![]() ![]() Everyone had jobs they applied and interviewed for. It was incredibly fun, and more than just chat rooms. Unschooling is an example of something where on-line community can be really important because there are so few people doing it that you're unlikely to have much of a local community, but attempts to keep an on-line community going are challenged both by trolls and by in-group bickering about definitions and identity ("are you really an unschooler if you use a math curriculum?") and suchlike.I spent a lot of time there between 99 and 01. Another I know of has drifted into general conversation among members because the list owners don't have time to moderate it it's no longer a good source of information or support for unschoolers. One of the biggest unschooling mailing lists is no longer active, and the one that is still alive and most active is heavily moderated, yet still has a high level of noise because of trolls, and people responding to trolls, and then the mods jumping in. People love to troll unschoolers because they have unconventional ideas about parenting and education. replaced it and still exists as a webpage with a few links, but no message boards anymore also trolls. died after a long period of high activity killed by trolls, I think. Posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:59 AM on April 17, 2010 It took eons for boards that were just starting out, because the only real way to "spread the word" was either through computer clubs or other BBSs. In order to convince people to actually dial outside their local prefix (or, gasp! fork over the dough for a long-distance charge) you had to already have a quality BBS. The limiting factor was the telephone company and the user base.īack in Ye Olden Times in the home of Ma Bell (NJ), a state who's population density is second to none, when you paid for telephone service you typically had a local plan that included 5-10 prefixes (the first three numbers after the area code in a telephone number). I would say at the height of the days of the BBS-which from my personal experience I would say was the Era of the HST 1-there were perhaps 30 really quality boards in the area. I could only imagine how big it was in places like NYC or the Bay Area. Posted by NoraCharles at 12:44 PM on April 16, 2010 Kind of sucks when you go somewhere to visit your friends and the place is gone and you have no way to get in touch with people. They've done this 3-4 times in the past decade - as recently as this week. I used to belong to a HUGE site, but the show stopped running and people got older and moved on, the boards became empty, the people responsible for the site decided it wasn't worth it to moderate, so it just disappeared.Ĭounting Crows is infamous for starting a forum on their website, closing it after they do a site re-design, then opening a whole new forum all over again. Once the show/movie/game/trend is over, the board dies too. ![]() You'll probably find a lot of boards that have closed have had a very narrow focus. But you have these huge swells of people for new things, which can create big communities - but most of those then move along to the next big thing. Then came Myspace, which lost members to Facebook.Ĭoobeastie wrote Anything that's 'fandom' can die pretty easily there are some very committed communities out there for shows/films/bands that are very old (and as said above, the off-topic chat is what keeps them together as much as anything). The Xanga community used to be huge - it's still there, but no one goes there anymore. ![]() Posted by restless_nomad at 10:44 AM on Ap (Communities may be deliberately created to follow this path, but that actually seems less common that having it occur through simple neglect.) Eventually, the trolls may get bored and wander off to seek new sport, but that seems to be a long, slow process. They just get toxic, as the trolls drive out the reasonable people and you're left with nothing more than a nest of trolls. General-purpose communities that get too big to be properly moderated have a nastier life cycle. Whedonesque is a good example of a community that survived the loss of its original focus just fine.) ![]() (It may, if it's particularly strong, just shift/broaden its focus and keep going. I could name a dozen MMO communities that had this happen. If that external focus disappears, the community may well dry up and blow away. Some communities have an external focus - a game, a tv show, a real-world event of some sort. Most online communities have an owner of some sort, and it's totally possible - even likely - for an owner to eventually get sick of running a community and withdraw whatever critical support he/she was providing (hosting or whatnot.) That is, I think, the most common way for a community to die. It depends on what the organizational structure is. ![]()
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