How Internet communities function

This is a collection of essays that explain why online communities end up the way they do, how they succeed and fail, and how to create and manage one. I think they are all interesting, though I don't agree with everything they say.

• The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat. Chip Morningstar, F. Randall Farmer. 1990. See also: the Habitat links collected on Douglas Crockford's Electric Communities page.


• A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. Clay Shirky. 2003.


• Building Communities with Software. Joel Spolsky. 2003.


• Five Geek Social Fallacies. Michael Suileabhain-Wilson. 2003.


• Why is [an anonymous BBS] better than regular forum software?. Shii. 2004.


• The chat room/forum problem. Robert Scoble. 2009.


• Outer Circle: Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists. Alan Crowe. 2009.


• Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. Eliezer Yudkowsky. 2009.


• Meta is Murder. Jeff Atwood. 2009.


• What I've learned from Hacker News. Paul Graham. 2009.


• The Evaporative Cooling Effect. Xianhang Zhang. 2010.


• The moderator problem: How Reddit and related news sites decline. Jake Seliger. 2015.


• The Asshole Filter. Siderea. 2015.


• Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution. David Chapman. 2015.


• Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums. Aella. 2017.