Some people may know it, some others may not, but together with a friend and business partner I'm running an online chat & dating community specifically targeted to mobile phone usage with i-mode. We've been doing it for over 1.5 years now and we're quite succesful at it too. iFriends is the number one chat & date community on KPN Mobile i-mode and BASE i-mode. Not bad for two simple developers I'd say. Now you may think that developing advanced mobile solutions for a great user experience on a small screen may be a tough challenge but keeping the community itself 'sane' has proven to be much, much harder than the most sophisticated programming efforts we've completed so far.

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The userbase

The userbase of iFriends is sort of weird really. It's not quite what I expected when starting the service. One would think it woult attract mainly young people looking for new friends and of course, a date. This assumption didn't quite hold up very well after a while. The bulk of the userbase consists of people aged 20 or older. A fairly large amount of users is even between 30 to 50 years of age.

The oddness doesn't stop here. Quite a lot of users can't be compared to your average 'internet chatter'. In fact a lot of them don't even own a PC with an internet connection. Instead they're using their phone to chat and send occasional emails. Another observation that can be made is about the intelligence level of a certain amount of users subscribed to the service. Rather low and... it gets worse here, combined with rather low social skills. These two things are a killer combination. Conflicts arise extremely easy and are terribly hard to resolve at times. People unable to resolve a 'conflict' with words can do strange things and become completely obsessed with the issue at hand while things go from bad to worse. It can even evolve towards ridiculous things such as people threatening eachother or members of the administration with real life violence. Quite a difficult kind of people to deal with. Of course not the entire userbase has these characteristics but there's a considerable percentage that does.

Get a life?

I've often amazed myself about the way some of the users of the service can get all worked up over issues that are of a completely trivial nature. At times a single remark or a wrongly interpretated joke can be made by user A, resulting in user B going completely berzerk over it, resulting in a full scale conflict that quite often involves an increasing number of other users who really didn't have anything to do with it until user A dragged them into it. Why it happens? One can only guess. It might be related to the fact that quite some people using the service might be using it just a little bit too much. On any online community, ours included, there are those who seem to have their whole life centered around... the online community!

Operators!

Having been involved in numerous online communities ourselves in the past, my partner and I decided that the key to success in maintaining an online community is making it somewhat self-regulating. Therefore we introduced so called 'operators' directly from within the community. These are users who contributed considerable amounts of time to the community and provided valueable input to it during that time. In other words: respected users. This seemed like a perfect idea. Respected users would be the best people to maintain a pleasant atmosphere on the board. They'd also have some sort of authority on it we thought. They're respected users, right?

The balance of power

Power, or perceived power, can do strange things to people. This isn't limited to online communities I guess. It's one of those bad things related to people and life in a broader sense. From time to time the operator team on our board has changed. One issue was always apparent as a constant factor. Once a user was promoted to operator his/her reputation as 'respected user' quite quickly deteriorated. Gradually users started voicing criticism and challenged the operators, almost like trying to trick the operators into bad behavior for the sole purpose of being able to say that operator X is a very bad operator and should be stripped from his/her status. Some operators couldn't deal with this pressure and had themselves demoted to 'normal user' again. And so a cycle can be identified: A user enters the board, gains respect and manages to be identified as someone suitable to become an admin member. For a short while things are fine until the earlier mentioned demise kicks in. The first conflict arises and a group of users starts to dislike and disrespect the operator. Some manage to cope, some don't. Those who don't have themselves demoted to normal users again. Sometimes they suffer from the 'bad reputation of being a member of the admin team' for a little while and then gradually lose interest in the board. A lot of them gradually decrease the amount of visits to the board and finally disappear alltogether.

Apparently you're choosing the wrong people

The above seems like a rather sensible conclusion. However, speaking from personal experience I can guarantee you this isn't the case. Several people with years of experience in being an admin on an online community have suffered from the consequences of becoming part of the 'bad admin team', including yours truly. For quite a while I'm not being an admin on the board myself anymore as I've (at least temporary) given up on being able to 'do it right'. Whoever becomes member of the admin team and whatever his/her actions are, their fate is certain: They'll be disliked by at least a part of the userbase eventually.

How to break through the vicious circle

So here we are... We're stuck with a 'difficult' userbase that definitely needs guidance (running the board without operators is definitely NOT an option) and at the same time it's almost impossible to 'run' the board without causing fairly large amounts of stress for those who are in the admin team, potentially even completely ruining the fun of being a member of the community for them. As in real life, introducing 'anarchy' by completely removing the admin team isn't going to work. People need guidance and regulation or total chaos will occur, just like in the real world. This chaos will chase away large amounts of new users causing the reputation of the board as a whole to go down the drain very quickly. A way to break through this impasse could possibly lie in trying to change the overall profile of the board. In other words: we need more people with a higher education and / or more people with a younger age. Here lies the challenge for the future in my opinion. I wish this article would finish with a firm kind of conclusion but at this time I don't really see any. So therefore, How to run an online community?

A pretty good question!