A recent Salon article on the legal action instituted by fromer AOL community leaders , and a short browse through Observers.net brings up some thoughts about the nature of those who volunteer to build something controlled by a separate profit making entity. A coworker is big into "free web site hosts", but the time he spends in chat rooms and such to pay for that hosting service doesn't pay off, especially if you look at the hours he spends billed at what he makes.
I don't get the appeal. It's not like the framework for hosting community discussions is hard to come by, ArsDigita and Philip Greenspun offer lots of discussion software and the servers and resources to run it on, for free.
Why do people want corporate McCommunities, with mores and standards dictated by a publicly traded company, to be thrown off when the community doesn't grow in the direction that's profitable to the office of the president?
Are humans really that bad at long-term thinking?
I guess so. I mean when this whole squawk happened over GeoCities it was fairly obvious from the beginning tha they'd have to start intruding with ad banners and popups given the economics of the situation.
It's also kind of odd 'cause there are occasionall rumblings in the web log community about starting some sort of communal site, seeing if we can build something bigger than our individual web logs, the largest of which in this community seems to have about 800 daily visitors.
And once we start trying to figure out how this will all fit together we realize that despite our individual efforts being almost too similar there's no way we'd manage to make a communal project (none of us contribute to, and I don't read, Memepool , for instance).
But I guess we're not market samples. Too cynical. Too worldly. Too something. Because it's really hard to fathom how any of these "community volunteers" who keep complaining that they've been shafted by the companies that recruited them could have imagined the situation turning out any other way.
Friday, April 16th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com