So I’ve been musing on communities, especially in their online forms, and in a discussion with Sarah a while back I realized something interesting:
Forums (along with many other forms of online communication) foster addictive behavior. Most studies on addiction indicate that it forms around activites which provide a random reward, not those which provide a regular reward. Forums, by their nature, provide random rewards.
At least they do if you define the ‘reward’ that forums provide as interaction. Most people who have done forum interactions have, at one point or another, caught themselves clicking refresh every couple of minutes hoping that someone has replied to a topic. Maybe so that you can respond to them, maybe because you’re curious to hear their opinion. But you’ve done it.
And sometimes, there’s something new there. You are randomly rewarded for your diligence. And sometimes you’ll stick around an extra five or ten minutes, checking back, hoping to get a response before you have to go to class/bed/work/eat.
This is downright unhealthy. First because addictive behavior itself is dangeous, but also because it wastes time. Contrast the way people read forums with the way they handle IMs. IM systems notify you when there is new content that requires your attention. You don’t check on them, they make themselves conspicuous. It’s pretty clear that this is significanly more time-effecient. You never waste your time checking, the computer checks for you (see also email and news aggregators).
So, if the forum is bad in these ways, what’s an alternative that dumps the bad but keeps the good?
Thomas
This is just a random musing, but you COULD rig a forum type experience on a single Gmail account. It has forum-like properties and automatically refreshes itself.
This is why I’d rather chat on IRC or MUs than blog, and why I’d rather blog than forum.
Not that I have solutions, just that I think you’ve hit on one of my issues with forums.
wow!
I think this somewhat explains why I don’t do well on forums. I like to feel as an equal in a group, but don’t like to waste time patrolling for new things to respond to.
wow again. You’re getting brain juice on me. I (still) wish I had more energy to devote to this
The advantage of chat channels is that they always give you that interaction hit. The other advantage is that, if chat is inane (as if often is) it’s easier to leave rather than just keep fishing for your next hit.
yrs–
–Ben
I don’t know if you can really take responsibility for addictive behaviors, even so far as to try to correct them systematically. If people use your community software, and they can’t get their addiction satisfied because it’s been designed not to encourage that sort of behavior, then they’re just going to go do it elsewhere.
I’ll freely admit to this same sort of addictive behavior. That’s probably the reason why I’ve got 7 webcomics I read regularly, 3-4 forums, LJ and my e-mail. But I check LJ with the same sort of frequency (actually, I generally just stroll down the list of all of my websites) and when I use IMs, it’s not entirely uncommon for me to ‘ping’ the people I’m talking to if they lapse into silence for too long.
That isn’t to say that having a sort of forum system that allows you to mark threads you want to watch and will notify you when there’s a response, or one that will even notify you of topics you’d be potentially interested in (based on keywords, perhaps?) is a bad thing. The fact that I want to obsessively ‘patrol’ on my own schedule means I frequently will fall behind on a hot topic, and when I have to read a thousand words each time I come back to stay current, I do tend to lose interest as well.
So to sum it up: The organization of a forum, but with a notification system that prevents the need to always be ‘patrolling’ to keep current. Basically, you’d need something like an forum IM:
“User 1 has responded to Topic 1 with: Blah blah blah… (click to read whole post)”
As an aside, I’d debate whether or not the behaviors in question are in themselves unhealthy, but that’d be going off the topic.
I think we discussed this already, but I really like forum software that allows users to sign up for e-mail notifications whenever a particular thread is updated. PHPBB has that feature, and it’s one that I really appreciate.
Although Livejournal does have the e-mail notification feature for interactions in the comments (although, as we discussed, it’s very poorly-designed if one wants to use the threads for group discussion), I’ve found that its “friends list” aggregator can often foster that addictive dynamic. As my serial commenting here probably shows, I don’t read my friends list all that regularly, in part because I know that I’m vulnerable to just that sort of addictive behavior, and not following things too carefully/promptly is one of the ways that I try to mitigate that.
At the same time, it’s this addictive behavior that builds community. Get rid of it, and you’ll have a much harder time getting people to participate.
I disagree. Strongly. Unfortunately, I’m in something of a rush, and so can not properly fight you on this issue. However, I will point to communities that have formed in places other than forums (LiveJournal, for instance) which, through the use of feed systems (Friends Lists) and email notifications of comments allow interaction without that sort of constant refreshing.
There’s still some addictive behavior, sure, but the need to constantly check for updates in the discussioin is mostly eliminated because the system seeks you out to tell you when those updates occur (email). This is a significant and important departure, though it has its own interesting implications for communities.
Anyway, I think that communities form around mutual topics of interest, not around a shared addiction. (Also look at the way that communities have traditionally formed in society, they form around goals, not addictions.)
Thomas
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