08:10 pm - Community!
I'm not deleting my Myspace account. Recent events have shown me it's a good way for old friends I've fallen out of touch with to reach me again. But I don't like it, and I don't use it.
I think Momus pinned down exactly what I don't like about it in his Wired article on Myspacecide (that is, deleting his Myspace account, rather than the prickly topic of suicide on Myspace). In justification for why he deleted his Myspace profile but continued (and still continues) to use Livejournal for his blog, he wrote:-
I felt like a sheep, letting social pressures, memes and fads herd me around. I wondered why I needed yet another social networking website to check: After all, I was already on Friendster and Japanese network Mixi, not to mention LiveJournal, a network organized around daily content rather than mere profiles and links. [Emphasis mine]
That's exactly it, of course. Myspace is structure-heavy, content-light (and what content there is is not easily or intuitively accessible) while lj has a light but effective structure and an emphasis on new content - and I don't even need to make one click to see it, since I have my flist as one of my home page tabs in Firefox.
I have little experience of Facebook and Bebo, but my impression of them is that they're copying exactly the same maximum-structure, minimum-content approach of Myspace. It might be a fun way to pass the time, but I never really feel tempted: it just doesn't seem useful or terribly interesting.
Of course, no entry of mine about internet community would be complete without a look at Second Life. Second Life is based on user-generated content. As a result (and with 900,000 active unique users), it can seem like it suffers from too little structure - which is a bad thing when technical issues like lag can actually discourage you from exploration.
Ultimately, that comes back to what I've been wondering about video games recently: the more freedom you give a player, is it not true the more directionless the game may feel, and hence the less fun it will be? And is it possible that, as with games, so with community: more freedom is, in fact, just as boring as less?
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