It’s time to abolish web monarchies
On forums, administrators, and democracy in web communities
Ten years ago, I was a teenager discovering the web, and one thing that really got me hooked was forums. I was connecting with people with similar interests: Pokémon, Megaman, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and game development. I participated in forums for each of those interests. It thrilled me that some people around the world actually liked the same things as I did with the same intensity.
My normal circle of real-world friends often didn't appreciate exactly the same things I did (I’m from Brazil, where loving football is a must, but I don’t), and I often had to avoid talking about my “annoying” interests. Most certainly many others experienced this.
Web communities are the essence of the Internet experience. We all open our browser everyday to read and see things that we are interested in, produced by other normal people like us. On the web, we gather around common interests.
Forums are one way of experiencing web communities. As a teenager diving into the early 2000s forumsphere, I quickly noticed something wrong with forums, and it was a social problem. Some users had special “moderator” or “administrator” tags that distinguished them from the rest. They were normal like-minded members like us, but were granted superpowers, capable of morphing the walls and windows of the rooms where we gathered to talk.
Unfair moderators were as common as fair ones, but something still bugged me about the hierarchy structure imposed in the communities. “Normal” members had no power whatsoever to affect decisions concerning the place we gathered. Even veteran members with the community respect had less privileges than the administrator’s buddies (moderators) did, those that visited the forum rarely.
Anyway, we normal members had to conform to this structure. After all, someone had to manage the server, pay the domain, install MySQL, install the forum software, ban spammers, and put an end to the flame wars. If someone radically disagreed with the administrator’s decisions, they could just leave and start their own forum. This ended up segmenting the community into “John’s forum” , and “Jack’s forum”. Pick the administrator you prefer.
Forum admins were kings. I used to participate in a forum with many thousand members, but one day the admin got mad at the whole community. In the occasion, he suddenly shut down the forum and put up an infamous and melancholic message (in Portuguese) for the community, leaving no database backups for the rest of us.
A couple of other forums were initiated to restore a space for the community to discuss, but most members were left with a trauma of admin dictatorship.
For many of us, admin trauma meant that it’s not worth
participating in a community owned by someone.
Because large web communities are essentially virtual societies, monarchy-like communities are bound to generate frustration. History has shown us that monarchies or dictatorships are no good model for a fair society.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana
For the above reasons and many others, forums are not the best solution for communities on today’s Web. A lot has changed, and web communities are now scattered across heterogeneous networks of blogs, Twitter profiles, and specialized community websites (Dribble, GitHub, etc).
Networks have helped web communities by giving each member praise (followers, reputation, badges) and ownership (in blogs and profile-centered networks). Suddenly bad administrators were not an issue anymore. The web today is owned by its users, not by a handful of hosts.
However, forums still excel at one thing: Meeting new like-minded people.
If you don’t have many connections in your network, it feels awkward and intrusive to jump into some stranger’s Twitter conversation about your interest. And even if you have many connections, discussions tend to be fragmented across several services.
Essentially, most online discussions are tied to someone’s space, be it a blog or a profile page in some website. So instead of providing an open and impartial space for discussion, social networks make community activity gravitate around the most popular and praised members.
Forums are the web equivalent of meetups, so there will always be a need for such kind of spaces.
With these ideas and memories in mind, I founded my startup to redefine what we understand as discussion forums.
We need a platform of forums that are owned by no one and by everyone. Moderation should be democratic: the community should select trusted members to vote on important decisions and act as a court whenever necessary. Everyone should have equal respect and equal opportunities. The community itself must filter out trolls and spammers, but any newcomer should be welcomed. Anyone should be given the right to start a forum quickly, not only those that know how to install webapps on servers.
Finally, content that the community judges noteworthy should easily stand out from irrelevant comments that typically overload online discussions. Those that generate relevant content should always be rewarded, not by who they are but simply by how they contributed.
I was just frustrated and curious how such platform didn't yet exist. The idea kept on poking me in the mind, so I went ahead and built it.
The Internet is an amazing thing that allows all sorts of modern ways for social interaction. There’s no point in keeping archaic and failed society structures (monarchies) on the Web.
