Virtual Community ----> Social Media

When I wrote about virtual communities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Internet was spawning a variety of communities. In 1996, we created a "Virtual Community Center" that listed all the communities we could find out about. Click on the letters in the round directory if you want to get a sense of virtual communities 30 years ago.

These communities used many media: Usenet, starting in 1979 was a clever way of bundling posts into newsgroups, exchanged by Unix computers around the world (it can still be accessed); IRC (Internet Relay Chat) predated chatrooms, MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) were text-based, role-playing fantasy worlds, and forums (sometimes called message boards or computer conferences or, more recently, subreddits.) Wikipedia has a contemporary version of the Virtual Community Center, listing today's forums.

The WELL was (and is) a forum in which thousands of people carried on conversation threads grouped by subject ("conferences"); some threads (called "topics" last for years). Started in 1985, the WELL is still going, although with a population of hundreds rather than thousands. In recent years, and to recent generations, though, the forms of computer-mediated-communication that involved longer posts in persistent threads have been supplanted by the infinite scroll. Other forms of community media aren't dead, but a lot of people think they are.

I have a strong opinion about long form asynchronous media: Facebook convinced a serious chunk of the world's population that their shite feed and groups are the way to communicate online. I talked to Facebook's social scientists a decade ago. So they know about my objections to the way they were and are set up. They just didn't choose to do anything about it. The groups are not good for large populations: Instead of remembering which thread each individual follows and navigates them through their threads, the way forums do, the Facebook group puts the thread that has been posted to most recently at the top. If your group has 100 or 500 or 5000, it's difficult to come back the next day or even an hour later to join a thread you had been following if it is buried under dozens or hundreds of threads. Certainly, large Facebook groups have developed workarounds. But there has to be a financial reason that Facebook didn't incorporate affordances that forums invented decades ago.

There certainly are communities today, and large ones, that communicate with more than a hundred and forty characters per post, with threads that continue for days or longer. Ask discourse.org or Wordpress or Reddit users. Even Tumblr hosts communities, although, like the WELL, it is diminished from its heyday. But the media most earthlings use today -- mainly Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-in -- are often pale simulacra of the forum-based communities that are extinct or far less well known. Largish, longish-lived communities that communicate with posts longer than tweets still exist and are mostly invisible. People with diseases or caregivers, for example.

Social media have been destructive to the growth of other, thoughtful forms of online communication because participants in social media don't control what they are invited to respond to. That's done by algorithms that maximize engagement, which often translates to conflict. The algorithm is what diminished virtual communities. But communities still do exist, and anyone can start one today with Discourse, Wordpress, Google Groups, Slack, Discord. I wrote here six years ago about preserving online greenspace in the face of social media juggernauts. Help keep virtual communities alive: start your own.