danielskog.se

During the last couple of days several Swedish bloggers have expressed their thoughts on how an online community should behave in order to keep its members over time. Mindpark points out that both Facebook and MySpace seem to be loosing some of their crowds, and suggests that we could look at these and other similar online venues as similar to nightclubs offline. A nightclub needs to be cool and hyped to have success, but after a while the hype calms down and people move to another place.

I’m not sure about the parallel to nightclubs, but I do agree with Mindpark that the size of Facebook has become a major threat for its further existence. When a community grows too big people start longing for something smaller and more exclusive.

Both Mindpark and Bisonblog argue that one strategy that should be adopted by community owners is to allow for sub-communities inside the large community. These sub-communities can be smaller and topic-specific, attracting dedicated members. This is very true and probably one of the key factors to why for instance LunarStorm has been such a lively environment for so long. (However, LunarStorm also seem to be loosing steam nowadays.)

I think that you could put this in another way by saying that if you want members to stay you’ll have to offer them an environment that does not only give entertainment but actually allows for a real community to develop. I get the feeling that many so called “community sites” don’t really have that much “community” going on. No wonder people eventually get bored and move on.