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February 21, 2002

Contribution on designforcommunity.com

Discussion thread "Where tumbleweeds blow"

Getting traffic to a new community site is easy. What I'm interested in is getting people to start talking - essentially to themselves - while a site reaches critical mass. I've found best results so far by taking the line of 'Hey, there's no-one here, come and talk to yourself but help the community grow, be a pioneer' etc etc seems to work fairly well, but I wondered what other people's experiences were in getting-it-going?

– wrightee @ 1:22 PM CST on 1/28/2002

[...]

I think the notion of critical mass is really important. To me, this hypothetical value CM represents the point at which things start to happen. However, I see two very different contexts in which the critical mass will play a role: the open community that takes members from the largest pool (i.e. the Internet-wide community) and the closed community that replicates a physical or offline community that is typically finite and smaller. Respectively, I see the critical mass being the actual number of people in the first instance, and the actual number of interactions in the second instance. While in the first case reaching CM seems more a function of advertising or visibility (and of course proper design!), the second case usually requires more patience and more subtle events. I have found that for the closed community, the design is especially important. I am not talking about graphical design here, but rather about the virtual environment that respects the transposition from offline to online. My theory contends that if users feel that the user interface respects their offline representation (i.e. belonging to subgroups, respect their anonymity or shyness, allow them to be extravagant via a picture or bold characters), then they are more likely to migrate and interact online. The critical mass in this case is represented by the number of online events (or posts) that correspond to their offline equivalent. I shall study my own users' behaviours to find out if indeed this theory holds ground.

– Yann Lechelle (ylechelle) @ 4:38 AM CST on 2/21/2002  

Posted by root at February 21, 2002 04:38 AM

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