The virtual community

What Hacker News says

1. caycep0llardAug 2020
   Hi

   I'm the founder and primary admin of tilde.town.

   I see many people signed up! Every application is manually reviewed, so, uh, give me a few days.

   Regarding "good" and "bad" users; this question has been at the center of tilde.town since its inception. We're a community first and a technological project second and encouraging a sense of belonging for users is our primary goal.

   Certain users sign up to abuse resources; that's easy to catch and deal with. Other users want to import the wider culture war aspects of the internet into our space, using a variety of tactics to provoke anger and discomfort.

   I'm a generally conflict-avoidant person so this took getting used to. On the server, I had to learn to be willing to ban the persistent trolls. I want to provide a space where people can grow and mature as I was given on IRC and web forums back in the early 2000s instead of a place that throws people out at the first hint of having "incorrect" beliefs. Unfortunately this gave too much leeway to people that were consistently there to recreationally troll or promote genuinely hateful movements.

   I became much more free with both temporary and permanent bans and made the signup intentionally cumbersome, wracked with nerves about the "good" folks who might be intimidated. I still have that anxiety, but ever since increasing the scrutiny on applications and doing more banning we've had a much more stable community environment.

   I read a lot of books on digital communities; the Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold is a great starting point, but the book that helped me the most was Cyber Chiefs by Mathieu O’Neil. It helped me understand that all communities that manage to grow over time will hit an unsustainable point and either retract or dissipate.

   Dissipation was a real possibility; for a long time I felt completely emotionally burned out by the town. I chose retraction though, and in retrospect, it was the right choice.

   I'm still learning and thinking all the time about ways to encourage quieter or less technologically inclined people to sign up and make a home on the town and am always excited to talk about it or hear ideas.

   (edited to clarify i'm not the only admin)

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2. samgDec 2012
   The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold http://www.amazon.com/The-Virtual-Community-Homesteading-Ele...
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3. ethankOct 2011
   That man knows how to flounce. Much respect.

   I should note that the concern isn't without merit. If you read Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community" which is one of the earliest discourses on Internet and online community, the concept of "virtual suicide" isn't new.

   http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/1.html

   In this case, someone created a tool to eradicate their online identity, then did the same in real life.

   I've had this issue twice in my 16 years of running Murmurs.com. In one case, the person was in chat on a Sunday and threatened suicide before deleting all her posts. We had to track down her university police department and they found her on the lawn outside her dorm overdosing on sleeping pills.

   The other was more sad. The guy disappeared and posts were removed. Only later did we find that he had left his suicide note on Flickr. He was Norwegian and we had to do a lot of digging to find more info. In the end his mom emailed me a very poorly translated English message, and it was heartbreaking.

   The moral is: I don't think there was any over reaction. This pattern has precedent and not a good one. I've never felt that in my 16 years of doing online community work I've ever over-reacted when I saw this behavior transpire.

   In one case we saved someone's life, and in the other we didn't.

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