ListOfOnlineCommunities

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Purpose

This page is to serve as an anchor for discussion of the rise and fall of on-line communities throughout history, and to analyze the unique factors leading to the success and failure of each one. It is intended to be food for thought and discussion rather than a mere enumeration.

Scope, related pages

This page is for on-line communities whose primary purpose is interaction and the exchange of ideas. Therefore, it does not include those communities whose primary purpose is the distribution and exchange of nontext content (e.g. Napster, photo sites), or whose primary purpose is functional (e.g. Sourceforge).

For a much broader listing, see OtherHypermedia.

For a narrower, more Wiki-specific discussion, see WikiLifeCycle.

The List

Major metagroupings of on-line communities through the history of the media

UseNet - NNTP - c. 1980
Internal IBM VNET conferences [1] - c. 1981
CompuServe? - proprietary - c. 1985
FidoNet - FidoNet - c. 1992
TheWell - PicoSpan - c. 1985
AmericaOnline? - proprietary - c. 1990
YahooGroups? - proprietary - c. 1995
Wiki metacommunity - UseMod - c. 1999
Slashdot - slashcode - ??

History

The earliest on-line community was UseNet, which began to reach significant size around 1980. Earlier on-line email and discussion systems existed but served to reinforce communities already extant in MeatSpace rather than forge new communities. Examples abound, since nearly every timesharing operating system had some sort of rudimentary messaging and discussion tool. UseNet was different because it permitted transitive affiliation. That is, you could carry on a conversation with someone at Bell Labs from a computer system owned by a college with no direct affiliation with Bell Labs, because of the presence of one or more gateways that would relay posts between two affiliated entities.

Discussion

These patterns are clear:

Seemingly innocuous differences in discussion software produce large changes in the character of the community that forms
Communities are initially defined by the pioneers that set the initial tone and who choose the target audience from which to draw
Communities shift over time. None have remained strong for any truly significant length of time.

Can this not be folded into OtherHypermedia? Currently that is also a ListOfOnlineCommunities. I'm not sure where the author wants to take this page, so I'll leave it for now. Perhaps the WikiLifeCycle would be another good choice, or the Wiki:CommunityLifeCycle which we should have a page on here. -- SunirShah

OtherHypermedia seems somewhat misnamed, since (despite its current header) it includes a number of collaborative online communities that aren't "hyper" in any real sense. I suppose it's appropriate that the list of online communities should be fragmented, since the communities themselves often are. :-)

CategoryOnlineCommunity (sort of)