Chapter 7 of Design to
Thrive discusses how to build significance within an online community.
Significance is an extremely important part of any online community. If a
person feels as though there is significance within an online community, it is
more likely that they will join that community, thus allowing it to thrive. One
of the steps towards making an online community significant is exclusivity. If
an online community is highly important and recognized, it is more likely that
people will want to be a part of that community because they feel as though
they are a part of the “in crowd”; according to Howard.
Many
online communities feel as though the way to become significant and exclusive
is to have an open community; one where anybody can join. According to Howard,
having a big community is not always the best thing to do to build significance.
Making an online community private and allowing just a select group of people
to join, allows people to feel significant and not just feel as though they are
just another face in the crowd. I have to admit, when I read this, I felt as
though it was better for online communities to allow anybody to join. However, I
realized that doing this may bring down the value of the community. For
example, Facebook was originally designed for just college student and only
allowed college students to join, but when they decided to open the community
up to younger and older people, it caused them to lose the “college-like”
atmosphere, thus causing their value or significance to diminish.
When
building an online community it is more about quality rather than quantity.
Starting with a private community, builds exclusivity and allows people to feel
as though they are significant and
that they belong. Making people feel as though they are the community rather
than just a piece of the community is what makes an online community
significant.
You made a good point about the diminished value of Facebook after it opened membership up to all ages. Beyond the obvious problems with the atmosphere of the site now, you can see this by its current worth in the stock market. Once Facebook became a publicly traded entity, it's value took a major dive, and you could say that this is because it doesn't generate much revenue for anyone other than the owner and advertisers, but you could also say this is because it's significance and exclusivity has gone down so much since the site first launched. Now, anyone can not only join Facebook, but own a piece of it — where's the incentive to participate in something spread so thin? In other words, they've focused too much on quantity than quality and as you said, it's hard for a community to maintain significance with that approach.
ReplyDelete