I hope what Spolsky wrote and what I wrote here will help people build nicer, better and less dysfunctional online forums.