Arriving through intellectual pursuit, I came to the cellar in search of "community" on the Internet.
I hung around, I think, in large part because of the real sense of community I found at cellar.org. Not that everybody is a buddy. Everyone is
not cut from the same cloth or wears the same stripe. It's not a club: it's a community.
It's interesting to me that this thread,
Why The Cellar?, even exists ... to pose the questions: how did you get here? why do you stay? It's telling that this thread was started by a
member of the community, not the founder.
I'm interested in the Internet as a communications medium for relationship-based enterprises. Community building is critical.
For a long time, I've been a disciple of Powazek, who recently published
Design for Community. Derek's one of those friggin' geniuses you meet from time to time, and might never have met, but for the net.
Recently, Powazek wrote an essay on his book's
companion website, titled
Seven sites doing it right. Among those sites recommended by the guru for doing interesting things with community features, was
Kuro5hin.org. When Powazek said to visit K5 "with your brain on" I was intrigued, and had an irresistible urge to explore for myself.
Off to K5, I started looking for a community doing interesting things with community features. On my first visit, I found a post by someone who also appeared to have his brain on ...
Wondertoad. (Wonder who that is? Little did I know.) This toad's post indicated to me a deep appreciation for the subject of my quest.
It is well worth reproducing here:
Quote:
K5 working as designed (4.40 / 10) (#101)
by Wondertoad on Mon May 21st, 2001 at 05:01:22 PM EST
http://cellar.org/
As someone who's run various online communities for 15 years, there's nothing wrong with K5.
The biggest problem that I can see is that while K5 asserts itself as a site where the community runs things, at a certain size there truly can be no "community". In the real world, a village becomes a town, a town becomes a city, and suddenly instead of having 1/100th of the pie, you have 1/1000000th of the pie.
There can be no community of over, let's say... about 1,000 users. Past that point, you have some users who are more active than the rest, giving it a community-like feel, but the lesser members are really left out in the cold.
Part of the sense of the word "community" is that it's more human. A community cares for its members, sometimes even nurtures them. The failing of the online community is that it doesn't nurture anyone. For 99.99999% of /. and K5 users, if they died -- the worst thing that could happen to them -- you wouldn't even know.
In fact, at a certain point, each additional user is a burden to a community. The community sense of the site would be greater if that person did not exist.
And so, for any successful site, complex moderation systems can keep the quality of the posts high, but cannot return that community "feel" to the site as it originally existed. There's nothing that can be done about this; it just IS. If you really want community, go elsewhere. (Blatant plug: my own cellar.org is small enough to maintain a community feel...)
I *think* that what K5 still gets you is an online forum that has a strong sense of fairness, a group that values critical thinking and originality. And even if K5 cannot care for its users, and other K5 users cannot care for its users, you know that K5 users care about K5. This is much less possible at /., where the posting system echoes the old broadcast model because stories are choisen by the elite few and broadcast to the many. To put it another way, on /. the comments are from the bazaar, while the stories, polls, editorializing and section choices are definitely from the cathedral. On K5, the stories and polls are also from the bazaar. Huge difference! On K5, I know that the stories were important to a healthy subset of the K5 user base. On /., I know that the stories were important to the submitter, the editor... and maybe no-one else. If the editor is an idiot, the site reflects that!
--
The Cellar - because conversations don't happen on K5
|
Immediately, I ran to the cellar and registered my nic name.
It's great to be part of a community, where everybody knows your name.
Cheers,
Nic
(even if it's not your real name)
PS: Now I'm off to recommend
cellar.org to Powazek's list of sites doing interesting things with community.
PPS: Your community is a precious thing. It's yours. Don't let interlopers screw it up for you.
CitizenXit
PPPS:
More sounds from Cheers.
Sam ... "You are the nuttiest, the stupid, the phoniest fruitcake I ever met."
Diane ... "You, Sam Malone, are the most arrogant, self-centered --"
Sam ... "Shut Up! Shut your fat mouth."
Diane ... "Make me."
Sam ... "Make you? My God, I'm, I'm gonna, I"m gonna bounce you off every wall in this office."
Diane ... "Try it and you'll be walking funny tomorrow, or should I say funnier."
Sam ... "You know, you know I always wanted to pop you one, maybe this is my lucky day huh?"
Diane ... "You disgust me, I hate you."
Sam ... "Are you as turned on as I am?"
Diane ... "More."