What Makes a Good Online Group?

Online groups have been around for longer than web browsers. If you're like most people reading this, you've visited or posted on an online group before. It probably didn't take you very long to notice that some groups function a lot better than others.

Who are these people?!

You know what I mean. In some online groups, all you see is dysfunction. Message exchanges are not so much discussions as they are mobs of people, name-calling and bullying each other.

Look at the comments on mainstream sites, like Twitter or YouTube. I mean, no! Don't look at the comments!! Never look at the comments!!! – Laura Maguire

Hey, look! Nice people!

Some groups actually work. You find discussions on topics that interest you. People post questions that are promptly responded to with helpful answers. People discuss the latest related news or just share their enjoyment of whatever the group is about.

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" – Godwin's Law

Most of us understand why groups have a natural tendency to slide into the cesspool. There are people who roam the internet looking for places where audiences have gathered just so they can drop in and ruin it for everybody else. When a situation is set up with rules that allow people to express their worst qualities anonymously with no real life social consequences, there's no surprise that eventually people take advantage.

How do you make online groups that work?

What is less understood is how to set up a group so that good conversations can happen, but toxic behavior is kept out. We can learn how to make online groups that work from observing existing examples of functioning groups.

You might assume that because I work at LinkedIn that I'm specifically talking about LinkedIn Groups, or that the observations I'm about to share with you are some kind of insight into how LinkedIn Groups works, or part of our future roadmap.

So, let me be clear: I'm not specifically talking about LinkedIn Groups. I don't work in the part of LinkedIn that implements LinkedIn Groups, and I'm not revealing any special insider knowledge about LinkedIn Groups. And it's just as well that I don't have insider knowledge about LinkedIn Groups, because if I did, I wouldn't be able to talk about it publicly.

Instead, I'm going to use as my case study an online group that I joined in 2001. To put this in context, that's five years before the existence of Twitter, four years before Reddit and YouTube, three years before Facebook, and a year before LinkedIn.

When I joined this group, it had just over 1000 members. Today there are more than 300,000 members. I not even a very active member, but I've always been struck by how it has successfully maintained a positive culture, and I claim that we can all learn from this example.

This online group is called CandlePowerForums (known affectionately by its members as CPF). It is an online forum devoted to the topic of flashlights.

Yes, flashlights.

Chances are that you personally might not care much about flashlights. You might be thinking that there is not much to learn from an online forum devoted to a topic that doesn't interest you. I want to convince you that there is a lot to be learned about promoting civil discourse and healthy online communities, even if you personally have no interest in flashlights.

First of all, you may be surprised to discover that are such people as flashlight enthusiasts, or flashaholics, as they call themselves on CPF. In fact, CPF is not the only forum specifically devoted to flashlights. For example, there is also BudgetLightForum.com (BLF) and The Flashlight Forum (TFF).

There are, of course, many other well-run forums on many other topics that I could have picked. You may already be a member of a few of them. If so, then follow along with the observations I'm making here, and see if they apply to your favorite group as well.

This is a forum about flashlights

One reason for the success of CPF is that it is a forum about flashlights. By that, I mean that it has a clear purpose that is easy to describe and understand. Anybody coming to CPF knows what to expect.

Of course, there are many things that can be said about flashlights, and over time, CPF has created separate forums and sub-forums for different topics. For example, there is one forum for LED flashlights and another forum for Incandescent Flashlights. These are two different families of flashlights, so it is natural for them to have separate forums for discussion.

Sometimes, however, the reason runs deeper for why there is a separate group. For example, imagine a hypothetical discussion in a forum with few rules where one person asks the group, "What would be the best waterproof flashlight for a camping trip?" Perhaps the first response is from a flashlight manufacturer, "Hey, we make several very nice waterproof flashlights." Then the next response is from an online dealer, "You know, we sell those, and lots of other nice waterproof flashlights too!"

The problem with allowing that is that every discussion gets invaded with sales pitches. Not only is that annoying, but the original poster is asking for recommendations that is presumably untainted by self-interest. (What a coincidence! The perfect flashlight for your exact need happens to be on sale now at my web site! Use coupon code YOUCANTRUSTME.)

So CPF made a rule that flashlight manufacturers and dealers can't do that. On the other hand, information about online sales and information from manufacturers is useful. So CPF created separate forums for them with different rules.

CPF uses this concept of separate forums with different rules in many different ways. There are separate sub-forums for flashlight manufacturers to discuss their products. There is a specific forum for offering your own flashlights for sale or trade. There is a specific forum for posting reviews of flashlights. There are even forums for discussing "off topic" topics where the rules are relaxed so that the subject matter doesn't have to be related to flashlights.

Stay on topic

Even within a single discussion, CPF enforces the rule that the topic should be clearly stated in the title of the thread, and replies within that thread should stay on topic.

This is actually an important rule. If a discussion is allowed to meander from topic to topic, then the discussion becomes useless to a future visitor who wants to review the discussion five years later.

Strong clear topics bring in the right people to the discussion while it's going on and ensure that the useful information in there is discoverable in the future. A powerful valuable feature of CPF is that past discussions are there for reference.

The people

I asked some people on CPF to answer the question, "What makes CPF work?"

It seems most people that love flashlights are pretty nice people. – CPF member "Chauncey Gardiner"

I'll mention some of their top answers later, but I don't want to pass over an important aspect of the people.

Now, I don't think that loving flashlights actually makes you a nicer person.

BUT, I don't think that it's a coincidence that you will find nice people in CPF.

This is because CPF has cultivated a community. It does this by

• being welcoming to newcomers
• valuing the time and expertise of their members
• vigilantly defending against bad behavior, up to and including banning members who won't follow the rules

Even if 95% of the site doesn't know the optimum operating voltage of an obscure incandescent bulb only available in northern Africa between 1965 and 2003 you can bet that someone will know which one it is, have a few spares, and take the measurements needed to find out the answer as well as keep it up here so the next person wondering in 10 years can also find it. – CPF member "LRJ88"

We have rules here

From their FAQ: "CPF has rules. Just about every forum on the internet has some kind of rules. All of you are here at CPF because of how it is run and the atmosphere. There are other forums you can go to but you choose to come here. The rules exist in order to keep things running smoothly and to maintain the atmosphere that you all enjoy when you come here looking for information or to share information. You all have seen what can happen when everyone is just left to do what they want. Total chaos and disorder. How do you expect to be able to find the information you're looking for if you don't know where to start looking for it? Should we just have one big forum and you can post any topic you want in it and use any kind of language and insult other members and just generally run amok? Of course, that is a ridiculous notion. And that is why we have rules. So that your experiences on CPF are pleasant and informative and fun." – Excerpt from CPF Rule #8: Whining and complaining about the rules

Moderators

To enforce the rules, you have moderators. These are people who actively patrol their area of the group to make sure that the rules are followed and bad behavior is stopped.

This is my top-level observation about CPF and every other well-running group I've ever been a part of. In some cases it may be enough to simply have a set of implicitly-understood social norms within the group, but most of the time rules need to be explicit and enforced.

It's the moderation; other sites just don't use the manpower needed to keep threads on-topic, so more threads become more off topic more often, which lowers the standard for what is expected to be moderated, and it devolves from there. – CPF member "StarHalo"

A big part of keeping CPF running properly is the result of the continuous work done by the moderators behind the scenes. This was the top answer from most of the CPF members who responded to my question, "What makes CPF work?" It rings true to me.

This rule exists because of you

Rules evolve over time. Often they change because somebody did something bad that didn't violate the rules, so a new rule had to be made.

The rules exist because someone at sometime abused CPF and rules had to be made. If everyone comported themselves as mature adults, we wouldn't have to have rules. But unfortunately, that is not how things are. – Excerpt from CPF Rule #8: Whining and complaining about the rules

If you ever see a rule that seems like it's coming out of nowhere, chances are there was something that happened in the past that motivated that specific rule. CPF has rules with origins that aren't too hard to figure out, such as:

• Email to Webmaster: If the email contains an attachment or is in the form of an attachment, it is deleted. Attachments sent to the webmaster account are not opened.
• New Account Vetting: Until a new user account has been approved and vetted in the above manner, the account has NO private message privileges and cannot add an avatar or otherwise "customize" their profile. Again, this is due to new users registering for spamming purposes only. They use the PM system without ever making a post in the forums.
• Advertising Policy: "Shilling" is not an acceptable practice in any CPF forum. For the purposes of this policy, a "shill" is defined as "a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating and/or one who publicizes or praises something or someone for reasons of self-interest or personal profit." 

Special software?

I've talked about CPF, but so far I haven't mentioned the software that runs it. Is there anything special about the forum software that explains why CPF is successful, but other online forums are not?

Basically, no.

Of course the software has to be able to handle the basics. It has to have a user interface that doesn't get in the way of doing all the basic operations that you expect from online discussion software.

But there are over 100,000 other sites on the web that use the same software, and the outcomes can be very different.

Why is that?

Learning from Stack Overflow

Back in 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky had a podcast where they talked about their ideas for building a new site that would be a resource for software developers to come and learn, share their programming knowledge, and build their careers. This site, Stack Overflow, now has more than 50 million unique visitors each month.

The site takes on the form of questions and answers, where members can not only pose questions and post answers, but also upvote, downvote, and comment on the answers that are already there.

In those formative discussions, Spolsky noted that in order to get Stack Overflow right, there is something that is far more important than the user interface, and that is what he called the social interface.

“Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops, behaves, and feels.” – Joel Spolsky, Building Communities with Software, March 2003

Spolsky relates that Cultural Anthropology was his most boring class that he took in college, but it has turned out in the long run to have been the most useful. He saw that building a successful community like Stack Overflow or CPF is actually more of an exercise in psychology and anthropology than it is a straightforward software development task.

In the case of Stack Overflow, they devised some policies that sound counter intuitive. For example, rather than trying to figure out who they want to attract to the web site, and design it to make it as attractive as possible to that target audience, instead they first tried to make everything about the first impression on Stack Overflow have the effect of driving the wrong people away.

“If we know we’re going to build a culture, and what we want that culture to be, we can design for it. We designed Stack Exchange for the culture we wanted from our users.” – Joel Spolsky

Next, they tried to tweak the software to incentivize the culture that they wanted. So, for example, Stack Overflow hates fun.

Their big achievement was figuring out ways to use software to replace the job that would have taken an army of human moderators. They have built a system that effectively harnesses their member's actions to allow the site to mostly self-moderate.

The CPF social interface

The experience of being on CPF is the sum total of what the online forum software is doing, together with the rules, the behavior of the members and of the moderators.

The rules that work for CPF are definitely different from those that work for Stack Overflow. And because CPF doesn't operate at the scale of 50 million visitors per month like Stack Overflow, there aren't the resources to tweak the behavior of the software to match exactly the culture they are creating, but they are still able to achieve the desired effect using human moderators.

How to do your part

So, if you're not the one running the online forum, how do you make your participation as positive as possible?

Read the rules. Follow the rules.

Every forum has different rules. Sometimes, as with CPF, the rules vary depending on which part you are in. Certainly if you join several online discussion groups, each one will have its own rules that have evolved over time in different ways, so before contributing your own posts, it would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the local customs.

Don't be a jerk!

This one ought to go without saying, but the internet is still full of people who don't know how to behave online. Don't be one of those people.

One guideline that should be enough for most reasonable people, is to pretend that what you are writing is going to be seen by everybody. Even though your post might be anonymous, or listed under some username that you just made up, pretend that what you are posting is public and visible, and will be read by your friends, your employer, your spouse, your children, your parents, etc. First of all, it might be. Even if today you don't have children or a spouse, maybe someday you will, and what you write today could still be there.

Block the jerks

On most discussion platforms, most of the bad behavior is committed by a small number of offenders. The problem is that even that small number can set off a disproportionate amount of mischief.

Most platforms have some way of notifying the site owners about behavior that violates the rules, and most platforms have some version of a blocking feature by which you can mark a person as someone who you no longer wish to interact with.

My suggestion is to make use of these features. For example, if somebody responds to something you post an a way that is ad hominem, abusive or threatening – block that person. One strike and they're out. You have better things to do than to pay attention to people who don't know how to treat you properly like a human being.

Personally, it almost never happens to me, probably because I don't usually post the sort of content that attracts that kind of response. In theory though, if you adopt a policy of blocking anyone who engages in that kind of behavior toward you, at first there may be a lot of people to block, but after a short while, you will have eliminated the noisiest worst offenders, and your experience should improve dramatically.

The more people adopt blocking as their standard response to bad behavior online, the sooner we will reach a state where the offenders will feel the effect as fewer and fewer of their antagonistic actions get responses.

Lessons learned

I chose the CandlePowerForums to use as an example precisely because it is probably unfamiliar to most of you. That way you can look at what they've built without too many preconceived notions of what makes an online forum work.

What we see is that how the forum is set up, what the rules are, and how they are implemented can have a dramatic effect on what kind of culture is created. The best online communities have structures in place that stop bad behavior and incentivize good behavior.

How that works in practice depends a lot on what the particular forum is about. One set of rules that works for CPF may not work at all for a different forum. In fact, even within CPF, there is a need to set up separate sub-forums where the rules are different because different kinds of discussions need different rules to make them work.

Sometimes you can transfer some responsibility for implementing the rules to automated rules that are built into the platform, like Stack Overflow does, but at a smaller scale, they key to making groups like CPF work are having effective moderators to make and enforce the rules.

****

Please join the conversation...

What do you think? Comment below. If there is something important that I've overlooked, please let me know, and I'll be happy to add it to this post.

Thanks for reading. You can find my previous LinkedIn articles here (https://www.dhirubhai.net/today/author/davidpmax).