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

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.

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.

yrs–
–Ben

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

Not that I have solutions, just that I think you’ve hit on one of my issues with forums.