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Some thoughts re: the issue of rekindling the ol' spark (i.e. getting people willing, nay, eager to participate)
As someone has already said, one of the biggest deterrents for the majority of members to come back is lack of time, due to work/study/personal obligations. Of course there are other factors at play here, personal issues and whatnot, but I'll only deal with the question of time, because that's the one I feel more accutely in my life (I'm already stalling production here to write this post). The experience of other members will vary, and I hope they will cover the other angles that gang up to smother in the cradle any nascent willingness to set a good hour aside to write posts with solid content and form.
Now, how do you measure the probability of someone being willing to engage in a certain activity? Someone will post in the countercultural messageboard if they feel that what they are getting out of the experience compensates for what they're investing in it (time). This is not exactly news, of course. In the old days of the board, I think most of these perceived benefits were psychological/emotional/intellectual - for instance, feeling of connectedness to a like-minded group; affirmation of intellectual stature/creative powers; harnessing of information.
Those benefits were the direct result of a certain set of people interacting at a certain point in time, and those days and those people are gone. This leads to a question that others might be better prepared to answer: if Barbelith is a social tool, how much of the Barbelith experience is unrepeatable once that social fabric is torn apart?). You'll have two ways of dealing with this, depending on the answer you get:
a) If that experience is repeatable, if it was not the result of a certain, specific intersection of right people @ right time, then I have nothing else to offer on this topic, since by this anwer, things would take care of themselves, and, once the board is active again with enough members, it will eventually gain momentum and revive itself. All effort then would have to be directed towards coming up with a process of selection/prospection for members that would improve the chances of having that spark igniting again - for that, I have not a clue.
b) If that experience is not repeatable, then the psychological/emotional/intellectual carrot would have to be demoted - not replaced, as it is still a considerable part of the experience of any message board - to a secondary role. People would still use Barbelith for social interaction and everything that it entails, but there would have to be something else that would guarantee that people using the board would be committed to high standards of writing & behavior.
Now, following from b):
What other carrots can we think of that would not clash with the core of what was Barbelith's "personality" (I'll avoid trying to define this further than saying that it "favored endeavors with an intellectual/spiritual bent")?
Well, there's always sex, as iconoplast reminded us, but that clashes a bit with the hasty description above, so we're not going to look further into that (although I would like if we could have some flash intro akin to BBR's, only saying things like "YOU WILL NEVER GET LAID")
Then there's money. Now, people from the business side of the internet will be better prepared to take it from here and offer their thoughts, but please keep in mind I'm not only talking about money. I'm talking about some system that would reward the time and effort you spent crafting your posts, in a way that's slightly more tangible. Is it possible to get funding from maybe a bookseller? I don't know, but I know that everybody loves to get books in the mailbox, especially for free. Or discounts/tickets for movies/theater, and so on, and so forth.
I know what you're thinking: "But Deja, how much do I have to beg and sob for someone to pay for my lengthy, throughly researched post that charts the pros & cons of Wolverine's bone vs. adamantium claws?"
I don't know.
Maybe a system of points could be conceived - you fill up a little graph bar meter as you keep on posting the good stuff, and after a number of your contributions are rated as helpful/worthy etc., you get the loot, the bar gets zeroed and it all starts again. Maybe the posts aren't peer-reviewed, maybe another system would be better. But still the core idea would be the same. I don't know if any of that is even remotely feasible - and it's probably far-fetched, but that's what I got.
At this point I have more questions than answers, really - For instance, what exactly could Barbelith offer to the business paying for all that jolly socializing?
So, people with real experience in internet business models, please pipe in. |
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