A random topic has come up that I wanted to get some feelers on, so I thought I’d make a post.
Question: How long do online communities live?
I’ll forego classifying communities in various ways… what I’m mostly talking about are online social communities of critical mass that live for at least a year. For example, say your blog has enough comments that it’s worth creating a forum for everyone who reads your blog, and over time the forum takes on a life of itself. People come not as much for the blog, but for the people on the forum, and talk about whatever, not just the blog topics.
How long does such a community last? And if we look at all communities, is there a power-law / Zipf distribution of lifespan, with many dying early and a few achieving immortality (or at least outliving the study)? Or could it be more of a Gaussian distribution, with most communities living within a certain range?
The reason I ask is that the Internet and Web have achieved critical mass, and enough time has gone by that this interesting technological and social phenomenon is having significant effects on people. I remember sniggering a bit at some friends back in 1993 who met online… geek love. But now, meeting someone online is perfectly acceptable, and there are several booming businesses that prove that. But while people have studied real communities for quite some time, there appears to be some differences in online communities that I’m seeing that provide some interesting dynamics.
The Problem of the Benevolent Dictator
Something that differs wildly between online communities and live communities is that online communities require tools, such as forums, blogs, and so forth, and these tools require administration. Somebody has to have the power to manage the settings, deal with moderation (or lack thereof), handle memberships, and ultimately police the community. In a live community, if there are rules (such as a country club, where there are membership dues and rules), there’s a committee there to evaluate transgressions and police effectively. In a live community without official rules, such as a group of friends or people with a shared interest, policing is more by majority consent. A single person can’t boot somebody typically; everyone, or at least most people, in the community need to agree.
In an online community, the admin can just boot somebody, usually just like that. In the forums I’ve frequented, while I’ve seen rules regarding good conduct, there’s rarely a process for handling the transgression besides having people with appropriate privileges simply boot the offender. Now, if the offender is just being a troll, fine, the community is certainly fine with that. But what happens when a reasonable member of the community ends up having a disagreement with the admin or a moderator with the power to boot?
I’m not sure if it’s reasonable anymore to just say, “Hey, it’s a frickin’ Internet group. Who cares?” People establish relationships in all sorts of ways, and chat, e-mail, and forum posts are every bit as reasonable as face-to-face conversation. People are still hurt by words, and people will react. And while it’d be nice to believe that people are always reasonable and act with full information, in reality people are emotional and act with minimal information.
So invariably, in any community, I wonder how long it takes before two people have some kind of disagreement, and what are the right factors for a community to survive and thrive, versus die either violently or by slowly drifting apart? Of late, there appear to be tons and tons of new communities / forums springing out all over the place. I wonder what the trend will be… will there be a constant number of communities, in some proportion to the number of people online? Will the number of communities continue to grow and outpace the growth of people coming online? Or will many communities die to make room for new ones? And what will end up happening to people as those communities die?
If you know of any research in the area, please let me know. So far, my own (albeit short) literature search hasn’t turned up much. Perhaps there’s just not enough data yet. But it’s been a very interesting brain exercise for me while I’ve been cooped up inside the house.