The rise of virtual communities in conversation with virtual world pioneers

"Uncover the fascinating history of virtual communities and how we connect to each other online. The Rise of Virtual Communities, explores the earliest online community platforms, mapping the technological evolutions, and the individuals, that have shaped the culture of the internet. Read in-depth interviews with the visionary founders of iconic online platforms, and uncover the history of virtual communities and how the industry has developed over time. Featuring never-before told stories, this exploration introduces new ideas and predictions for the future, explaining how we got here and challenging what we think we may know about building online communities. Readers will: Learn what a virtual community is and how it has become an integral part of modern society Review key insights into building virtual communities and platforms from the founders and pioneers who created them See what thecurrent developments and the potential challenges are related to the future of virtual communities"

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

A AthertonThe Rise of Virtual Communitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_1

1 Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer

Cocreators of Lucasfilm Games “Habitat”

Amber Atherton1

(1)

San Francisco, CA, USA

“Habitat” was the first massively multiplayer online game (MMO) and virtual world cocreated

by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer in 1985 while they were working at Lucasfilm Interacting through text chat and moving around a graphical environment, users bartered for objects and eventually created self-government – creating rules independent of the server operators – forming the first social virtual world Morningstar coined the term “avatar” for the online representations of Habitat users Morningstar and Farmer encouraged innumerable possibilities within Habitat, allowing users to drive the direction of design and Lucasfilm to facilitate “Habitat” ran from 1986 to 1988, eventually closing due to unviable costs In 1988, a downsized version called Club Caribe was shipped preinstalled on the

“Habitat” is widely acknowledged as foundational to present-day online community design, particularly for immersive, 3D graphical environments In 2017, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) supported Farmer in his restoration of “Habitat” (available to

Aside from “Habitat,” Morningstar and Farmer created what many agree to be the first decentralized metaverse, in the late 1990s, while working at Electric Communities Along with Doug Crawford, they also created the JSON Protocol.

Atherton: Chip, Randy, you’ve built some incredible things together over the years How

did you first meet?

Morningstar: I hired Randy to work on the development team for Habitat back at

Lucasfilm; I think it was 1985 He had been working for us as a contractor on our gamesand had done a good job with those and worked quickly I had finally received the go-ahead

to begin hiring for the product team So I recruited Randy It turned out he’d already beenworking on virtual worlds since the dawn of time! Since then, we have worked together alot over the years, not just at Habitat We’ve collaborated in many roles and consulted forsome of the later communities in this book, including for the Palace and Linden Lab, whichowns Second Life

Atherton: Randy, what virtual worlds had you already been working on? What was

exciting and emerging in online communities at the time?

Farmer: I’ve been working in online communities since the 1970s I cocreated a game, SPB,

where people in high school formed teams and logged in to a server.2 Each team had a textterminal, into which you would type commands Sadly, the cocreator passed away a couple

of years ago – that’s how old this is Some friends have kept the game alive; the modernversion has port views and maps, but at its core, it is still the original game and is playableonline I also have images of the source code for my first Bulletin BoardSystem (BBS), COMUNI, which dates from 1976 Through this BBS, I was connecting highschool students to play games Back then, there was no centralized network like theInternet for talking together

Meanwhile, Richard Bartle in England was creating the first text multiuser game (MUG) in

1978, called MUD1 Simultaneously, the University of Illinois was building PLATO.3 At thistime, I was using standard terminals, while the University of Illinois was using plasmascreen terminals, an expensive technology that was never widely adopted All of thesedevelopments were happening in parallel

Morningstar: There were also several early online communities which simulated the

future through the use of money PLATO was one of them, alongside what was developed atXerox PARC.4

Atherton: Before Lucasfilm’s Habitat, had you experienced any need for online community

moderation?

Farmer: I had a great interest in connecting humans online, to share a game experience or

to talk and communicate At high school, a member of one of my message boards took totrolling me, with what are now laughable insults but hurt a lot back then He likened me to

a peanut butter sandwich… Nothing by comparison to what we suffer today online, but Istarted learning about the challenges of auditing virtual communities in the late 1970s

I had an idealism then, which I shared with my father, which was that the Internet wouldconnect everyone and that great things would happen People would cooperate more.There would be fewer wars Now I’m not sure that throwing everyone into a big pile on theInternet was good design Over the years, I realized that the best communities are the onesthat have shared content, a shared purpose for existing, even if it’s temporary and on asmaller scale

Atherton: How did the idea for Habitat come about as the first MMO?

Morningstar: The initial genesis was actually a lunchtime conversation between Noah

Falstein (a coworker at Lucasfilm) and I We were discussing artificial intelligence ingames, which had a very different connotation back in those days AI just meant thecomputerized opponent that you would play a game against My take was that we simplydidn’t know how to provide an opponent that players could interact with that had therichness, depth, and subtle nuances of an actual human being AI opponents could not beconvincing So I suggested that we don’t even try What if we used modems to connect realpeople, so they could play against each other?

That led to the idea which we initially called Lucasfilm’s “Universe.” It was an open worldspace game, which anybody could connect up to and then interact with each other Wedidn’t have a clear concept of what the gameplay would be I wrote up a two- or three-pageproject proposal, which was how we pitched our ideas at Lucasfilm Games The team woulddiscuss the proposal, and then it would be filed away in the General Manager Steve Arnold’sfiling cabinet Then when clients approached Lucasfilm, shopping for projects, Arnoldwould gauge the client’s brief and match it up against the catalogue of ideas in his filingcabinet He’d pull out a couple of these proposals and pitch them.

One of the driving constraints at Lucasfilm Games was that our mission statement was,

“stay small, be the best and don’t lose any money.” George Lucas, the founder of Lucasfilmand creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, was clear on this The result wasthat we could build what we wanted, but we had to get somebody else to pay for it

One day, Clive Smith, the VP for strategic planning at Commodore International, came

in.5 Commodore’s big initiative that year was going to be cheap modems for Commodore64s As part of that, Commodore made a strategic investment in a company called QuantumLink, which was a consumer-oriented online service That in itself was pretty radicalbecause it was cheap, targeted at consumers, and used a client-server architecture whichkept their costs down Commodore approached Lucasfilm asking if we had any ideas forwhat they could do in the game space

Steve pulled the “Universe” proposal out and I pitched it, which led to an extendednegotiation After months of discussion, they funded what became known as Habitat, andLucasfilm mostly executed the project It took months for the lawyers to settle on the terms

of the deal In the meantime, I produced innumerable design documents At one point, I had

a three-inch ring binder full of specifications and design material, a lot of which was notused in the end But it meant that we had thought through the ins and outs of Habitat ahead

of time When issues came up in development, we had often already thought about that and

so had a leg up in solving whatever the problem was We didn’t have a grand vision thatmagically unfolded, we were making it up as we went along

Atherton: How did the community begin to form in the early days around Habitat?

Farmer: Habitat went through some testing phases It was initially internal, mostly

employees and a few companies Then it went into alpha and paid beta We invited acurated group from existing Quantum Link users, who were interested This led to somegreat community formation Habitat then went into wider beta testing around 1986

We touch on this in our publications: Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Habitat Anecdotes.

We discuss that in a virtual world, where there is no strict “winner” or “rules,” we did needsome areas that were safe – that you could retreat from the threat of being killed – whileother areas were wild We did several experiments on what worked best

When you’re pioneering something – and none of these features existed in 1986 – thatsomething doesn’t even have a name yet One of our biggest problems with Quantum

Link was that they couldn’t wrap their head around what we were building They wanted toknow how you win the game We kept responding that you play Habitat, you don’t winoverall, though there are some games within the game The idea of a virtual environment, avirtual reality, an MMO, was novel and disruptive Quantum Link wouldn’t accept adescription of less than 25 words The Habitat promotional video was eight and a halfminutes long, attempting to describe what a virtual world is!

Morningstar: There was a lot of stuff that nobody had the vocabulary for yet Some of it we

tried to explain and demonstrate Elsewhere, we made vocabulary up The most notableexample was the term “avatar.”

Avatars sparked widespread debate Are they you? Is it a representation of how you’d like

to be portrayed? Is it some other character that you control? The answer was all of theabove

Atherton: Chip, you’re credited with coining the term “avatar.” How did avatars change

how people were interacting online? Unlike traditional text-based Bulletin Board Systems(BBSs), users now had an avatar that they could connect with the community through

Morningstar: It was all new It signaled that you were in this virtual world Your presence

was designated through avatars, a visual metaphor that you are there It also created anotion of place There were other people and various objects in this virtual world that youcould interact with, pick up, and move around People fell into it pretty naturally becausethey had already been playing single-person computer games which had a world model inthem Habitat was a radical departure though, because some of the other entities usersinteracted with were wired back through the network to other actual human beingselsewhere in the real world

Quantum Link did a lot of thrashing around, trying to explain Habitat, which turned out to

be completely irrelevant because people intuitively grasped it right out of the box Ratherthan explaining for ages prior, they should have let users play it, and it would click withinminutes

Atherton: Was there any accompanying social phenomena to these innovations that took

you by surprise?

Farmer: So many things! Some had to do with mechanics of the game, which we would fix

in later versions For example, users would steal from each other I know it seems obviousnow, but when you do it the first time, it’s new The very nature of how crude the interfacewas meant that if you wanted to trade with people, you had to trust them You would putsomething on the ground and expect they would give you something in return But, theycould put whatever they had offered you back in their pocket, grab your item, and runaway So we had to establish a few rules We made changes so that when you went intoyour house – every avatar had a house – you could control who came in That way, youcould then build trust

Also early on, people were trying to figure out the divide between the virtual and realworld In a virtual society, your avatar existed in a different context from real life Even thepromotional video explains that your avatar is not you, Habitat is just a place to have fun.But being stolen from in the game affected real-life emotions Users would then meet in reallife, and some got married There was an intersection.

Habitat only continued until the end of paid beta in 1988 It was then transformed into ClubCaribe, which was run by different people The “world” became a beach resort with all thefantasy elements stripped out – all those things that had emerged as we wereexperimenting were removed Over the years, they readded those features, which theycould do without changing the front end as it was already there The Habitat software wasthen licensed to Fujitsu in Japan It was the first virtual world and MMO in Japan when itlaunched Some of the developers at Habitat went on to create WorldsAway, anothermultiplayer community with avatars, in 1995 There were some shared social challengesbetween all of these projects

One common aspect was that users would find bugs in the software that generated money

In Lucasfilm’s Habitat, Club Caribe, Fujitsu Habitat, and other virtual worlds since – this hascontinued to occur for generations – there would be bugs where the internal currencycould be generated arbitrarily If there’s a bug, people will find it We were fortunate, atleast during the testing phases, that Habitat users would take this money and then figureout how to redistribute it in the game, by financing mini games they ran inside Habitat.WorldsAway created APIs for users to run games on top of the game, so that users couldcreate social context and value.6

Habitat and its successors were modeled upon a fact that paved the way for NFTs: scarcitybecomes the thing of value In the original Habitat, users could buy heads in vendingmachines, which were a unique way of styling your avatar Heads were purchased with thecoins that users had earned in-game Some heads were scarce Many could be purchasedeasily Heads could be colored or redecorated a little, but as in WorldsAway now, therewere some heads that were given out that could not be purchased This gave those headshuge value People treasured having the only munchkin head that was stripey, for example.Scarce items were valuable; that’s why people would be so upset if their items were stolen– they might be irreplaceable

Atherton: Did you find that BBSs were popping up around the game, or was most of the

interaction happening in-world?

Morningstar: A bit of both We had a guy who started publishing a newspaper within

Habitat Every few days, he’d produce 20–30 pages about funny or interesting things thathad happened, the “news” of the community He did that for quite some time It wasspontaneous and community generated

We were constantly building tools that would permit users to create For example, we hadsingle sheets of paper that users could write text and graphics on We also had a bookwhich had multiple pages, but you couldn’t edit the order of those pages There was

demand for more flexibility, so we created a machine that could take several disparatepages and bind them together into a book We also allowed users to stock their ownvending machines The feedback cycle of users wanting something and us figuring out how

to enable it happened quite a lot

Atherton: How did you go about moderating Habitat?

Morningstar: There’s an interesting distinction between the rules which we enforced

technologically and the rules we enforced socially To prevent stealing in later systems, wecreated an automated trading machine to let people swap items back and forth – anexample of technological rules But up until then, we had to rely on social rules

There was controversy surrounding people stealing things The users wanted a sheriff tocrack down on that We weren’t sure how to do that, but we were able to create a votingmachine so users could have an election They self-organized election campaigns for two orthree candidates to be sheriff They held a candidates debate where other users could askthem questions Then one person got elected sheriff, and we gave him a special avatar headthat had a cowboy hat with a star on the top Because of the collective approval of thecommunity, he carried with him a lot of moral authority So if somebody did somethingwhich wasn’t the Habitat culture, like stealing, and he suggested they return what they hadstolen, people took that seriously and were more inclined to respond in a constructive way

Of course, we could have manipulated that – gone into the database and restored items totheir original owners – but we didn’t want to have a dictatorial rule over the communitywhen they were able to develop their own set of norms that were mostly enforced by aconsensus model

Atherton: The principle of allowing the community to vote on who they want to be the

moderators is not that dissimilar from how DAO communities are structured today: theyare governed by its members.7

I’m curious how you have seen moderation evolve in online communities and how youwould advise approaching virtual governance?

Farmer: Let me first distinguish social media from online communities We’ve conflated

those words over the years I try not to, but a lot of people say “the Twitter community” or

“the Facebook community.” There’s no community there You don’t take big piles of peopleand call them a community just because they use an application; that is a shared tool It’slike saying I use a hammer, I’m part of the hammer-using community! An onlinecommunity requires a shared context, something that is valuable to its users For example,

a cancer survival support site

Social media involves moderating everyone in the world to speak the same exact words.When I worked at Google, specifically on YouTube, I came to realize that YouTube hostsvideos, and most videos have a comment section, which requires moderation But the sameword in different contexts can have different meanings The word “queer,” for example, isoften a term of endearment and membership that the community support, but in other

contexts, that word can be hate speech How do you universally tell? You can’t tell withoutthe context That’s why moderation on a global scale is unsolvable, unless solved locally.When I was at YouTube, I suggested you should only allow comments to be turned on if thevideo creators moderate those comments They have to decide what’s good and what’s bad,and if they refuse to do that, they shouldn’t have comments Otherwise, comments becomegarbage.

Online communities differ They can be moderated by their members, because they careabout the platform I have been a member of numerous online message boards since thefirst one was created in the 1970s, and they’re great because the topics are limited andspecific For example, a forum on paper craft is not going to accept posts on politics or theprice of oil If someone comes in and doesn’t behave, they are kicked out, no big deal.Online communities define their own rules If you don’t like the rules, you can form a newcommunity

Atherton: I wanted to ask you both about the nature of trust in online communities In

your experience, do real-life interactions, meeting the person behind the avatar, reinforcethis trust?

Morningstar: Trust is a very slippery thing You have to define what that trust is for I

know people who I would trust to manage my money who I would not trust to do a goodjob looking after my children!

Farmer: I coauthored a book called Building Web Reputation Systems in which I talk about

trust in virtual communities

Communities meeting in real life does not necessarily create trust I am part of virtualcommunities in which I share values with people that I have never met and have no reason

to ever meet But I trust them I send them money when they can’t pay for the servers All

kinds of trust, but not all trust.

Trust is hard to measure Five-star ratings and reviews are among the most dumbreputation systems in existence today, because of the collapsed context I wrote a paperwhen I was working at Google, outlining the reasons you should not use those scores.Firstly, they’re sexist Consider movie reviews on IMDb Did you know that movies focused

on women are more than one star lower on average rating on IMDb than movies focused onmen? That’s because more men give ratings on IMDb So why would a woman trust IMDbratings?

Five-star ratings are also racist and subject to inflation Even the same products rated indifferent virtual locations (IMDb vs Rotten Tomatoes) have different scores Additionally,this system is designed for abuse If you have a new object in this database, you needreviews So you ask people to write reviews, which is against the policy Why would youhave a mechanism that requires a bootstrap, which you cannot get without abusing thesystem?

Reviews contain social data which is unrelated to content or product quality For example,when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, all of his property ratingsdropped two stars on average People who had never been to those places, who hated him,rated them badly Businesses shut down because of social data influencing these ratings.I’m not going to say whether social justice is a good thing, I’m just saying that the resultingreviews are out of context Varying factors are folded into ratings and yet areindecipherable, so why would you average those numbers? What a customer needs is theopinions of people who are like them.

Turning to trust in Web 3, DAOs are complex They often use token ownership as a marker

of trust, rather than earning trust With DAOs, trust is founded in the ability to buy tokensearly and cheaply, which suggests that money is trust, and I reject that I think distributedsystems are trying to reject that also, so I’m confused how DAOs have moved to theforefront in so many cases

Atherton: Is contribution not also a factor influencing trust in DAOs and Web 3

communities? It’s not just about buying in through tokens, but then how you contribute tothe community and how that contribution is incentivized, no?

Farmer: It’s hard to measure quality of contribution, so it ends up being measured in

numbers People in message boards threw this out a long time ago; they stopped displayingpost counters for people, because people started jacking up their numbers by postingpointless content Another example is Instagram: girls suffer horrible psychological effectsfrom the number of likes on their posts, because these are public value scores that they aretrying to increase

Morningstar: Every time you have a number which is a measure of something, people will

start layering interpretations on it You can’t necessarily control what they layer

A great example was Orkut, an early social network experiment that came out of Google in

2004 Orkut had a facts page, and one figure mentioned how many market users there were

in different countries Some of the countries that were disproportionately representedstarted treating this as a leaderboard As a result, Brazil became the number one country

on Orkut, mostly because the Portuguese language community challenged themselves toget to number one Orkut became a Portuguese-only site by default, just because somebodydecided to post the number of users in each country What Orkut saw as a page of amusinginformation was understood by other users as a leaderboard

Atherton: For a text-based community, is the level of active participation by members a

good indicator of community health?

Farmer: This is known as the engagement trap The reason YouTube, Facebook, and

Twitter have a fundamental problem is because engagement is their revenue model Theysell advertisements, so they need you online more This led to teaching algorithms tohighlight anything that was highly engaging because it meant more revenue This cycle is

well documented Even Jack Dorsey, cofounder and former CEO of Twitter, knows about

it Controversial content is exaggerated, because controversy generates revenue

Another problem with engagement metrics is that they often reduce the quality of content

in message boards Those who have the most time are not necessarily the best people foryour community When I post on message boards, I spend a lot of time crafting thoughtfulresponses Others might have time during the day for chatter Once others log on in theevening, it might have 500 back messages, which I’m not going to read Engagementmetrics reinforce chat and shut out long form

Morningstar: You can have a group of 1000 people in an online environment, in which 20

of them are having a sophisticated, nuanced conversation among themselves, and the other

980 people are watching it because it’s interesting and informative

You can also have a group of 1000 people who are all constantly nattering to each other,and its content is trivial Activity metrics are going to suggest that this second group is theone you want as everyone is engaged, when in fact the first one was better The second is adifferent form of entertainment, with a lot of noise, but it’s not a driver for deeppsychological satisfaction or progress in the world or anything that you might attach value

to The shape of the interaction is more important than the size of it

Atherton: Looking at virtual community architecture, you’ve both seen everything from

virtual worlds, message boards, asynchronous chat… Are certain architectures preferablefor deep engagement?

Farmer: I’ve consulted for a lot of virtual communities, and really that question is “what

helps the community?” It’s not a list of features that it has to have: chat, message boards,email relay

At one point, I created a community around a podcast When we moved from messageboards to Discord, which values engagement metrics, the community lost its value, asthoughtful posts were lost among chatter In fact, chatter was promoted as it was produced

by “more engaged users.” It creates brain drain

When people think about community design, you literally have to start with “what does thecommunity need?” That could even be utilizing email or SMS relay The original Habitat hadinternal mail; you could send messages to other avatars and never know who was behindthem So my answer would be that you should architect the community to serve thecommunity

Morningstar: On a related note, one of our long-term collaborators Doug Crawford has a

saying: “media has biases.” I don’t mean biases as in left wing or right wing, pro-this or that; rather, that with any given medium, there are certain messages that get through thatmedium more easily than others Features filter the experience, which is why Twitter isdifferent from Facebook, Discord, and Reddit They are effective at transmitting differentkinds of messages, information, and emotional effects

anti-Having different media does not necessarily make companies more flexible or powerful,which is a misconception that I hear a lot Any combination of media will create a differentset of biases Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there are features which will be more

or less effective at achieving what you’re trying to do, whether that’s chat or videoconference, they’re just different Somehow we’ve absorbed this idea that you want allpossible tools In reality, you want to make design choices that will aid what you’re trying

to construct We don’t have a body of theory on what design choices are going to workbetter as a mailing list or a chat service yet though

Farmer: Chat services are febrile: if you aren’t there, you miss the conversation So if

everyone in your community is supposed to be on the same page, a message board won’twork so well Even if it’s archived, because now you’re reading a conversation thatsomebody else had, you’re not participating Only recently have chat platforms allowed you

to edit posts For a long time, you weren’t allowed to, so posts might be outdated by thetime you read it, even on the same day For example, “car repair” is a common search termonline You wouldn’t want the information of your company to be on a message board – theinformation would get lost – you want it in a place that is persistent and curated Thesethings can be features or bugs, depending on what you want from your community

Morningstar: There’s also what I call the fundamental paradox of the Internet, which is

that nothing lasts, yet nothing ever goes away…

Atherton: Can we touch on your work on communities in the metaverse and the

implications of these?

Farmer: At present, I am the executive director of the Spritely Networked Communities

Institute, which is working to build technology to remove servers from communities It’sworking toward an environment where anyone can create communities with whomeverthey want, with no centralized server On this project, I haven’t worked with Chip, but wetried to do something like this before when we were working at Electric Communities, anInternet application developer Everyone focuses on the virtual worlds that we worked on

at the firm, but our ultimate success was that we removed the necessity for a central server,

in that case implemented on top of a virtual world In doing so, we made the first fullydecentralized metaverse in the late 1990s!

Morningstar: One contributor to the demise of Electric Communities was that there wasn’t

great demand for decentralized, secure, virtual world infrastructure at the time, eventhough it solves important coordination problems, as Randy was just explaining

An unintended but fantastic consequence of framing a decentralized, secure metaverse in agraphical environment was that the metaverse and its implications were visualized in avirtual world, which gave them the same moral intuitions as if it were the real, physicalworld It helped your brain understand the problems with the metaverse in a way that youcould make sense of them and come up with possible solutions So human engineers wereable to think about the underlying technical problems of decentralization

Farmer: Through the lens of a decentralized, secure virtual world – the first metaverse –

it’s easy to say who should be allowed to turn the light off at my house or take the head off

my avatar’s body We think of that not as data, but as behavior, so it’s easier to considerrationally With data alone, there is no context So when someone says nowadays, let’s takeyour social network graph and put it on the blockchain, that is morally wrong, but they’rethinking of it as a contextless object

Morningstar: There’s a lot of confusion about ownership of data, particularly medical data

or financial data Some believe you should own your own data To me, there’s afundamental confusion rooted in that, which is that people know things about theiracquaintances and the companies they interact with What you know about them is storedinside your brain When somebody says they should own their own data and you knowsomething about them, are they saying that they own part of the contents of your brain?Because that doesn’t make sense

The real question is what is done with your data If a robot knows your deepest, darkestsecrets and never does anything with that information other than while it’s interacting withyou, has your privacy been violated? Our society is still grappling with these questions

Atherton: Randy, what have you been working on with the Museum of Art and Digital

Entertainment (MADE)?

Farmer: I have been working on two projects with MADE.

One is a restoration of Lucasfilm’s Habitat as it was on its beta test in 1986, for theirplayable online video game museum and exhibit We reinstated the database, rebuilt theserver, and it’s using the original software MADE even has Commodore 64 emulators,which are astonishingly accurate to the original technology… pitifully slow! It is availableonline at NeoHabitat org , and there are people who log in every day!

Separately, we’re working to restore the work of Electric Communities, most notably thehistory of decentralized systems, which foreshadowed the blockchain Out of ElectricCommunities came some developments that nobody else has ever done since, and we’dlove to see those make it out into the world

Atherton: You both seem to have found yourself at the forefront of every major

technological and cultural shift!

Morningstar: Yes, we often laugh that we have started several industries in

which other people have made billions of dollars!

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

A AthertonThe Rise of Virtual Communitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_2

2 Howard Rheingold

Writer and Lecturer on “Virtual Communities” and an Original Member of The WELL

Amber Atherton1

(1)

San Francisco, CA, USA

The WELL was a dial-up Bulletin Board System (BBS) that stood for the “Whole Earth

’Lectronic Link.” It was the earliest affordable multiline chat-based forum Founded in 1985

by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, it was an electronic offshoot of Stewart Brand’s Whole

Earth Catalogue (1968), a how-to guide for building your own off-grid civilization The WELL

featured message board–style discussions, divided by topic Writing about The WELL in 1993, Rheingold popularized the term “virtual community” with his article The Virtual Community:

Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier Rheingold has since lectured at Stanford on

community and become a leading commentator and advisor for technology companies The

Atherton: Can you take me back to the early days of The WELL and how the community

differed from the other Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs)?

Rheingold: The WELL started in 1985, and for a year or two before that, I had been

exploring BBSs There were tens of thousands of BBSs before there was an Internet orUsenet, and so a lot of people, like myself, who later became involved with systems like TheWELL, started on other BBSs The problem with BBSs is they were usually a PC in someteenage boy’s bedroom that was connected to a phone line, and only one person could log

on at a time So you had to wait your turn There was one thread It doesn’t sound like a lot

to be excited about these days, but it was interesting You met people who shared yourinterests who you may never have known otherwise

Aside from The WELL, there were a couple of other online systems ARPANET was one, butyou really had to be a computer scientist to participate in that The Source andCompuServe were also big commercial services in the early 1980s The Source in particularhad something called Participate, which was similar to forum software today So it was onthese platforms where I got involved in multithreaded discussions that went on for days.But it was expensive and I was a struggling freelance writer, so I couldn’t spend too manyhours on any of these BBSs

The WELL had a couple of technical advantages Mainly that it had 30 or 40 phone linescoming into it In fact, The WELL office used to have this room full of phone lines andmodems The WELL was based on Unix (pre-Internet), so it had a forum software that wasoverlaid, which allowed the kind of asynchronous text conversations that you see today.Unix had a couple of utilities: you could see somebody’s profile by entering a command, andyou could send them a private message So The WELL was a combination of public forumposts and private messaging We were excited about the possibilities of doing both of thosethings

Another important innovation was that The WELL was relatively inexpensive I thinkthe Source and CompuServe cost about $10–$15 per hour, whereas The WELL cost around

$3 I immediately became very involved in The WELL My wife became concerned about allthe time I was spending online, and my daughter actually said, “was that daddy laughing athis computer again?” As a writer, I started producing content about the platform because itfascinated me It also gave me an excuse to be online a lot.

Living in the San Francisco Bay area, The WELL was an offshoot of Stewart Brand’s Whole

Earth Catalogue (1968) The WELL’s office was just on the other side of the Golden Gate

Bridge from San Francisco One day, I visited their office and talked to the manager of TheWELL He told me that if you host a conference, The WELL is free.2 So I started the “mind”conference, hosted it, and spent a lot of time online That was the start and the basis for thepiece I wrote about hosting online conversations in 1998 By then, I had been using BBSsfor over a decade

Atherton: Do you think that the formula for healthy online communities = hosts +

moderators + rules?

Rheingold: I’m not saying that you can’t have a healthy community without a host, but I

believe that the chances of it being successful are multiplied manifold by having someonethat cares

When I advise people about building online communities, I said that in addition to having

an experienced facilitator from the beginning, you should identify the people in thecommunity who are the most eager contributors and enlist them in helping as you scale up.Your hosts, your facilitators, should really come from the most enthusiastic members of thecommunity Obviously, these are people who have a stake in the community, but also itsignals to everyone else that we, the community participants, are the owners of this virtualspace It is not some distant company who hires people to corral us That feeling ofownership is key to feel they can participate and take responsibility for the health of thespace

From my research, the main takeaway was that the success of an online group, whether itbecomes a community or not, has a great deal to do with the way it is facilitated Todescribe that, I borrow the term that The WELL used, which is to “host.” A lot of people usethe word moderation Moderators back in the days of Usenet were really gatekeepers.Moderated newsgroups meant you sent your message to the newsgroup and the moderatordecided whether to send it on to everybody else A host isn’t a gatekeeper or a sensor, but

is rather more like a host at a party You don’t just invite people, buy beer, and rent a room

to have a party, you need to greet your guests at the door You need to invite an interestingcrowd You need to introduce people to each other You try to break up the fights or at leastmove it away from the punch bowl That is key to successful online communities

As I wrote in The Virtual Community, the host should also demonstrate the behavior that

they would like to see Another important aspect is to have rules of behavior clearly set out

at the beginning By that I mean you need to agree to them before you join The rules mightdiffer in content and how they are enforced in different places Rules should not be decidedonline with the group once it’s going, it needs to be decided before you start; otherwise, it’s

an endless rathole I’ve been in many discussions about what people call censorship Ifsomebody is driving people away with their behavior, censoring their behavior signals topeople who might not otherwise have participated that it’s okay for them to participate Ifthose people see users getting away with attacking others, a lot of people will notparticipate for fear of sticking their head up and getting shot at.

Those are really the basics Have a simple set of rules that everybody agrees to beforehandand have someone who is not just a moderator or a police of behavior but somebody who’sactively engaged in catalyzing community I often use that analogy of a host at a houseparty You need to greet the guests, introduce them, and welcome them; direct them as towhere they might go based on their interests and who they might enjoy speaking to Thefirst impression that you get when you enter a party or online community, I think, dictateshow engaged those users will go on to be

Atherton: To what extent were the online forums of The WELL and other communities you

played a key role in powered by real-life connections? What overlap was there between thereal life and the virtual at The WELL?

Rheingold: In the early days of The WELL, you had to dial up to log in, which meant you

paid phone charges So it was less expensive for people in the San Francisco Bay area,although there were people who paid long-distance charges to get into The WELL fromelsewhere Therefore, most of the participants online were in the same geographic area.The community crossed into real life when one of the people running The WELL had abirthday, and some WELL users suggested we show up at The WELL office with some beer

to give him a birthday party For many of us, this was the first time that we saw people face

to face that we had communicated with for hours online People just talked and talked, as

we did online It was a great success, so we decided to have a regular monthly WELL party

I remember one WELL party that was held at a beach When it got dark, we had no lights,but people stood in the dark and continued to talk People felt this commitment or need orwant to communicate with each other From there developed a series In the parentingconference, where we talked about our kids, we decided to have a softball game and bringour kids In another conference, somebody started an argument about who made the bestchilli, so we decided to have a chilli cook-off By that time, we had moved the parties to alarger place that had a kitchen, and so the chilli cook-off became an annual event! To manycommunities, having face-to-face gatherings was important

Bear in mind that Usenet has existed since 1980, and there were Usenet groups worldwide

before the Internet When I was researching The Virtual Community, I came across the

Harley-Davidson motorcycle Usenet group It had users from all over the world, and theyorganized meetups, for which people would travel halfway across the globe to attend.People were reporting that they met their spouses online There seemed a desire to movetoward face-to-face communication But of course, there are many online communities inwhich people are scattered around the world that don’t often have a chance to get together

I started a group in 1998 called Brainstorms that I have written a little bit about We hadface-to-face gatherings where people came from the Netherlands and Australia and allacross the US I think they help to build trust, but it is not necessary.

Trust however is somewhat transitive in that I may not know person A, but we have amutual friend This often translates to trust, until proven otherwise I think that the number

of those transitive trust relationships can help catalyze a sense of community A certainamount of trust is required to open up to the community in a public thread

Online groups are not necessarily communities, if people don’t have relationships witheach other If they don’t necessarily care enough about each other to rescue somebodywho’s in trouble But they do exchange information For example, in Silicon Valley, at onepoint almost all the engineers were on Usenet, and they were exchanging information withother engineers around the world “I have x problem Do you know how to solve it?” Hadtheir bosses known that they were communicating with engineers from competingcompanies, they probably would have shut it down, and we would not have seen thegrowth that entailed In some cases, exchanging information might create a commitment tothat particular group, but not to individuals within it

By contrast, there are online communities for sufferers of rare diseases If you have adisease that one in a million people have, there are 2000 people like you on the Internet.Those groups have very strong relationships with each other, but may never meet face toface So I think it’s a mix

Atherton: If not a crossover with real-life interactions, what do you believe is needed to

start a community?

Rheingold: One of the things you need is a strong center of gravity, something that’s going

to attract people to your online community, say, Harley-Davidson motorcycles or a raredisease

The WELL had a number of conferences; some people were just in the books conferences

or the politics conference The real core members of the community were in a number ofdifferent conferences Now we have Reddit, which has thousands of subreddits, some ofwhich may be communities and some of them may just be for exchanging information

Atherton: Do you think there is a limit to how many virtual communities you can be a part

of as a user?

Rheingold: That’s a tricky question Because I was writing about online communities, I

spent a lot of time exploring different ones, in the early 1990s, before the Internet Aroundthis time, I went to England, and there was a WELL community there There was anotherone in Paris, and I went to a meetup in the outskirts People all around the world weredoing this as the Internet began to open up these opportunities The WELL was no longer aSan Francisco Bay area platform, people could go there through the Internet

If it’s for your job, then how many hours does your boss allow you to use BBSs? But there’s

a lot of online fatigue going on now, and I think that using Zoom so much during the

COVID-19 pandemic has really affected people’s tolerance for how much online communicationthey can do

Atherton: What shift is required to turn an online discussion into a community?

Rheingold: One is to have people actively facilitating community and welcoming people In

my experience, the one factor that most affects whether someone who participates for thefirst time will return and continue to participate is whether anybody acknowledges theirparticipation by name There’s nothing like having someone say they read your post I canremember the first response that I had to my first post on The WELL I said I wanted to talkabout a certain topic, and someone said, “oh goodie”; I just felt acknowledged and welcome

A good host or facilitator will look at a person’s profile and try to direct them to placeswhere they might be interested Then your chances of having a community grow out of thatincrease

I told a story in The Virtual Community about a fellow parent that started the softball

tradition at The WELL’s parenting conference His son was diagnosed with leukemia, and ofcourse medical support groups are commonplace today, but back then our parentingconference had doctors and nurses in it We created a topic thread and raised about $15–20,000 to help out with expenses The WELL became an online support network for them.There was another woman whose circumstances caught her very sick in Asia, and thepeople in The WELL figured out how to get her home and raise money to do that Therewas a woman who was dying, and people took turns sitting with her I think when youbegin doing those things for each other, it’s proof of a true sense of community

There’s an expression that it’s really not a community until it’s had a funeral Indeed,weddings, breakups, rites of passage that occur in face-to-face communities are alsoimportant milestones online

Another way of shifting discussions to communities is the presence of rituals The ritualsthat work best are when they just emerge naturally When someone says, “what does itlook like where you’re sitting?” Or “what did you have for breakfast today?” Anything thatcatches people’s interest and that they then turn into a regular event

Atherton: Looking back to The WELL and Usenet, what were the scale of these

communities?

Rheingold: Usenet was all over the world in about 100 countries, and it had hundreds if

not thousands of newsgroups, so I would guess between tens and hundreds of thousands ofusers The number of people online was then hugely multiplied when the Internet camealong

Atherton: In your experience of the communities that you’ve been a part of, is there an

optimum number of people for a healthy community?

Rheingold: I’m sure you’ve heard of Dunbar’s number, which suggests a healthy

community is around 150 people.3 Sociologist Barry Wellman has suggested that theDunbar number may be flexible online.4

If you look at The WELL or at Reddit, they are an overarching community platform withsubcommunities In The WELL, each conference had probably around 150 people, maybemore With the exception of the news conference that everybody participated in, mostconferences like the science fiction conference or the books or media conferences werearound 150 members So I think that online groups kind of naturally spin off intosubgroups that are more of a manageable size

I know that Facebook groups, which I no longer participate in, can have hundreds ofthousands of people I have a complaint about that In fact, I’ve spoken to the socialscientists at Meta, because a Facebook group is a bad affordance for a large number ofpeople in which to discuss a large number of topics over a longer period of time The threadthat has been most recently posted goes to the top And everything else gets buried For agroup with say 5000 people, if a discussion starts on something that interests you, if youlog in an hour later, you might not even be aware of that

This was a technical problem that forums solved in the 1980s, whereby the system knowswhat you read, what you ignore, and the last thing you posted; it was solved by showingyou everything that’s been posted since then To me it’s important for a forum to keep track

of posts for you There are a lot of bad forums in which you see links and then you have toclick on the link to get to the discussion, and then you have to figure out which was the lastresponse that you read That should all be taken care of for you That’s really the advantage

of asynchronous text

Atherton: How do you go about attracting new members to a community?

Rheingold: It’s a lot harder now because people are spending 150% of their available time

online, and they’re already participating in other venues, so that’s an issue that didn’t existbefore Somewhere in the 2000s, around the tenth anniversary of Facebook when theonline social population became very large, word of mouth became very important Ifsomeone participates in a forum and is enthusiastic about it, that attracts people and theyare more likely to stick

I think there are two key ways to attract new members: Firstly, do your participants have asufficient feeling of ownership that they themselves want to grow the community?Secondly, you need to know your target market That’s marketing 101 Who do you want tojoin, an engineer or a mother? What distinguishes that person? What are their interests?What attracts them? Where do you find them? How do you get them to try your platform?And to come back again? This is the way you market any product

The other key attraction of your community is specialist knowledge I use the example

of Patreon because its users have an art form or podcast or videos around a particulartheme, and people who are interested will find their way to it They might then spend five

or ten bucks a month to support that person to continue producing content and toparticipate, say, in their Discord I think cross-medium is important For example, if peoplefrom your community make videos and YouTube promotes those videos and you’re invitingthese new viewers to your community, you can be using other platforms to promote yourown

Atherton: From your time in text-based communities vs avatar-based communities, did

you feel there was any difference in the community connections? Were connections deeper

in text-based communities?

Rheingold: Connections had to do with the quality of the interaction rather than the

environment the interaction occurred in In a very visual virtual world with fantasticavatars, if the conversations were mundane, community was less likely to grow

Atherton: In a virtual world environment that is more visual, how can you encourage more

meaningful conversations? I’m curious whether we will have the same level of meaningfulinteractions and connections as we spend more time in the metaverse, as we have had thusfar in text-based worlds?

Rheingold: Well some of the rituals I have highlighted in text-based virtual communities

do not occur in more visual virtual worlds, like Second Life, because there’s an element ofescapism Users role-play a perhaps slightly different version of themselves, a more playful,fictional version; so they’re not necessarily sharing the person behind the User ID, sendingpictures of where they’re reading this or topics they’re concerned about

At the same time, especially for females, being able to disguise your gender has advantages.One of the experiments I have done for research involved me logging in to different onlinecommunities with a male-presenting name and asking for advice, then logging on with afemale-presenting name and asking for the same advice I got greater responses to myfemale-presenting persona, all from men I think that women can use that ability to disguisegender to their advantage

Atherton: Do you think whether a virtual world is in 2D or 3D impacts the community

interactions? 2D BBSs like the Palace perhaps heighten the text interactions vs in a fully 3Dvirtual world you’re immersed

I wonder if there might be a resurgence in 2D If you look at the rise of Webtoons, VTubers,and the anime community, they’re largely 2D More teenagers in America and the Westernworld are now spending time in 2D interactions, which feels nostalgic given that VRheadsets now make 3D more accessible

Rheingold: I wrote about virtual reality in 1990, and its technicalities have come a long

way since then But I think the same fundamental remains, which is that in VR you feel cut

off from the world An immersive 3D environment, which is the attraction of VR,simultaneously contributes to a distancing from other people in the real world.

In VR, you are disengaged from society in a different way than when you’re in a text-basedvirtual community Traditionally, text-based communities have been asynchronous, so youcould read it a week later Discord and Slack are now semi-synchronous Virtual worlds and

VR are ephemeral and not recorded, so you have to be present online, which can take youaway from the real world

Atherton: Sometimes, it’s intimidating when you join a new community, and there are

elements of language and lore that you don’t understand Contrastingly, many communityfounders cite funny inside jokes and memes as critical to community building

Do you have any examples of other communities where inside jokes are key, and do you seethem as important to the platform’s success?

Rheingold: To me, there’s a collision involved here If the community has developed its

own kind of language and its own events that people refer to, it creates a sense of unity Yetthe other side of that is that every person who joins a community feels like an outsider To

a newcomer, people you may feel are embedded in the group may only have joined an hourbefore you, so that’s also partly the nature of being a newcomer More fundamental is thatthere are people welcoming and explaining the community traditions to newbies

People use abbreviations like “Lmk” for “let me know,” and you can search to find out whatthey mean, so slang is a little bit different in the larger scale I think every community has tobalance their emergent norms with the necessity to not make people feel like outsiders

Atherton: Touching on rituals and community events, I read that at Electric Minds, the

online magazine + community you founded in 1996, you hosted an infamous discussionabout the chess rematch between the Grand Master and Deep Blue, IBM’s chess playingsystem Was hosting discussions on real-life events key to the success of the community?

Rheingold: People that may not have been interested in participating in our forum, but

were fanatic about chess, joined our platform specifically to come to that event In someways, it was inventing a ritual that would attract people with a particular interest; theywould spread the word, and then some may stick around So you might be able to cross-pollinate different communities with a big event and then hopefully convert some of thoseguests to become community members

Atherton: Philip Rosedale, founder of the virtual world Second Life, is also interviewed in

this book Can you tell me about how you have used Second Life in novel ways for teaching?

Rheingold: I have been invited to Second Life frequently to do lectures and have

discussions I had participated in multiuser dungeons (MUDs) before that, in which youcould create objects that had behaviors with a little code.5 For example, in some MUDs youcould have a permanent residence which you could decorate; you could enter doors and

even make a camera to put in your room, so you could see who had visited while you weregone The ability to shape your environment, I found extremely interesting.

Of course, in Second Life you could shape your avatar and your environment There wereand still are some really dedicated communities in Second Life A lot of companies built realestate in Second Life and spent a lot of money on it, though nothing really came from that

Interestingly in the educational sphere, nobody has really taken advantage of onlineenvironments like Second Life In my lectures, I would be in Second Life, floating in the airand others would be floating around me, but other than that, it was a normal lecture Thereare real advantages to having an immersive 3D environment in education You could takepeople through a model of the Great Pyramids or Notre Dame You could have studentsmanipulate molecules with their hands or crawl inside of a plant cell I’m not seeing thathappening; I would love to see that

The frustrating aspect was griefers that would interrupt lectures, showing up as squadrons

of flying penises.6 Facebook is already having tremendous problems trying to moderate atits scale I don’t know how they are going to do this Griefers will always come up with newways of making people’s lives miserable

Atherton: The term “virtual community” was popularized by your article The Virtual

Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier about The WELL and Usenet I read

that you wrote this to counter the idea that there was something dystopian about virtualcommunities Is that right?

Rheingold: I tried to get that book project going in the late 1980s, and I was told by my

agent and editors that only electrical engineers want to communicate through computernetworks It wasn’t until the New Yorker cartoon was published in 1993, “on the Internet,nobody knows you’re a dog,” that people began to accept online communication At thetime, it was deemed peculiar, even pathological, for people to spend a lot of time talking tostrangers online I didn’t think so

Atherton: You revisited this idea of the positive and darker sides of online communities in

your book Netsmart How have your ideas changed with the emergence of the loneliness

epidemic and online communities influencing voting and so on?

Rheingold: Now a significant percentage of the human race is online If you count

Facebook, a significant percentage of those participate in social communications online.With that, we get all that comes with the human race Put it this way, if a rising tide lifts allboats, then it lifts the hospital ships along with the pirate ships A lot of good things havebeen happening alongside bad

I wrote Netsmart in 2012 because I felt that the way to improve the virtual public sphere

and individuals’ experience of it was for them to gain literacy in this new medium Tenyears have since passed, and I still have not seen educational institutions teaching kids how

to search and differentiate facts from misinformation I’m now much less sanguine about

virtual literacy, as it’s not spreading Our educational institutions are very conservative andslow moving They have not proved themselves up to the task But even worse is that wenow have computational microtargeted propaganda, so you can gather a huge amount ofinformation on a huge number of individuals, and you can target not only advertisingtoward them but political persuasion You can exacerbate differences in a society andspread misinformation about vaccines, racism, antisemitism Facebook is particularly guilty

of this The more money and technology that goes into deceiving people, the moreeducation is required to help people avoid being deceived I’m concerned about that

People that for whatever reason gain pleasure from making other people miserable online,they’re called griefers or trolls Sophisticated misinformation that has entered the publicsphere online, which has exacerbated conspiracy theories and bigotry These havepoisoned the atmosphere of virtual communities for a lot of people

On Twitter, you can have complete control over your experience You should have peoplewhose opinions and intelligence you have some respect for, but with whom you disagree aspart of the mix I think that’s all part of having a good experience But you can also blockpeople, make accounts private, and control who you follow and who follows you Peoplecomplain about their horrible experience even though they have the tools to prevent that.Again, Twitter’s not educating you about it

Knowing how to use a medium and how not to be misled online are huge issues and criticaluncertainties about the future of online communication If platforms become mistrusted,then people stop using them

Atherton: So you think the usage might decline if we don’t tackle this problem of platforms

providing minimal education on how to not be deceived?

Rheingold: Yes, or even worse usage might not decline, and people would just be

credulous…

Atherton: What virtual communities are you most excited about now? Do you feel there

are any pioneering platforms?

Rheingold: Well, back in the days of The WELL, we knew that there would be greater

bandwidth and that computers would have greater capabilities someday It wouldn’t just

be words on a screen, there would be images, sound, and video What nobody foresaw wasthat amateurs would upload more video in a few minutes than the entire history ofbroadcast television, so the scope and scale of what happened, for example, when YouTubecame about, was not really anticipated

I participate in a couple of communities that have forum software that enable you to embedvideo players and drag and drop images On those platforms, we have traditions; one weekevery year, people upload photographs of their food in their backyard and their hometown

A long time ago, a fellow at a newsletter asked his recipients, “where are you reading thisand what does it look like?” People sent in pictures of their offices and homes That’s

something that I’ve done with a number of different communities It really gives you asense of other people’s space So I’m all for videos, images, and links that create theserituals within the community People can take photos of their coffee and participate in away that lowers the barriers to entry.

Atherton: How do you feel about virtual communities today, like Discord or Reddit?

Discord’s layout recalls IRC; avatars have not developed dramatically since the Palace I’mcurious to know what you think about that?7

Rheingold: In 1997, I had a company called Electric Minds, and we had a Palace That was

great fun and a type of graphical environment that we don’t see a lot of these days

People have said that Discord is a modernized version of what had been going on in IRC for

a long time, so I think if you take an old medium and put it in a new bottle, that offers yousome better affordances, and it’s going to be even more popular IRC was a little esoteric:you had to join a server, et cetera, so it was the domain of more tech-oriented people

Reddit, I have not explored very much, but I think that the great advantage of Reddit is itsmultiplicity, that there are so many different forums that you can participate in and thepeople who run those forums really help determine the atmosphere in them Lately, I’vebeen seeing that people doing Google searches can get better information by specifying

“Reddit” in their search terms

Atherton: What thoughts would you like to leave our reader with? Do you have any parting

advice for future community builders or perhaps some predictions?

Rheingold: There used to be this legend that you build the community and people will

come That has long since ceased to be true There is so much happening now in people’slives competing for their attention

In the early 2000s, I had a consultancy, and there was a period where every startup, everycompany felt that they had to have a community The first thing I would ask those people is,

do you really need to have a community? Have you thought about what its downsidesmight be? For example, if you are a company that offers a technical product, if you start anonline forum around that product, if people just complain or recommend and nothing everhappens, then that’s really a negative for your company Again, it’s back to marketing 101.Who are the people that you want to attract? Why do you want them? What is your valueproposition? What are you giving them in exchange for their attention?

Another issue that I think still persists is that companies rarely budget for having a time community manager No matter how many facilitators you have, your community mayget out of hand without a plan A lot of planning is required for a community to have a goodchance at success: How will you market your community? Who will your members be?What kind of technology will you use? What will the information infrastructure be? Whatare your norms and rules? People who want to start a community should question why

full-they want to build one and whether full-they have the resources to do it successfully That wastrue 20 years ago, but infinitely more so today.

Community manager is a role that is now understood Pay attention to your members at thebeginning and draw them into your planning I used to say something which perhapsdoesn’t hold up as well today: do an experiment before you invite 10,000 people Invite 100people and let them know that it’s an experiment and that you want their feedback Thatyou’re going to change what you do according to their feedback If you change thingswithout telling people you’re going to change things, they get upset, because they feelownership of the platform too So do an experiment before this stage and see what youlearn Scale it from there Don’t try to have the grand opening with 100,000 people invitedbefore you see what happens At the end of the day, you would do product testing beforelaunching, why not with a community?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

A AthertonThe Rise of Virtual Communitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_3

3 Stacy Horn

Founder of Echo

Amber Atherton1

(1)

San Francisco, CA, USA

Echo is a text-based platform intended to be “the virtual salon of New York” that comprises a Bulletin Board System and personal messaging, known as “yo’s.” Founded in 1989 by Stacy Horn, Echo was one of the earliest social networks to emerge in New York At its peak, Echo was used by tens of thousands of people, maxing out New York phone lines Echo stands for East Coast Hang Out, a small but vibrant collective of people, known as “Echoids,” who discuss arts and culture in its conferences Echo pioneered online media, hosting the first interactive

TV show and went on to be described as “a cultural icon of the online community” by The New

York Times Horn has subsequently taught Virtual Culture at NYU and published Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town Horn turned down offers to acquire

Atherton: Can you take me back to how Echo started in your student days? I would have

liked to have sent a “yo” and been the host of a conference!

Horn: I had been working as a telecommunications analyst for a few years, and my job was

connecting people around the country to each other in a work environment I was workingfor Mobil Oil at the time, and one of the higher-ups came into my office one day, and hesaid, “you’re never going to move up the corporate ladder if you don’t get a graduatedegree.”

I didn’t want to move up the corporate ladder I’d always wanted to be a writer I fellinto telecommunications somewhat by accident I was trying to decide what to do with therest of my life, and graduate school just sounded like fun while I made up my mind andcame up with a plan I picked the interactive telecommunications program at NYU onlybecause it had telecoms in the name I had no idea what went on there I applied, I got in,and discovered that it was a playground People were experimenting with all these newtechnologies Remember, this was 1986 when I started graduate school Everyone washaving a ball I would work all day at Mobil Oil, and then at night I would go to NYU andplay.

At NYU, I had an assignment in my very first year to call up The WELL and just try it out Ijust loved it It was a glance into what we’re used to today I had instant communicationwith people in California except this was 1986, and there was nothing else like it at thetime Doing something like this was new and unheard of I was thrilled

Atherton: When you say you called up The WELL, could you clarify what you mean?

Horn: You had to buy something called a modem, connect your phone line to the modem,

literally dial up a phone number, and pay long-distance phone charges to participate in TheWELL, a forum in California Mobil Oil was spinning the bill so I could do that

Long after that assignment was over, I continued to call up The WELL In my last year ofgraduate school, I was logged in to The WELL, and somebody said, “we heard you werestarting an East Coast version of The WELL.” I don’t remember ever saying that, but as soon

as someone said it to me, I thought that’s a great idea!

I dropped a class that I was taking at the time and signed up for a class called Writing aBusiness Plan I thought I would start what we called a “virtual community” at the time; asocial network was not a label that was used then I never liked the term “virtualcommunity,” but I couldn’t come up with anything better I wrote a business plan and tried

to raise some money But everyone would laugh me out of the office for even thinking thatpeople would want to socialize through their computers Not only did they think that

“virtual communities” would never become widely used, they thought there was something

a little pathetic about me, that only losers and nerds would want to do this!

Atherton: Were you pitching to VC investors?

Horn: Yes, but I only tried a couple of times; I got the idea that nobody was going to give

me money I came to this conclusion quickly because of a prior experience at Mobil Oil Assoon as I had discovered this way of communicating, I pitched it to Mobil Oil I suggestedthat we start a virtual community like The WELL

At the time, my job in telecoms was to set up Mobil Oil buoys all around the country to ourmain networks in Princeton and Dallas To do this, I was shipping equipment to all thesedifferent locations and sending installers from the phone company and from the modemcompany I was sending a lot of people very complicated installations, and things were

always falling through the cracks and going wrong I thought it would be great to have aplace where people at every stage of these installations could check in and update whatthey had managed to get done, so that I would know exactly what was going on, anddetermine if I needed to send more people to fix something With a virtual community, Icould address problems as they arose I pitched a computer conference system, a virtualcommunity for Mobil.

I was the only woman in the office working in telecoms at that time Every week, at ourlong conference table, I would stand up and tell them about these new, cool things calledvirtual communities and how we could utilize them They would shoot me down, and everyweek I would come up with another reason why they would be helpful

Eventually, I went to the head of Corporate Telecoms and told them, “I know with everyfiber of my being that virtual communities are a good thing It could be very effective andsave us a lot of money in terms of communications It’s going to take over the Internet andthe world.” He didn’t believe me I suggested we do a pilot, set it up, and see how it works

He agreed

I set up something called Monet, an amalgamation of mobile and network, though in mymind I was pronouncing it like the artist! It failed miserably I later learned that the otherpeople in my department had quietly agreed that they weren’t going to allow it to succeed;they wouldn’t use it as intended or check in regularly A very important lesson for me was

to consider alternative perspectives: while I saw it as a way of knowing what everyone wasdoing so I could fix problems, others thought it exposed problems and highlighted whatinstallers had not achieved

After that experience, when I approached VCs and received the same response that I got atMobil, I thought I’d better do this on my own I lucked out because around the time that Ifinished graduate school, Mobil announced that they were moving to Virginia and closingthe NYC office I was entitled to severance pay, and I used that to fund my startup

Atherton: When you started Echo, what was your business plan? How were you going to

monetize the platform?

Horn: Through monthly subscriptions When I took that course, How to Write a Business

Plan, and then wrote my own business plan, I learned that you can make those initialfinancials say whatever you want Early-stage funding is like sticking a finger in the air, but

I figured members paying a monthly fee made the most sense

Atherton: With your severance pay, you set up Echo in your apartment and just started

coding it yourself?

Horn: I bought this software that already existed called Caucus, a text-based computer

conferencing software which Echo uses to this day The WELL used PicoSpan, andstructurally it’s entirely the same, it just has slightly different commands I had to learn

Unix to troubleshoot problems, but I wasn’t very good at it, and things were always goingwrong!

One day, I was talking on a computer radio show, Off the Hook, about how much trouble I

was having with the software end of the system and that I needed some help Echo would

go down, and I’d have to figure out how to bring it back up I wasn’t a Unix programmer, I

had learned enough to get by, but I couldn’t deal with these complicated problems Off the

Hook told me that on air next was the well-known hacker Mark Abene, who went by the

name Phiber Optik When I came off air, he introduced himself I was looking at one of themost famous hackers in the world, and he was telling me he can fix all my problems But inorder to fix them, I would have to give him access to Echo, the keys to the castle What adilemma But I looked at him, and he seemed sincere, not that you can tell that by looking atsomeone! My gut reaction was that he would help us, and I was right He became my CTO

Atherton: What was the first conference on Echo?

Horn: When I got it all set up, I had a bunch of empty conferences I couldn’t advertise “Join

Echo” and participate in discussions that don’t yet exist! So I got 20 people to log in andhelp start these conversations

Among the early conferences was “Central,” which was where you came first, like a lobby,where you could tell newcomers how to get around Echo and what other conferences therewere Users would answer questions and could raise problems with getting around Echo.From there, we started the New York conference to talk about the city, where to go, where

to live, anything to do with that very general heading “New York.”

Those 20 people just went around to all these different conferences, starting discussionsand talking, so that when I finally did open my doors, there were conversations to join Ilucked out from the very beginning that the idea of virtual communities or social networkswas very new and interesting Most of the people involved with early computertechnologies were men My presence in this arena was very novel, so journalists jumped onthat, and I got a lot of attention, just by the virtue of my sex Being female had not been anadvantage for most of my life, as someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s With thatpress, I got a lot of people joining right off the bat

Atherton: How did you encourage new Echo users to engage in meaningful conversation? Horn: It was part of a conference host’s job to encourage new users to imagine the

conversations they would be having if they were in a room with other users The host couldtweak conversations and help new users who were perhaps shy or feeling awkward andhelp the conversation along

I called every user who ever logged in to Echo on the phone to get feedback As the founder,

I would take the time to speak to new users, so they would feel connected and a sense ofownership Plus, if I could get people to attend a face-to-face event, they were more likely tostay on Echo

Atherton: Echo has been described as the virtual salon of NYC, can you tell me about the

demographics of the platform?

Horn: I wanted to have as many women as men on Echo, and I wanted the discussions on it

to be about anything but computers and technology I felt the latter were interestingsubjects, but had already been covered elsewhere On Echo, we’d talk about art, music,movies, and culture

Atherton: Echo users were known as Echoids, how intertwined was Echo’s virtual and

face-to-face community?

Horn: People were meeting up a lot in real life as well as just online, and that was also

intentional I had at that point three years’ experience of following The WELL, so I wasbasing a lot of what I did on that One of the things that I was disappointed by at The WELLwas that I would log in, talk to all these interesting people, and I wanted to meet them, butthey were mostly in California I thought I’m going to make that Anybody who wanted todial in outside of New York was welcome, but we marketed Echo as for New Yorkers

In addition to starting Echo, the virtual salon, I immediately started organizing ways thatpeople could get together in person Originally, we just met at a bar, once a week We had alot of writers and readers online, so I started a reading series at a bar We had analternative film festival and music jam sessions Anything that I could think of that was fun

to do, we did

Atherton: Did you consider moderation from the start?

Horn: When I started Echo, I thought I was creating this network of interesting people and

that I could log in to and have fun, as I did on The WELL What I didn’t foresee at all – it stillshocks me that I didn’t – is that I was now responsible for things that happened Ifconversations went wrong or got ugly, I had to figure out what to do – having to moderatethe problems of human behavior, without any particular training to do so! Echo quicklybecame less than fun for me

I was just making it up as I went along I borrowed things that I saw on The WELL thatworked, but I didn’t always agree with how they handled things As a woman, I think I wasmore sensitive to harassment; I responded to that in a very strong fashion People almostforget that there’s real people on the other end of the line I can’t imagine they would ever

be that rude to someone in person I found that if people disagreed online, if they met inperson, it would usually fix the problem They may not always be friends, but once theyhave looked that person in the eye, they would never speak the same way to them onlineagain

Atherton: What were some of the rules that were inspired by The WELL and others that

you made up to moderate the community?

Horn: The main rule I used was “attack the idea not the person.” If somebody says

something that you disagree with, rather than say “you’re such an idiot,” explain why youthink the idea is stupid It was a small shift in communicating to keep the conversation asafe space

I was particularly careful about harassment as Echo was filled with women and in thatsense was unlike many other virtual communities at that time We had cases where someusers wouldn’t leave a woman alone We had a rule: no harassment If someone says “leave

me alone,” you have to You can’t argue that you’re a nice guy You can’t “yo” them, whichwas Echo’s way of communicating in real time If they posted something on a discussion inthe conference, you couldn’t respond to them

Atherton: Did you physically block them from communicating or was it an instruction?

Horn: The software had some limitations We could block someone from “yo-ing.” In terms

of posting, we would first ask them to stop, and if they kept going, we would put them onread-only If this behavior continued, we would kick them off

We published these rules of engagement; people knew what they were signing up for Mostpeople didn’t mean to harass, so if you asked them to stop, they would

Atherton: Echo’s gender split was about 50-50 (male, female), very healthy for the time.

How did you achieve that?

Horn: I think I was the only one even trying I did depend a lot on all the press I was

getting, and I tried ads I went everywhere I could think of to talk about Echo and theInternet I would give presentations to anyone who would listen I was going to women’sgroups at the time There were a lot of activist women groups that were early adopters Themost successful thing I did was that women got the first year for free on Echo Men got onemonth free, women got a year So why not try? It wasn’t costing them anything

I was operating on my memory of always working for men, standing up at that conferencetable, and having to pitch the Internet to men I thought when women get here, they’regoing to see as many women in charge as men Every conference had two hosts, one male,one female The conference manager who oversaw all the conferences was a woman, MissOuterborough

Atherton: Why are hosts that users can relate to so important in virtual communities? Horn: I always tell the story because it’s indicative of the time When people joined Echo, I

would mail them this card with a list of conferences and who the conference hosts were Aman on Echo read all the names of all the conference hosts, and he exclaimed, “oh my godmost of your conference hosts are women.” I said, “Really? Look again.” He looked againand reiterated, “yeah, mostly women.” It was, in fact, exactly 50-50, but to approachequality appeared to him as almost only women

Atherton: Did Echo ever expand beyond New York? I know the original purpose was to

encourage real-life interaction

Horn: I wanted it to be mostly New Yorkers, but I loved the idea of people visiting What I

enjoyed about The WELL was its very West Coast flavor I wanted people when they went

on Echo to feel like they were visiting New York

At the time, people were talking about how the Internet was going to break downgeographic boundaries and the positive effects of this There are a lot of good elements tothat; it would be nice if we all felt more like members of the same planet Equally, the joy oftravel and online communities is seeing our cultural differences I didn’t want to eliminatethat, I wanted to accentuate that

Atherton: How do you think you’ve achieved giving a virtual venue a sense of character?

How did Echo feel like New York and The WELL like the West Coast?

Horn: I set the stage and then didn’t do anything It’s the users who gave it that sense of

place They talked about New York, what was happening, both good and bad I gave peoplethe space to allow this to happen and then supported it

Atherton: Echo had a Bulletin Board System; you could send “yo’s” and emails Were there

any other features that you wanted to create that you didn’t see built?

Horn: Because this was a New York virtual community, I wanted to involve the City of New

York more Since Echo was text based and communication was via words only, Iapproached New York newspapers and magazines I suggested they start a conference on

Echo, where users could discuss topics raised in their articles I was able to attract The

Village Voice, Ms magazine, High Times magazine, Mademoiselle, and a bunch more.

I didn’t make any money from their involvement; I felt it was mutually beneficial that theywould bring users and conversation to Echo and vice versa

I met the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, David Ross, at an opening, and Iapproached him He was a very forward-thinking man, and the Whitney Museum started aconference in Echo on American art

Another thing I briefly considered was the idea of starting other communities like Echo inother cities that like Echo and The WELL would have the flavor of their city – in Boston andAustin and so on

Atherton: How big was Echo?

Horn: At its height, our user numbers were in the tens of thousands Not all those people

were using Echo for the virtual conferencing, some were just using it for email

Echo had text-based software, which required learning commands to get around I heldclasses in my apartment once a month on “How to get around on Echo,” and I included how

to get around on the Internet, so I felt like I was also giving them something that did notjust benefit me But the necessity to know these commands limited who was using theseforums

The minute there was a graphic interface for the Worldwide Web, Mosaic, I thought this iswhat the Internet has needed all along People will not have to learn commands anymore,they can just point and click

Atherton: I read that John Kennedy Jr visited Echo Did other high-profile people come on

using their real names?

Horn: Kennedy used his real name; everybody had to It was my way of forcing people to

own their words and be civil If you posted like a jerk, everybody would know who you are

I did make an exception for very famous people who couldn’t be there as themselveswithout being descended on I gave him that option He went by Flash, as everyone couldplay around with pseudonyms, but people could still see the user’s real name, and he opted

to show up as John Kennedy Jr

Atherton: Having that dual interface, where you can play around with a pseudonym, but

everyone can see your real identity, probably prevents things from getting too out of hand

On Twitter and other platforms where we can be completely anonymous, we can witnessthe worst in human behavior

Horn: That was my intention behind it But there are people who seem to have no problem

posting the ugliest thing using their real name It seems like behavior and civilizeddiscourse is eroding

Atherton: How did you monetize Echo?

Horn: The business model was subscription based Originally, it was $19.95 a month, plus

the communications fee In addition to running Echo, I had to pay for the phone lines thatpeople used to call up Echo, and that was enormously expensive We started with tenphone lines, which I had to pay a monthly fee on As Echo grew, I had over 100 phone linesgoing into my apartment Eventually, I maxed out all the available phone lines in myneighborhood, and the telephone company had to rip up the street from their closest office

to my apartment to install more phone lines It drove all my neighbors crazy, but all I couldthink was “You’re welcome We’re getting an upgrade thanks to me!” We eventually didbreak even and make a little money Though I didn’t get rich, not even close! Before that,there was a point that I thought we would go under I was getting users on ten at a time,and it was expensive to operate

Around that same time, Clinton was elected president of the United States Al Gore andClinton started talking about what they called the Information Superhighway that was

going to take over the world It was having an effect, and people began thinking that theyhad better learn about the Internet or get left behind When I presented Echo, I told theaudience, Echo is a stop on the Information Superhighway Get on Echo and I will help youlearn how to get around the Internet That’s when I knew Echo would survive.

Eventually, I decided that Echo should become an Internet provider We offered peopleInternet access, and from Echo they could go anywhere they wanted It came with theaccount, and they paid for usage When Mosaic emerged, I also threw in a website as part ofusers’ accounts At that point, we moved Echo into offices We had a bunch of T1s, whichwere expensive, massive cables with many phone lines within them I charged acommunication fee based on how many hours Echo users were online for (essentially theirphone line usage) When the pricing on the Internet changed, I could bring that price down.Around then, I decided I was sick of the Internet provision side of things

Keeping those phone lines in operation was very hard Phone companies were used toproviding telephone lines for telephone conversations, so there was always noise or static

on the line On a telephone, that meant a voice sounded faint But for data communicationand modems, the noise would garble the communication A message sent on Echo wouldcome out spelt incorrectly We had to keep those phone lines cleaner than they had beenfor telephones My background was in telecoms, so I knew it was the phone company’s job

to keep them clean I had to call them all the time Eventually, I got sick of it and used othercompanies to provide telecommunications access, like Panex

Atherton: That is fascinating, because the Internet feels so centralized nowadays You go to

a Verizon or Comcast, and it’s a one-stop shop

Did you ever have any offers to acquire Echo?

Horn: There were a couple of nibbles The only serious offer was from Bruce Katz, who

bought The WELL He wanted to buy Echo, but I didn’t feel that he was a good fit So to upthe ante, he said, “Let me buy Echo, and you can run both Echo and The WELL.” That wasvery interesting, but when I thought about it more, I realized I was not the right person torun The WELL, as wonderful as it is People were already doing a good job, and I didn’t seethat I had anything to add I was where I needed to be

My dream was to become an author, and I started writing books and getting publishingcontracts, so eventually I let Echo slide to the wayside

Atherton: Does Echo still have active users?

Horn: Yes, but it’s a small group of friends We’ve used it for years and probably always

will Today, I saw a fight online, and I sighed I have been managing these troubles for 30years now; I don’t want to do it anymore It’s almost like a dysfunctional family!

Atherton: Do you have any guiding principles to leave our future community builders

with?

Horn: It’s hard to say, because I’m not sure that everything I did at Echo was correct or

worked To me, what I saw in founding Echo and through using The WELL were thesepowerful conversations between people who would show respect even if they don’t agree.That tolerance allowed one-off thoughtful conversations to take place I don’t see thathappen anywhere else online these days, except perhaps Reddit A community should be aplace for people to have discussions and to freely change their minds

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

A AthertonThe Rise of Virtual Communitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_4

4 Jim Bumgardner

Creator and CTO of the Palace

Amber Atherton1

(1)

San Francisco, CA, USA

The Palace was one of the first multiplayer real-time virtual worlds, made up of avatars and rooms within graphical chat room servers, called Palaces Bumgardner created the software

in 1991 when he was working for Time Warner Interactive Within the Palace, avatars could navigate the rooms, chat to each other, create props, and even follow links to other decentralized Palace servers In 1997, users began clothing their avatars like paper dolls With these “Dollz” and crowded servers run by the likes of MTV, 20th Century Fox, and Sony

purchased the Palace for an undisclosed sum, with SoftBank as a majority investor The Palace was subject to numerous sales and ultimately closed with the bankruptcy

of Communities.com

Atherton: So, if you can take me back to how the Palace started as one of the first multiuser

dimensions (MUD), what were the early inspirations for you?

Bumgardner: I was going to CalArts as a music student in the early 1980s, and I got into

computers around then, because that was the first time they became accessible to peoplewith no money, like students

I remember going to K-Mart and buying a TimeX Sinclair computer that was about $100 Ihooked it up to my little black and white TV and started learning to program on it Not toolong after that, I got a Commodore Vic-20, which is the cheap version of the more famousCommodore 64 I also bought a modem that fit the standard AT&T telephone handset we allhad back then, so I was able to connect to dial-up services

The communication software it came with wasn’t very good, so a friend of mine and Iended up writing our own that was called “quasi modem.” We used it to connect toCompuServe at the time and to dial into BBSs This was before AOL, pre-Internet even,

so CompuServe was pretty popular around 1983 There was a community of people in Los

Angeles that were on a chat board on CompuServe that was called NetWits Their userswere all over the country, but there was a fairly large LA contingent, so we had some things

in common NetWits was my first exposure to online chat

At that time, online chat was mind-blowing Up until that point, the closest equivalent waswriting letters or calling someone It was interesting what it took away in terms of whatyou have on the phone – what’s implied between the lines – that all goes away with text Iremember trying to explain the appeal of it; I just got incredibly addicted to it I went intodebt in those early months on CompuServe, running up a bill that I couldn’t afford on acredit card I tried to explain the appeal of online chat, the cause of my debt, to my relatives

I told them “it’s like you’re meeting people on the inside before you meet them on theoutside.”

Now we’re all steeped in online communication and also very aware of its associatedproblems At the time, it was an incredible new way to communicate and to find people thatshared similar interests, because prior to online chat I was relatively lonely Suddenly,there was this community of people that I met; we’d chat on CompuServe at two or three inthe morning!

There was another chat board topic on CompuServe related to golf A group of users fromour NetWits board “trolled” the golf board by all changing our handles to Russian names,which seemed funny at the time, and joining the golf board all at once Then we all wentback to NetWits and laughed about it…

Atherton: How did you find these online communities?

Bumgardner: We must have been aware of CompuServe from advertising Around 1982 or

1983 if you bought a computer, like a Commodore 64 and Vic-20, you were also buyingmagazines that were filled with articles on computer software CompuServe was probablyadvertising in those magazines

Once you got into CompuServe, they had menus; it was purely text based There was nographic interface That came much later with the dawn of AOL CompuServe had menus ofthe active bulletin boards, which showed how many people were on them Initially, youwould sample them to see if you liked what you saw I stumbled upon NetWits probablyjust through the menu and found I liked that one

Atherton: How did you first get the idea for the Palace?

Bumgardner: In the early BBS (Bulletin Board System) scene, virtual communities were

entirely text based You would sign in to a BBS, and there would be a menu… Press 1 to seeour files, press 2 to have a chat with a system operator, press 3 to access our help system.But there were also a few companies that were creating custom BBSs, trying to make themmore like a text adventure game

Mystery House was one of the early text adventure games; there were some from the OldHacker One was called Rogue, which was an ASCII dungeon There was also a board in LAthat was supposed to be a shopping mall called Citadel The software would tell you: “Youare in the main hallway To your left is x is happening, and further down is the post office…”

I only went there a couple of times, but it was always completely empty No one was using

it I think it probably only lasted a couple of years It was trying to be an online shoppingmall, a physical space, though it was way too early for that, with only a handful of peopleusing BBSs at that point

A few years later, when I was working a tech support job and I had a lot of free time on myhands between phone calls, I started working on a text-based system called the Mansion,which was sort of a precursor to the Palace, but was text only The Mansion allowed you tocut doors and create objects inside the text adventure It was intended to be multiuser Ididn’t get very far with it, I just worked on it for a few weeks, and what I found very quicklywas that language is really hard

I wanted to be able to say things like “create a table, put a vase of flowers on the table Onthe wall to the East, put a painting on the wall.” Just the difference between a vase being on

a table and a painting being on a wall were very different things, and I immediately startedrunning into difficulties with parsing the grammar, because at that time language parsingwas a huge struggle for everyone We’re doing language parsing really well these days, butwe’re doing it with neural networks!

So, the idea was a multiplayer text adventure in which you could create rooms or spacesand do fairly imaginative things, like create a door that goes to a spaceport, with a rocketship on which you can then go to another planet Or there might be a bottle on the tablethat you would drink, it would make you very small, and then you could go into amousehole The idea was to be able to have a wide variety of experiences, something that’salways been very important

Atherton: Was there an ideal community size you were aiming for at the Palace, to

maintain a healthy community?

Bumgardner: We intentionally restricted the number of people that could be in a room.

Remember that the Palace server was divided into rooms that you could navigate between.Users could watch and participate Each was represented by an avatar, with cartoon chatballoons over their heads, and a separate window which just had the chat history of thedialogue You might miss a chat balloon go by, but you could go back into the text historyand read it, and so you were typically going back and forth But after about 16 people, just

as what happens today with overpopulated live chat channels like YouTube comments, itjust becomes an endless stream of chat, and you no longer have the ability to follow thethread of conversation Everyone is essentially a stranger to each other, and you can’t forminto clusters and have conversations the way you would do at a party

It was possible on the Palace to have maybe two groups of people in a room that werehaving two separate conversations simultaneously, and an onlooker could enjoy each

cluster, but that was probably the limit Already if all 16 people were constantly chatting, itwas too much But because of the nature of human dialogue, there were always introvertsand extroverts, people who were actively conversing and others sitting back to watch So

16 felt about right for one room in the Palace

The room limits could be changed by the server operator, but it defaulted to 16, and mostpeople didn’t mess with it It also physically worked because the avatars took up spacewithin the room More than 16 avatars and they start trampling on each other!

Atherton: What I loved so much about the Palace is the blend of feeling like you’re in this

physical space within the virtual And that still doesn’t really exist today In a largely based community, there’s less accountability that you would get when you’re in a real roomwith people

text-Bumgardner: Very early versions of the Palace I made as a plug-in, which worked on top

of IRC, so that you could take an existing IRC channel with avatars, whose position could becontrolled by sending private messages to a bot So the earliest versions of the Palace thatworked on IRC could in theory work on Discord or Slack You could create a Discord botthat would create a 2D palace-style room with avatars

The other equivalents of the Palace these days are 3D avatar chats, like virtual reality chats

in the metaverse

Atherton: How did the first users discover the Palace and how did the original community

form?

Bumgardner: We went out to other early Internet communities, to places like The WELL

and ECHO, which was New York’s equivalent of The WELL, and would mention this greatnew platform called the Palace We also signed into existing virtual communities that wereexperiencing growing pains and told unhappy members about the Palace Some werehaving major issues where users disagreed with the decisions that were being made asthey handled their growth, and we ended up getting major influxes of people from thoseother virtual spaces The analogy I often used was a beehive: if you want to build a beehive,you have to go to another hive and steal the queen When we could get alpha influencersfrom other communities to discover the Palace, they would bring their bees with them ButMark Jeffrey was more involved with marketing than I was

Atherton: Wow, that is such an awesome model for early-stage community growth Find

the queen bee, who’ll in turn bring the hive

Bumgardner: We did some of that inadvertently, but I was aware that it was happening.

By using these other communities, some of which we probably were on already, we wouldtalk about what we were working on, invite people, and then they would tell their friends.Fairly early on, I remember we had an influx from World Chat, some of our earlymoderators came from World Chat, and then a big influx from Echo NYC

The latter was partially fueled by an Echo meetup Mark Jeffrey and I were invited to speakat; they had monthly demos followed by dinner at a delicatessen We gave a very nicepresentation of the Palace, we showed the features, and the members loved it Many ofthose attendees were either already on it or ended up joining as a result of attending thatday.

Atherton: Did you find that the cross-pollination of online to offline happened a lot?

Bumgardner: It definitely happened with the Palace There were a lot of people meeting

each other physically for the first time at Palace events It was probably not dissimilar to aclass reunion, except that they were meeting people that they were talking to concurrently,rather than people they had known 20 years ago We had a couple of Palace get-togethers

in Vegas, where we rented a nightclub for the evening

Atherton: How do you think that the interaction between the real world and the virtual

impacted the community?

Bumgardner: That’s a big question I’ll just give you a few anecdotes, because I can think of

both positive and negative things that happened

Tons of people found their future partners through early virtual communities I’ve receivedmany letters from people that met their wife or husband on the Palace and are stilltogether So that’s a great thing

But in those early days, we weren’t as aware of the pitfalls of anonymity, likemisinformation and hateful groups Anonymity, while useful in certain situations, alsointroduces real problems, which at the time I was not as cognizant of It was evident thataccountability was necessary, you didn’t necessarily know their name or who a user was inreal life, they could still be who they wanted to be, but it was useful to attach responsibility

to users for their actions We were just beginning to get our heads around the differencebetween identity and accountability

Atherton: Interesting, I wonder how you can blend both to keep communities healthy?

Because I think in one sense, bringing people together in real life builds trust, because yousee the people behind the version of yourself that you might play online

Bumgardner: Oh agreed I spent a lot of time thinking about the differences between

communities I liked, committed to, and enjoyed participating in Communities that were, in

my view, healthy as opposed to one-sided

My experience with virtual communities is that, in general, it’s often healthier when it firststarts up and is in an initial growth phase The community is smaller and tends to consistlargely of early adapters Then if the social medium is successful, it gets so many peopleinvolved that it loses its original charm It becomes infected with urban blight, it becomesmore difficult to moderate and manage, and you end up with Facebook and Twitter!

Atherton: Can you tell me a bit about the gender split on the Palace?

Bumgardner: I don’t think it was 50-50, but it was definitely much better than the Internet

as a whole was at that time It might have been 60-40 men to women, whereas the earlyBBS scene was more like 95-5

Atherton: Why do you think the early BBS scene was so skewed toward men?

Bumgardner: I don’t know The early BBS scene was an offshoot of ham radio (amateur,

noncommercial wireless communication), which was a male-dominated hobby to beginwith In a patriarchal society, so many early BBS founders were men, and they were notcreating content that necessarily appealed to women There’s nothing inherently maleabout technical stuff, but culturally it has often been the province of men The Palace brokethis pattern

Atherton: How did the community on the Palace shift overtime from adults and artistic

types to a younger audience?

Bumgardner: Initially, the Palace was in beta while we were developing it for the first year

and was free to use We officially launched in November of 1996, which meant we beganselling it as a product, not for much, perhaps $15 or $20 The Palace could be used for free,but you had to pay to be able to customize your avatar Stores like Egghead Software soldthe Palace in a box Some of the original users let their kids use the Palace; kids were reallyinterested in it, including my daughter who was around four at the time

At first, our users were an older crowd After we came out of beta, the core of moderatorswere called wizards They came from those early adapters, largely from World Chat Theytended to be in their 30s or older As the main administrator, I was the head wizard, or

“God of the Palace,” as it was called! So I’m sure I was selecting for people like myself tosome degree We had a pretty good mix of male and female wizards; I would say that waspretty 50-50, or at least I believed it to be; it’s hard to identify my own biases

As time went on, we started seeing more and more kids They were wreaking havoc,making it very difficult for the wizards, because initially we didn’t have any establishedrules

Atherton: Do you think that it’s essential for communities to have rules?

Bumgardner: No, communities should be able to do whatever they want, but all the

communities that I enjoy being in have rules There are people that enjoy anarchiccommunities, and that’s why 4 Chan exists, but I’m not one of those people

Overnight, we had all these kids asking to be wizards, because wizards had the power tocreate doors and run scripts If scripting was turned on, you could wreak all kinds of havoc.You could write scripts in rooms at the Palace that would steal everyone’s props, whichwere the pieces that form their avatar, and they would scatter on the floor and could be

picked up and stolen Scripts could cover the screen with graphics, because the Palace had arudimentary graphic painting ability So kids would ask to be wizards to be able to runscripts, and we would say no.

I remember doing an experiment, though, where I let everyone be a wizard in this otherPalace I had created, called the Wild, Wild West Everyone there was a wizard It lastedabout a day and a half; it was just sheer chaos Someone eventually figured out a script thatwould shut it down!

Without rules, it becomes a Lord of the Flies situation, especially with multiplayer games,

as many people within that game are often playing differently For example, in World ofWarcraft, one person might be fighting monsters with swords, while others are going in toconverse and find people who share common interests Meanwhile, a lot of the kids at thePalace were just trying to annoy as many people as they could If they annoyed people somuch that they logged off, that was how they “won.” So the problem is that different peoplejoining a virtual community have varied expectations about what the experience issupposed to be Without rules, the most dystopian version of that often ends up winning

So the wizards spent a lot of time banning accounts, which was the equivalent of kicking atroll off of a chatboard

Atherton: You mentioned that many of the moderators came from World Chat and became

wizards A lot of people would say that moderators are essential in keeping a communitysomewhere you’d like to be What do you think?

Bumgardner: If the community is like the Palace and does not have effective

crowdsourcing capabilities, then absolutely The Palace not only required moderators, itrequired the server operator to actively select and recruit moderators, if the server wasgoing to have any size and succeed as a stable community

By contrast, something like Reddit has a moderation system in place, but it’s acrowdsourced moderation system Reddit and Wikipedia are probably the best examples ofsuccessful crowdsourced moderation, where the creators of the space hardly need tomoderate because the community is self-moderating There are generally sufficientsystems in place for that self-moderation to work Though not always, there are orphansubreddits and things like that

Atherton: Are there any other roles, in addition to moderators, that you think need to be

present within the community?

Bumgardner: We had people that functioned as social care takers, who worked to ensure

that everyone had a good experience; that was one role Not all these people werenecessarily wizards, some users were very law and order oriented

I was often kind of trying to keep a balance between hardline moderation vs expression to make sure that both were happening It’s a tough line Because there would

self-be users that would try very hard to get as close to the edge without technically breakingthe rules Eventually, we did have to establish specific rules over what was and what wasn’tallowed.

Another very important role is the creators, community members that were creatinginteresting content and sharing it People that were making avatars for other people andmaking props As a creative person myself, I originally naively thought that everyone wouldjust love making their own props A community where everyone owned sewing machinesand was making their own clothes, which of course is not realistic

On the Palace, you could role-play and think “I’m going to be the Pope today,” go on theInternet, search for an image of the Pope, use your screen capture to copy it, and then paste

it on the Palace, and that would be my avatar for the evening I could be the Pope or SammyDavis Jr or whoever Some people would pick a particular avatar and never change it,opting for a fixed identity, while other users enjoyed making a lot of different avatars andsharing them with people

Atherton: Can you tell me about the Dollz?

Bumgardner: There are a few different versions of the Dollz, but they were basically a

virtual paper doll system I believe that that community was largely female driven and thatthe original creators were women The young baby boomers or the late bloomers like metended to use more heterogeneous props, where we would all look different from eachother The dolls were a brilliant way to have a modicum of unified self-expression, but alsoreplaceable parts, which we never bothered with

I was thinking about this earlier, and I realized that one of the driving factors behindthe Dollz’s success was our shitty business model Remember when you got the Palace, itcost 20 bucks, which was to unlock prop making

Because of that, we didn’t spend a lot of time on providing good avatars We had thesepretty crappy smiley faces and a few things you could stick onto the smiley faces, almostlike a Mr Potato head So within the community over time, anyone wearing that traditionalsmiley prop was a newbie and using a free account, almost a lower social class It was kind

of like being on Twitter with a generic bird, a newbie Because we didn’t provide asophisticated avatar system, the community created some on their own

Dollz looked like angsty teenagers; they were slouchy, with hair over their eyes There was

a subversive aspect to their appeal too which probably helped with their popularity, asthey were constructed in three parts: a head, torso, and legs It was against the rules towalk around with nude props, but when someone selected the macro that applied their fulloutfit, there would be a brief flash where nipples were visible

Atherton: Did you find that people who used Dollz or custom avatars were more active

users in the community? Did customization of their identity within the community meanthey became more active community members?