There seems to be a bit of a misconception that ‘community’ means being in some sort of love-in state all of the time. The way some people talk about it, I envision 70’s hippie communes where everybody shares nicely and dances around and nobody disagrees.
Well, those hippie communes didn’t work that way and neither do communities.
There seems to be a wee kerfuffle over in Flickr-land over some recent ‘changes’ they’ve announced. Since none of them negatively affect me, I just kind of shrugged it off and kept uploading. In fact, I thought about the limiting of the tags and ‘friends’: ‘thank goodness, all of those spammers I’ve seen creep in will hopefully be discouraged and go away.’
But as I watched the billowing of the vocal minority rise, a thread on Techmeme grow with the usual suspects as well as a few opportunists, I thought: Yep. There will be a bunch of folks who are upset by this.
Okay…some very real issues arise here.
Number one. Technical stuff. This really isn’t a huge issue for most people. Really. They may say it is, but it isn’t.
Number two. The emotional impact. This is the real one. Just check out the twitters (although Jimmy feels much better now). It’s the ‘facing the fact’ that Flickr is no longer our beloved startup community…it belongs to a big, fat corporation. That hurts. There is something about this that makes us ‘early adopter crowd’ feel decidedly dirty.
And this is why community isn’t about warm and fuzzy all the time…PEOPLE HAVE EMOTIONS. Hell, I saw it on my blog a couple of posts back when I blogged about Flickr and a member of a competitor that will go unnamed got quite emotional, to which I got emotional, then their CEO got emotional and it just turned into a big puddle of emotional mess in the comment section. We were all so darned full of passion, some throwing their entire livelihoods behind it, that we couldn’t even listen to what the other was saying, which went something like:
“When you said that, you hurt me/made me scared/etc.”
Whoah.
And we can’t escape that. It’s impossible. People will surprise you and come out of nowhere, angry and hurt and on the attack. And sometimes you have to make wildly unpopular decisions for all the right reasons and people will still hate your frickin’ guts. And that’s okay. You have to let them walk away.
It’s actually the people who don’t react at all that I’d worry about.
What did Kathy say? Oh yeah…the zone of mediocrity.
Healthy communities aren’t all warm and fuzzy all of the time because healthy relationships aren’t warm and fuzzy all of the time! Chris and I are madly in love and guess what? We fight about all sorts of stupid stuff all of the time. My son and I have an amazing, healthy relationship and we are constantly getting angry with one another. My mother still hangs up on me from time to time for saying stupid things. The closer the friends, the more we bicker.
What’s happening here is that we are bringing our passions and commitment and personal investment into these conversations and sometimes we are not feeling heard. And, from the perspective of the Flickr team, they can’t always listen, ’cause, guess what? They are talking with their passion and commitment and personal investment, too! It’s what makes it such a great community as well as an ocassionally messy emotional community.
So, Community Fallacy #1: healthy communities are happy communities.
And then, Community Fallacy #2: healthy communities are democratic.
Heh. Show me a community that is entirely democratic (i.e. the users control the direction, content, etc.) and I’ll eat my socks.*
Wikipedia? Nope. There is a very definite hierarchy there…a strict set of rules that are set into action by a small number of community guardians.
SpreadFirefox? Definitely not. It’s a meritocracy, like many healthy developer networks. And Firefox, itself,
Facebook? Flickr? MySpace? YouTube? Twitter? These are corporate entities that may have been influenced and informed by their early adopters (building tools to suit their needs), but they are not democratic by any means.
I’ve been part of collectives. I’ll tell you, consensus is the most frustrating process in the universe. Believe me, you can’t make everyone happy. In fact, the more you try to make people happy, the unhappier they tend to be. I don’t know why that is, but it just goes south without a bit of top-down “this is my vision and the way it’s gonna be” kind of leadership.
Yes, leadership. The kind that guides and connects and makes decisions and lays down the law. It doesn’t have to be one person behind it, nor does it have to be the same person throughout the life of the community, but they are rarely elected and almost always charismatic and visionary. It’s kind of a basic of group dynamics that you need leaders and followers. All leaders will lead to a mess and all followers will lead to a lack of direction. And no matter how politically correct we try to be, forgetting this excludes more people from participation.
Now, of course, the laying down of the law can get a little over the top and heavy handed when looking at many corporate examples, so there has to be a ‘lighter’ more *ahem* invisible hand when it comes to community leadership…the type of leadership that deputizes alot of people to go out and deputize other people, but you need leadership nonetheless because sometimes there are difficult, but essential decisions that have to be made.
So, right. Community. Let’s stop fooling ourselves. We are human beings. We are emotional, self-preserving, often lost and in need of a good visionary or two. It’s actually quite patronizing to tiptoe around these issues. Yes, we have choice and we have agency. We are all special snowflakes. But we are all grown ups (I think we all are here, anyway), too, and far from perfect.
* caveat: must be around for a while and growing at a healthy rate. And the socks must be clean.
January 31st, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Who are you arguing with? You have this confrontational tone in your writing. Maybe you wouldn’t be disagreeing with people if you actually defined precisely what online community is.
A lot of those sites don’t have a community because there’s no user interaction. On MySpace your interaction is limited to people you have on a friend list. Even more for Facebook.
Wikipedia is largely a read-only affair for nearly all its users. There’s a very tiny minority of people who do nearly all the editing. YouTube video producers often mean “the YouTube community” but really I think they only mean other people with a lot of subscribers.
In fact I don’t think any of the websites you talk about have a real community per se.
I was on a Quake 2 mailing list in the late 90s. We all knew each other personally, played games together all the time, talked about all kinds of stuff. I still talk to a few of them regularly and kept in touch with many of them for years after no one played the game anymore. That is community. I haven’t found it since anywhere else. Not on reddit (the only intelligent site of its kind) or any other so-called social/community site.
I don’t see how you can take a condescending, confrontational tone when the stuff you’re talking about doesn’t even matter to most web developers (although it probably should) or people somehow involved in running a website, which itself is a very specialized fraction of the population. If you have unpopular ideas you can’t act like they’re so ridiculously a priori clear.
January 31st, 2007 at 11:09 pm
@warren – I think you may be misreading my personal passion for confrontation. Or maybe you just haven’t read very much of my stuff.
it’s kind of my style…
You may not experience community on these sites, but many do. I have a tribe that travels around many of these sites. Some people I hang with offline, but many I haven’t met in person. Your Quake 2 group sounds like many of the interactions we have. We were brought together on Flickr and through our blogs, then it strengthened as we continued to find one another on Facebook and IRC and twitter and MySpace, etc.
Either way, you may have missed the point I was trying to make, which was intended to be a positive one: that these interactions aren’t always sunny…and that’s an okay thing. In fact, it’s a good thing. It takes a lot of pressure off of people who are constantly trying to “do the right thing”…which is nobody in particular but many many of the startups we work with on this stuff.
T.
February 1st, 2007 at 6:27 am
I suppose the flickr change represents the threat of commodification of something that for many has felt rather more boutique-like to date.
February 1st, 2007 at 6:57 am
Sing it sister!
Yeah, totally agree with what you’re getting at. It’s always a fun conversation to talk about in advance of launch with a client that community and community-like activity may result in some uncomfortable moments of sqwabling. And that’s OK. Always an….interesting…. discussion.
(By the way, the point you’re making gets a little weird in the disucssion of emotion with “warm and fuzzy”… since to many people those are the same thing)
@warren: Describing community… there’s a BIG BIG task. Many have tried, John Windsor is collecting definitions. You should check his site for a bunch of different takes on that question.
February 1st, 2007 at 8:08 am
There is a thread on Megite to discuss Goolge’s Q4 report too.
February 1st, 2007 at 12:04 pm
I love your style it challenges me to think, learn and grow. I am glad I learned about you on OkDork and Community Next. Noah has been good that way to me.
I am honored to be part of your/our community
February 1st, 2007 at 12:10 pm
As usually, this is a timely post for me. Part of my role at EBSQ has been as the primary community moderator for the past 7 years. And I can tell you from experience: healthy community and democracy are unmixy things! Once we got over that hump, things ran a lot more smoothly and folks were a lot happier. Of course, we still have the annual kerfuffle around midwinter when people are bored and pissy, but I have (finally)learned to be zen about them, seeing them now as part of the normal cycle of community life rather than a life-and-death situation for the community to weather.
I also agree strongly that it’s the people who don’t care when you make big changes that you have to worry about. Apathy is a much better indicator of poor community health than the occassional kerfuffle. At least when people get angry, you know they’re engaged enough to be pissed off!
I think I’m going to have to share this post around the office this afternoon!
February 1st, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Yeah, Daryl, I’d agree with you on that one.
February 1st, 2007 at 12:59 pm
What does this have to do with anything?
February 1st, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Yeah, personal stuff makes some people cringe.
I like making people cringe.
February 1st, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Hi Tara,
“one: that these interactions aren’t always sunny…and that’s an okay thing. In fact, it’s a good thing.”
Agree with you 100%! Conflict, while not always a good thing if it happens ALL the time, can actually lead to the creation of new ideas. Some of the most vocal members of a community might be detractors of your company…but they are often doing so because they care (emotions) enough about your company to be vocal..
February 2nd, 2007 at 6:16 am
yep, i saw those posts, all the people ranting about flickr and yahoo removing rights or something.
and them all hoarding over to zooomr (a competing company) to do the same thing.
bad pr is the worst thing.
however i got one thing out of it and that’s that zooomr are offering a free pro account to bloggers, however in reality i don’t i’d ever switch from flickr as i’ve just made too many friends over there.
it sort of revolves around that saying my mum always said ‘if someone asked you to put your head in the oven, would you?’
all the best and see you at FOWA,
John.
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:41 am
You bring up a great point Tara. Community isn’t always a love fest.
Sometimes it is for a short time. And I hope we can see that and appreciate it at the time.
Most of us who have spent any length of time on the web can remember a time when we were part of a group where it was just working, and life was good. But times changed, more people joined and changed the mix or there was an interest or focus shift. It’s all part of the cycle.
Community has a life and for some, it’s time to mourn the loss of a younger Flickr.