Stickiness of Community

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Steve Rubel writes on his blog why historically most online communities haven’t stuck. He has even pointed out some successful and not-successful examples. I haven been watching this space from quite some time now and have some observations as a user of these services and then actually working on such products. The most successful example of community for me is Slashdot. I think Rob Malda, the creator of Slashdot is a brilliant guy and knows what community and its users really mean

1. Why Communities don’t stick: Because it is very easy for its users to leave the community. Most of the recent examples of communities that you see are actually different variations of six-degree of seperation, about friends and paths to the friends. They started with this ‘Novelty’ of finding out the path between users and very soon the novelty faded for users and the SNS fatigue came in.

2. Build connections not just networks: A network is a technical word for connected nodes (any relations) whereas community, the word itself signifies strong connections between the nodes. So blogosphere is a big network of blogs which may include the splogs and content poser, but it a good share of this ecosystem behaves like a community where the connections are made through blog posts, blogroll or by the bloggers themselves.

3. Where is the Investment: It is very easy to create the network of nodes through a simple stuff like email invites. That’s what most social network thought. So they started having Invite your friends as a standard default page post registration and wanted to mimic the success of myspaces and facebooks of the world. People clicked on invite, spammed their friends on MSN, Yahoo and Google and that’s it. Network was built but not the community. So if your investment in the network is just a email spam, can it be a community - not really. And for that matter, time is also not the investment - would you not join Facebook or the lates in SNS or Community if it offers something more that your current community/SNS site and may be on the current one you may have spent a year or two spamming people and doing nothing worthwhile.

4. Novelty & Fatigue: The current community or the SNS model is driven around Novelty. Novelty is followed by fatigue. Common, how may friends you can have, how many pokes / scraps you can digest, how many supernovas you can follow, how many blind dates you can hunt for, how many forwards you can spam.  Where is the real need, the attachment and the bond that has a reason for you to stay.

5. Relationships & Connections: I go to Slashdot everyday, on any given day there are at least 3 - 4 posts that interests me, I click on them, read the news and go through the comments and sometimes I jump to write my own comments. Even if I am not a contributor, I have a relationship with the content and topics. Because, its about the news for nerds, stuff that matters. This ’stuff’ is the stuff that matters, how strongly your users feel connected and how strong is their relationship with your site, with your site’s content, with your users and with the connections that you provide on your network. That’s what people miss, when they wonder how Amazon or Ebay can be a example of a community. They fail to understand is that it’s something like the ‘tipping point’ where collectively society is showing a trend or a bias, may be at the individual levels but at the end of it all - humans are social animals and its all about community.

6. It’s all about Users stupid: No it’s not about forums, buddylist, email this, comment on this, or the 100 others features you can think of. Your community is built by users and it all depends how you treat your users, how do you communicate with the user and how do you really manage the user experience. So even a site with just plain phpBB installation can be a great example of a community and the other with all the bells can whistles can be a complete failure.

7. It’s also about the Moderation stupid: Slashdot or Digg, it’s all about the moderation. Moderation in terms of real precise filtering or just in terms of vote up/down buttons. It’s very easy to loose the focus and stray away from your path when you are interacting with 1000s of users. It’s also very important for you to manage the experience and the focus of the community site and intervene it between if that focus is lost. Moderation does not mean censoring or blocking, moderation means enabling intelligent communication and to filter signal from the noise. And the most successful community sites actually do it with the help of the users.

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