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Online communities are amazing things, full of surprises. One of those surprises is how few successful ones there are. The first few were very exclusive clubs, initially of academics [darpanet] and geeks [compuserve] then expanding to a group of intellectuals who formed the Well. These groups, their ethics, their standards of conduct, their foibles grand and petty formed the expectation set by which communities and significant behaviors on the net are still defined.

Participants were named, flamewars typically moderated but rarely exiled, there was a sense that, as Nicholas Negroponte said “information wanted to be free” and the current wikipedia is one of the best examples of this atmosphere of altruistic democracy. Most of the participants were scientists who believed in the primary importance of the progress of scientific knowledge above and beyond the artifice of nation states. Those wacky pre-millenials.

Almost Real-time
However, communities were also being invented by commercial groups, and the most notable one of these was AOL. A couple of tiny differences had dramatic consequences on the tone, conduct & consequence of conversing online. One was the timescale. Instead of a threaded list, which is a non real time, stop and start interaction, it deployed live chat on a large scale. Or nearly live chat, as I recall there were lengthy pauses between interactions. But the expectation had been shifted, which changed the tone of the writing.

With a thread, a participant may feel some urgency but still has a few moments, hours or days, depending on the tone of the list, to compose their thoughts. That means the likelihood of complete sentences and structured ideas is considerably higher. With a chat room, the timescale is more like IM; you try to get a response back before a new comment appears. In fact with a chat room and multiple participants, participants are often trying to fit a response into the thread before the conversation moves on and a hilarious [you thought at the time anyways] comeback is lost in the scroll.

I have to admit that I always found the AOL chat room atmosphere to be pretty vacant, where probably intelligent humans where reduced to rapid fire monosyllables to stay in the conversation. Often conversations read like games of hopscotch, with threads being commented on one or two posts after the initial question.

Waiting for Anon
The other important shift was the option of anonymity that AOL encouraged. Of course, the user had signed into their account so it was a fairly thin ruse, but you were anonymous as far as the immediate community was concerned. This allowed users to participate without immediate consequence, a very different kind of interaction than a named environment. And popular too; the concept kept AOL afloat for many years, and the popularity was largely a surprise to them. I personally found it as boring as watching paint dry, but clearly many people found it intriguing.
In part 2 of this blog we will look at specific rules sets.