How Internet communities function

Essays

This is a collection of essays that explain why online communities end up the way they do, how they succeed and fail, and how to create and manage one. I think they are all interesting, though I don't agree with everything they say.

• “What ever happened to real bulletin-board systems?” Anonymous. 1982.
• “The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat”. Chip Morningstar, F. Randall Farmer. 1990. See also: the Habitat links collected on Douglas Crockford's Electric Communities page.
• “The Making of an Underclass: AOL”. Wendy Grossman. 1997.
• “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”. Clay Shirky. 2003.
• “Building Communities with Software”. Joel Spolsky. 2003.
• “Five Geek Social Fallacies”. Michael Suileabhain-Wilson. 2003.
• “Why is [an anonymous BBS] better than regular forum software?” Shii. 2004.
• “The chat room/forum problem”. Robert Scoble. 2009.
• “Outer Circle: Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists”. Alan Crowe. 2009.
• “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”. Eliezer Yudkowsky. 2009.
• “Meta is Murder”. Jeff Atwood. 2009.
• “What I've learned from Hacker News”. Paul Graham. 2009.
• “The sad evolution of wikis”. apenwarr. 2010.
• “The Evaporative Cooling Effect”. Xianhang Zhang. 2010.
• “The moderator problem: How Reddit and related news sites decline”. Jake Seliger. 2015.
• “The Asshole Filter”. Siderea. 2015.
• “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution”. David Chapman. 2015.
• “Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums”. Aella. 2017.
• “The World That Twitter Made”. T. Greer. 2020.
• “Ask HN: How are online communities established?” 2020.

Tags: group dynamics, Internet, links, list.