When the idea of the electronic community is discussed, people usually envision a virtual "place". Programmers go to lengths to create the illusion of place: rooms, objects, avatars, etc. Many also approach the electronic community as a detached virtual existence, unrelated to real world events, time, space, or social groupings. The kinds of virtual communities that meet these criteria (MUDs, MOOs, Virtual Reality worlds, etc.) are extremely interesting.
However, there is a much more widespread type of community on the net. These communities are simple and direct; they are related to an external world; they involve real people; they are strictly electronic with no attempts to emulate real world objects. These communities are special interest email lists and newsgroups. Low-tech high-tech-communities, the simplest modes of communication available on the net, are every bit as communal as complex MOOs, they have their problems, their social structures, their "regional" dialects and jargon.
In fact more net users are involved in these sorts of electronic communities than any other. Because there are so many of these communities, many tend to be somewhat transient, the lists and groups appear and disappear and the membership changes constantly. This transience combined with the low-tech nature of the communities makes them much more anarchic than other more stable communities like Lambda-MOO. The email community does not have a "game state", a new user can not see any history of what has transpired, a new user can not observe a landscape that has been affected by years of participant sculpting.
Over the years, experienced net users have come to see certain patterns in email list behavior and they have established basic widely understood guidelines for how people should behave on various types of email forums. These guidelines can not be enforced, they must be agreed on by the participants. On some lists offending users can be removed from the list by an active administrator, but most lists have passive administration, and offensive users go unnoticed by those in power. Nonetheless, these agreed upon guidelines often work.
In recent years there has been an explosive increase of network users, along with this there has been an increase in membership on many email forums. This increase has lead to an annoying cacophony on many lists, a higher incidence of users who don't "play by the rules", and a general social tension between the "old school" email community and the newbies. The newbies make the same mistakes the old schoolers made years ago, but the old schoolers are often intolerant of these mistakes because they view it as a solved problem (if only people would follow the wisdom of the solution).
I believe there is a balance that can be struck between the old school attitudes and the reality of the influx of newcomers. A combination of a number of modern technological tools for managing high traffic lists, the shared ethics that have been built up over the years, and some new ideas in list management could lead to more enjoyable electronic communities for many lists.
I was, until recently, a member of a mailing list for fans of the folk singer Ani DiFranco. Ani is an independent artist with a large grass roots fan base. The mailing list I was on was called "The Secret Garden" because it was at one time a secret by-invitation-only mailing list. The list served as an alternative to a larger list that had experienced the decay common to many lists.
On the large mainstream list the signal to noise ratio was very low, with people posting content free statements of the name of their favorite song, or asking about astrology signs, or forwarding political information. Intelligent discussion was lost in the senseless of babble of people posting just because they could. Useful information was even more scarce. This is the standard problem of an unmoderated list, with a constant influx of new readers who have not learned the old lessons, and with no commonly understood direction or group ethic.
A small group of fans from the original list formed the Secret Garden, inviting only people they knew were responsible and interesting from the original list. Membership was kept fairly low, posts were limited (by agreement rather than by technology) to 2 per day, posters were encouraged not to post anything that wasn't part of a conversation or information interesting to a large number of the readers. All subscribers got a clearly worded message outlining these mutually agreed upon rules of the list.
The list did not only focus on Ani DiFranco (how much is there to say) but on general friendly dialog, on issues of interest to the members of the list. As fans of Ani DiFranco, the members knew they would have a lot of other interests in common and enjoyed having a group of people to share their ideas with. They were not interested in merely being fanatical fans, they were interested in extending the accepting, communal atmosphere they experienced at concerts.
Eventually the members of the list decided to open it up to the public. Instructions for joining the list were posted on web pages and anyone was allowed to subscribe. The same rules and culture still applied and for a while everything seemed to be fine.
The size of the list steadily grew up to 300 people in size. The more popular the list became, the more exposure it had, feeding to its growth. There were a number of incidents where a small number of posters behaved in a way that was far too reminiscent of the old mainstream list for many of the older posters. At these times the list would flare up into debate over the finer details of what is interesting and what is not, of course these debates themselves were certainly not interesting. Usually these debates would settle down with time, but it only took some fresh subscribers to cross the naively undefined line to start it all again.
When things got really bad one of the original founders of the list, an individual who many on the list respected for her insight and friendliness, would step in and explain the shared values of the list, point out where things had gone wrong, and plead for people to just stop posting about it and go on with their fanish musings. These posts were not inflammatory, they were pleading and explanatory and they usually worked.
In any group of net users there is always a small percentage of self determined "enforcers". Individuals who feel that the only way to get people to conform with the rules of the list is to be mean to them. These people typically use the list itself to do this and they usually feel perfectly justified doing it. Whenever this happens it causes another flood of off topic posts to the list, people flaming the people who are flaming for being too harsh, people begging everyone to stop, people begging the beggers to stop begging. The language crystallizes in self righteousness as everyone tries to establish their power position.
All the while, the vast majority of the list is getting unwanted mail, all the while the peaceful readers of the list are becoming more and more disillusioned, and all the while the original founders of the list are seeing the community they constructed regressing just as all large lists seem to do. The list was transformed by a few small people from a community of friends, to a stomping ground of net-philosophical factions, not because the majority of the list had changed from friendly to aggressive people, but because the aggressive people had taken over the traffic of the list; the voices of a few overly excited posters drowned out the laid back day to day conversation of the many.
In the last couple of weeks many of the original members of the list left. They saw their construct crumble and they lost interest. Their departure got the attention of some, but did not slow the decay. Eventually the founder of the list shut it down. She sent a last message and unsubscribed everyone, the cacophony was silenced but so was the community destroyed.
It seems as if left to their current implementation mailing lists for social groups like music fans are destined to have the same failings as the Ani DiFranco list. Part of the reason some people join mailing lists instead of more complicated communities like Lambda-MOO is because they don't want to work at building the community, many just want to join and talk. This unwillingness to participate in community building on the part of some members of the list means they are unlikely the follow the shared guidelines. A few unruly individuals are usually tolerated, but when the posting population consists of a majority of people not following the guidelines it leads to the breakdown of the list and the exodus of the very community builders who held it together.
The primary problem seems to be one of mere population, small groups tend to remain more tightly knit than large groups. The primary solution then should involve reducing the population of the list. This forms the backbone of my proposal for a new type of email based electronic community.
I envision not a single email list but a gaggle of lists. For a given topic there may be 20 lists, all devoted to the same topic. When a user wishes to be added to the list they may only specify the topic, and the computer assigns them to a random list. That list and the people on it becomes their neighborhood. This way the 300 person Secret Garden would be divided up into small 15 member lists. (The numbers, of course, could be adjusted as necessary.)
A user would be welcome to leave a given neighborhood and rejoin a new random list, but given the nature of email list subscribers most would not do this. The option would mainly exist so that the members of a neighborhood could leave if it became particularly inflamed. This would eliminate the problem of the unruly users without alienating the other users from the topic. Dissatisfied users could always go to a different neighborhood to enjoy discussion on the same topic.
The only way newbies can become less naive and more experienced is through the shared lessons of interaction with a wide variety of people. Something that needs to happen is that newbies need to grow, but also that old-timers need to learn tolerance, that is part of community building. These are what I seek to address with the random distribution system.
The random assignment to various neighborhoods is the key to success, it allows for brand new voices to easily enter a given space, it allows for equal initial distribution of personalities, it prevents ghettoization (stay away from list 19, its all newbies there). It prevents the elitist attitude of a secret list. It forces people to work together as a community rather than running away from minor problems because there are likely to be minor problems in every neighborhood, but hopefully the populations will be small enough that the problems can be easily solved without escalation.
One problem that arises is that hopefully the neighborhoods would create strong friendships among their membership, if things got bad the friends would want to stay together in their move to another list. This could be accomplished by allowing subscribers to specify a special seed number that guaranteed they end up on the same list but provided no control over which list they ended up on.
Another problem is that many people join fan lists for informational purposes more than for conversational purposes, they may enjoy the small group conversation of their neighborhood but they may also feel they are missing out on important information from another group. To address this there would be a moderated broadcast list. When someone had something important to post, that they felt everyone would be interested in they could send it to the moderated list, if the moderator felt the content was indeed globally interesting they would forward it on to all the neighborhoods.
There are a number of alternative configurations that could be experimented with. These would build on the themes of the main system but I expect they would not be used.
Users could perhaps decide, if they wanted more conversation than they were getting, to subscribe to multiple neighborhoods. Each assignment would still be random, and any new post they made would only go to one of the 2 neighborhoods (either randomly chosen or chosen by the poster); any response they made would only go to neighborhood of the original message.
Users could decide to subscribe as wanderers. They would get a random subset of all the messages to all the neighborhoods (where the volume of received messages was equal to the typical volume of a single neighborhood). If they responded to a message they would become a member of that neighborhood until they decided to wander again.
The key to allowing users access to multiple neighborhoods is that they have to take extra effort to bother extra people, but they need not take any effort at all to post and respond to a small subset of people. This localizes the impact of a particular irresponsible post, while still allowing for complete passivity on the part of the user.
Something has to be done when the list gets so many members that each of the neighborhoods has too many members. Even with 20 neighborhoods it is not inconceivable that eventually each one could have 100 or more members. Some sort of mechanism for increasing the number of neighborhoods would have to be invented. The system could do this at a given threshold point, but how would the existing users be re-shuffled into the new empty neighborhoods. Perhaps neighborhoods could be automatically split, but that would not be kind to the communities that formed there. Perhaps mere osmosis would cause an eventual equilibrium.
The last thing most email list users want to do is interact with the underlying server, very few people take advantage of the features of existing servers, they just want to talk and get information.
Like every other network community, this plan would be a sociological experiment. There is no way to know if it would be successful or not without implementing it. I have attempted to take lessons from a wide variety of net experiences and attitudes, but every new community has its own unexpected quirks. Perhaps this system would sniffle communications all together. Perhaps it would be difficult to fine tune the number of neighborhoods in the gaggle. I intend to present this plan to a number of people from the Ani DiFranco group and if reaction is strong I will actually implement it.