Wei_Dai comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong

11 Post author: WrongBot 28 July 2010 05:48AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 July 2010 08:17:47PM 5 points [-]

How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?

Is anyone aware of any good write-ups on this topic? I'd be interested in seeing any insights as to why things happen the way they do, and what we can do to improve matters.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 02 August 2010 10:58:37AM *  5 points [-]

To answer my own question, here are a few write-ups I found about why the quality of an online community tends to decline over time, and what can be done about this problem:

Also, the book "The Virtual Community" that Richard Hollerith mentioned is available online, although I wasn't able to find much information in it about the specific topic at hand.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 29 July 2010 08:45:09PM *  3 points [-]

Howard Reingold's book with the string "Virtual Community" in it. Old though: 1994 or so, but very informative on pre-Internet communities. The chapter on France's Minitel (term?) I found particularly valuable.

I've been participating in online communities since 1992, and most of my information has come from short comments by people trying to preserve the character of specific communities. Paul Graham's comments on Hacker News are particularly worthwhile, but have not been collected in any one place.