Subject: Reflections on Online Communities

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 12:55:35 +0300

Hi all!

See:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/web/online-communities/

for an essay I wrote about online communities and how to manage and grow them. 
It is based on this article by Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

Comments are welcome.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [email-masked]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
one thing, and everything else says something else - E-mail will conquer.
    -- An Israeli Linuxer

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From: Amit Aronovitch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 19:23:30 +0300

Two comments about the original article. Feel free to quote, change, put
in your essay, or just delete :-)

1.

  Joel talks about the effect of excessive quoting over the USENET, but
fails to identify the simple cause (and proper cure) to this phenomenon.
He seems to (wrongly) deduce that people have "a natural urge" to quote,
and considers extreme measures to discourage it, at the price of
usability (to the point where he talks about rendering messages as
*images* just for disabling cut & paste!).

  This failure is ironic, because the usenet quoting issue is, in my
mind, a good example of the major message of that same article: software
design decisions might have a big effect on communities.

  The reason people overquote on the usenet is because they access the
usenet using software that was designed for a very different media,
namely *email* clients. On email conversations, you can't know if your
recipient kept the original post you refer to in his mailbox. Hence, the
default action when pressing the "reply" button is quoting the original
post (with all those hated multilevel >> included). A good *news* reader
(and by extension forum software), should avoid quoting the entire
message by default, but that does not mean it should try to prevent you
from watching the original post in a separate screen area, where you can
copy and paste from. I believe that left to their own devices, most
people are *not* very likely to waste their time on quoting big chunks
publicly available material inside their messages (in the case of the
usenet, the problem was the fault is of some big, competing, email
clients, who had to include every possible feature before their
competition, but did not care much for the usenet itself - maybe only as
some kind of unwanted "competition" for email - thus did not have a real
interest in integrating the news feature properly).

2.

 On several occasions (forcing the user to scroll down to the bottom,
lack of a "display before send" feature, lack of rss-feed/email
notification), the essay argues in favor of restricting the actions of
the user, increasing "stickiness" (his own words), and forcing him to
spend more time on the forum using *annoyances* (my word). This is in
contradiction with the principles offered by the same author in his
texts regarding user interface design.

Like the designers of the annoying "minimize database" wizard, he seems
to forget that people have other things on their mind than his forum.

Scrolling all the way down does not mean they will actually read what's
written there (at least the same "most people" that, as he argues, would
click through the "view before send" screen, would not read it). Hence
the user, which probably wants to send his post before getting late for
work, would only be annoyed by having to search for that "reply" button
all over. And, wouldn't all these tiny frustrations add up, as he says
in his bakery story, into a big annoyance?

This would probably work as long as he has a good stream of newcomers
(and that's because of his essays, not his forum), which he can force to
stay a little longer, but these things would not make people want to
come back to the forum.

Shlomi Fish wrote:

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