I’ve had an ongoing discussion with Alexander Cherry about blogs vs forums for the purposes of community formation. I’ve been thinking on the subject rather a lot recently, and I figured I’d share…
Forums as they currently exist tend to support community better than blogs as they currently exist because they provide a clearer sense of context for discussions. You can see what other discussions are going on, and how lively they are, and who is involved in them when you think about a given discussion. This context helps you to make proper sense of the discussion at hand. You might know that Bob is still stressed out from the discussion in that other thread, and thus might be a little brusque. And you know that Frank and Sally are arguing about immersion over there, so that explains their comments on immersion here.
It is not that blogs can’t show context. Often they do (with direct links to inspiring posts elsewhere, or to similar discussions), but this doesn’t provide as wide a context, nor is it as simple. A forum does this automatically, blog posts require you to enter each link manually (which requires you to be aware of the impact a given post is having on your thinking).
On the other hand, forums, being generally communal, are subject to roughly authority-level social controls to a much greater degree than blogs are. That is, in a blog there is a strong sense of power and authority. Whoever’s blog it is is assumed to be watching every post and every comment, and thus is able to police literally anything that needs policing. This provides a strong central voice and focus, and can permit the person in power to protect minority voices.
Forums tend to be much more socially moderated. It is assumed that moderators aren’t watching every single thread, and they most certainly can not devote the time required to protect minority voices from a torrent of polite, but overwhelming, commentary from a majority. This tends to provide a unifying force to the voice of the forum, but it also tends to drown out minority voices. Especially over time, as minority voices grow frustrated with repeated, often unintentional, suppression and leave the community.
Now, for some purposes a community with strongly unified views is an advantage. It allows for directed discussion without distractions. Unfortunately, it’s bad for injecting new ideas into the community.
Interestingly, blogs can take on this sort of focused community role on a smaller scale. The disadvantage to blogs (the lack of context) can be overcome, I believe, with the proper software, and this can be done without sacrificing the central voice and minority voice protection advantages. That’s part of what my project is about.
The big thing, though, is that I’m all about new blood and new ideas as a means of keeping a community vital and growing. This is one of the other big things the community management project is about, but it’s also a problem that I don’t see a way to overcome for forums. I don’t see how the forum paradigm can successfully protect minority voices in a practical manner, which is why I’m so focused on blogs.
But for blogs to be effective at community they need to handle context better. And that, I think, is a software issue. One that is difficult, but definitely solvable. It, hopefully, won’t require any more work out of any community members, which is a huge advantage in my mind.
Well, that’s what I’m thinking these days. I welcome feedback.
Thomas
Perhaps something that mechanically formalizes the Forge policy that the thread originator has some right to direct the discussion that happens within it. Maybe the ability to split off what I’ve always called “entropic” posts into separate discussions, or even to squelch posts from people who may be sidetracking or going counter to the original poster’s desires for the thread.
Now, there’s some potential for abuse in granting this sort of power, especially with the squelching ability. But the same social enforcement will prevent, or punish, overuse of this power. If you squelch someone simply for disagreeing with you other people will notice, and decide to stop reading your posts.
Another method for further helping people keep up on hot topics would be a sort of.. I dunno, temperature gauge, for lack of a better term. For instance.. If one person posts something, it would be set at a default value of, say 50 degrees. Every person who views the post will raise the ‘temperature’ by.. I dunno, 5 degrees. Every post to the topic will raise the temperature by 10 degrees. Over time the temperature will fall.. Say, 10 degrees prorated over a 12-24 hour period. Color-code it rather than displaying numbers, and you’ll be able to determine hot topics at a glance. I’m not sure if that idea is even something you’d want to encourage, but it’s something I thought about independently lately, and figured it at least related to your ideas.
The power enforcement thing is something, but I don’t think it solves the ‘tyrrany of the majority’ problem that tends to arise in forums. This is for a number of sociological reasons, but I think the real problem is that it still leaves everything under the meta-authority of the forum itself. You have a single, unified code of conduct. This code of conduct will, necessarily, disadvantage some types of discourse, and thus squelch, or at least disempower, posters who work best in those types. The blog system is diverse in types of discourse, which is powerful for protection.
Thomas
Oh yeah! The temperature thing is pretty interesting, actually. It shows what’s important to the community at any given time. However, I’m not sure it helps you figure out the community context as well. I mean, I click on (say) the front page of Story-Games, and I see three threads discussing ‘social footprint’. I know automatically that there are at least three discussions I should be looking at to figure out what’s going on. And since there aren’t other threads with similar names, I probably don’t have to worry about keeping up with more threads if I want to stay in the loop with the discussion.
Thomas
I’m not sure I totally understand how you don’t feel this would solve, or at least curtail, the “tyranny of the majority”. Basically, what my suggestion was trying to do was give some of the control of a blog to the original poster of the thread. Essentially, the thread becomes a single-serving blog for the OP, with the ‘forum’ moderators given only the same sort of rights and powers that, for instance, LiveJournal or MySpace Ops would have. In the context of the thread, the OP would be able to make sure his points didn’t get buried, unless he simply didn’t have the willpower to keep things in line.
But let’s assume you’re just correct in that it wouldn’t solve it, and go a step further. Allow the community management tool to give everyone their own “blog”. When they create a post on their blog, they choose a category, as defined by the community managers, for the blog to go under. Other people can then click a category link, and all blog posts that are flagged under that category are listed, with subthreads accessible in standard blog or forum style. This has the same power structure of a blog, but the organizational power of a forum.
My main problem with discussing in blogs is that you have to either scroll through new posts by the same poster (in their personal blog) or by other posters (on a “friends” page) to reach the post you want, which makes it harder and harder to continue to follow a discussion as time goes by.
Well, dang. My IRC connection just collapsed, and it looks like there’s no hope for recovery tonight. I want to pick up our conversation at some later date…
Thomas
Hey guys, there’s another English person about, :)
I’m a new on lordsmerf.livejournal.com
looking forward to speaking to you guys soon