Creating Passionate Users

Building a successful online community

It was March 26, 2003, in the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was the ceremony for the closest thing geeks have to an Oscar--the Jolt Cola/Software Development Magazine awards.

The last awards category was "Websites and Developer Networks".

First the finalists are announced, with all the usual suspects including Microsoft, IBM, BEA... and javaranch. WTF? Javaranch? It had no corporate sponsors. It was not a business. It was a quirky, no-budget all-volunteer community, run entirely by people who just wanted to be a part of it. It was simply a Java "fan" site--but a hugely successful one with numbers most sites would kill for--over a half-million unique visitors a month.

So how did Javaranch do it? (Oh yeah, they did win a 2003 award that night, and the next year as well, beating out Sun's java.net and Microsoft for a 2004 Jolt award.)

They did it by being passionately, single-mindedly, ferociously committed to enforcing one rule: "Be Friendly."

Not that you can't have a huge community without that rule... slashdot is the perfect example. But if you're trying to inspire passionate users, I believe that enforcing a "Be Friendly" rule can be one of the best moves for long-term growth and retention of the community.

[Disclaimer: although I am the original founder of javaranch (in 1997), I'm not responsible for its real success. Most of the growth happened after I turned it over to Paul Wheaton. I gave javaranch its original heart and soul, but it is Paul and all the moderators (Sheriffs and Bartenders) who gave it a body and brain that could actually do something...]

Enforcing a "be nice" rule is a big commitment and a risk. People complain about the policy all the time, tossing out "censorship" and "no free speech" for starters. We see this as a metaphor mismatch. We view javaranch as a great big dinner party at the ranch, where everyone there is a guest. The ones who complain about censorship believe it is a public space, and that all opinions should be allowed. In fact, nearly all opinions are allowed on javaranch. It's usually not about what you say there, it's how you say it.

And this isn't about being politically correct, either. It's a judgement call by the moderators, of course. It's fuzzy trying to decide exactly what constitutes "not nice", and it's determined subjectively by the culture of the ranch. Sexy jokes are usually OK, racial jokes are not. Some perceive the sexy jokes as sexist, and therefore "not nice", but if we would laugh about it with our friends in a somewhat racy dinner party conversation, it stands. Javaranch censors for meanness, not to protect delicate sensibilities. To a lot of folks, that makes us "not nice", but we reckon these are the folks we wouldn't invite to our party, either. ; )

There is obviously no way to have a one-size-fits-all "be nice" rule; every culture will have its own. A church forum, for example, might draw the line much earlier.

I believe an online community can work with virtually any metaphor (I'll keep to myself what I think the slashdot metaphor is...), but that metaphor determines the kinds of people you attract and keep. The "frat party" metaphor supports one type of behavior, while the "public space" is another. The "professional business office" metaphor is different from the "passionate user group" model.

But the really good news is that if you have a strong and consistent culture, whatever that culture is, the community starts moderating itself. Kind of a hundredth-monkey effect... when enough people are behaving in a certain way, and that hits critical mass, it becomes not only accepted but obvious to everyone when it's being violated. (I talked about this earlier with respect to customer service in Can you teach someone to care?)

And for a wonderful article by someone who knows far more about online communities and social networks than I ever will, read Clay Shirky's speech from 2003 ETech, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. Among other things, he talks about the challenges of balancing the idealistic goal of open and free speech with the atmosphere of the online community:

"And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."

Pick your metaphor carefully. Dinner Party isn't for everyone, but it's usually my personal favorite for passionate user groups.