Online Communities are not Social Networks

[crabpaws]

Christophe does have a very good point, "Like" is puerile.

I have been pondering the My Profile area. I am concerned about the Facebook-like "What's on your mind?" etc. I don't want my users to share their updates in a private conference with their friends, I want them to post them in public.

If I could do so easily, I would disable this group of features that allows users to have private mini-forums of their own. (My users will be utterly confused by it anyway.)

It's fine if they have friends and send pms to each other, I just don't like the private conferencing, it saps energy from the commons.

The commons is where people from widely different backgrounds share ideas. With this vitality, it's tremendously stimulating.

Allowing users to have private conferencing areas fragments the community as they will gravitate toward hanging out with their friend instead of adding to public areas.

The commons becomes anemic and populated by newbies. It changes the character of the board.

This issue of the vitality of the commons has been around in bbs circles for a very long time. Some boards may want to be very Facebook-like and some not.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this is designed in 3.2. I hope the admin has control over many of these features.

[rbiss]

The ability for forum members to disable/enable features on their own is more important these days. To much emphasis is placed on everyone getting what the admin wants and not enough about what the end user wants.

If you read what I was asking - is precisely that. The ability to disable features that I do not need. Some of them don't have this as an option. Like I've had to skin out the share features in Gallery.