Phil Sandifer wrote:
> May I ask what communities these are? Particularly the one with
> hundreds of thousands of members.
It seems that Skyring has ignored the opportunity to back up his vague
claims with specific evidence. However, judging from his user page, it
appears that the two communities he's alluding to are LiveJournal and
BookCrossing.
Anyway, I'd like to take an opportunity to see how the "competition"
compares, and whether other large, open online communities really are
more "polite and productive" as he claims. First of all, I don't see any
reason to say that the atmosphere at LiveJournal is any better than on
Wikipedia. As with Slashdot and Kuro5hin, two of the other leading
candidates, LiveJournal has its own well-documented social issues, of
which you can get the first inkling by reading our articles about them.
I don't mean to bash any of these sites - as with Wikipedia, if you're
not looking to get involved in contentious areas, you probably won't be
- but they have their own problems, along with their own ways of
combating them. They may not be worse than Wikipedia in this regard, but
I wouldn't agree that they're any better, either.
BookCrossing may have a comparable number of members to Wikipedia, but
its character is too different for a sensible comparison. I mean, who's
going to force you to pick up a book you're not interested in? I don't
see how the community brings out the kind of passion that produces the
disruptions we experience.
I might consider Skyring's argument more plausible if made about some
other communities, including possibly craigslist and Flickr (notably,
unlike the previous examples, their Wikipedia articles fail to mention
whatever critics they may have). With Flickr, you don't have to reveal
anything you don't want to reveal, go anywhere you don't want to go, or
deal with people you choose not to deal with. While collaboration and
community dynamics do exist, the site is not organized in a way that
fundamentally requires it. And still, as their FAQ reveals, where they
do have community groups and channels (similar to IRC), they have the
same problems with disruptive behavior and deal with them in the same way.
That leaves craigslist, in my opinion, as the one realistic candidate
for a more "polite and productive" community on a scale similar to
Wikipedia. If someone knows more about the seamy side of craigslist than
I do, feel free to enlighten me to the contrary. Presumably their forums
can occasionally breed bad behavior, as with all such creatures, but I
know of little else. It's also interesting to note that craigslist
happens to be the only one of these sites we have not yet overtaken in
terms of traffic. Perhaps we should take more interest in figuring out
what lessons we can pick up from their experience.
--Michael Snow