Mashable: TikTok made a Discord, so…chaos?. “TikTok has launched a Discord server, where TikTok-enthusiasts can chat about all things…TikTok. Most widely used in the gaming world, Discord has been favoured by gamers since its launch in 2015, championing voice chat rooms, and text-based threads. Since then, Discord has evolved, bringing more like-minded communities together.”
Washington Post: Burnout, splinter factions and deleted posts: Unpaid online moderators struggle to manage divided communities. “From Facebook, Reddit and Nextdoor to homes for more niche topics like fan fiction, many online communities and groups are kept afloat by volunteer armies of moderators. The people who moderate these groups often start as founders or enthusiastic members, interested in helping shape and police the communities they’re already a part of. They are both cleaning crew and den parent. Moderators take down spam and misinformation. They mediate petty disagreements and volatile civil wars. They carefully decide between reminding people of the rules, freezing conversations, removing members or letting drama subside on its own.”
Rhizome: First Look: The Thing BBS. “Founded by artist Wolfgang Staehle, The Thing made up just a few of the tens of thousands of BBSs that flourished in the years preceding the popularization of the public web, and it fostered a community that sought to experiment with cultural practices via telecommunications networks: writing and publishing, interacting with a community, performing an identity, and distributing art. Immediately preceding the rise of the public web, The Thing was an important forum where early ideas of online art were rehearsed. Despite its historical significance, much of its content has been inaccessible for years. Now, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New Museum’s digital art affiliate Rhizome has created a contextual archive of messages that were posted to The Thing.”
Mother Jones: Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief. “As she sat on her couch in her house, alone, sick with COVID-19, an unwelcome series of thoughts crept into Erica Bial’s mind. If I die here, she wondered, who would ever notice? How long would the neighbor’s cat take to find me? Bial, a neurosurgeon living in Massachusetts, works at Lahey Hospitals northwest of Boston. She was two weeks into her self-imposed isolation with the disease, when it took a turn for the worse on her 45th birthday. ‘I had been—I thought—getting better,’ she said.”
Search Engine Journal: How to Find Subject Matter Experts Using Slack & Other Web Communities. “It is blatantly obvious when a non-expert tries to write something for an expert audience. To succeed at SEO through non-branded educational content, brands and websites must attempt to raise their editorial standards to that of a magazine or newspaper. This starts with developing relationships and making connections with experts in the community of people interested in the topic you are publishing about.”
Ars Technica: Anonymous “Anonymous Cowards” are, for now, not welcome on Slashdot . “On August 9, tech news aggregator Slashdot quietly removed one of its earliest features, which had been available to all visitors since its founding in 1997: the ability to post comments as an ‘Anonymous Coward.’ And while the feature returned within five days, it returned in a largely nerfed format.”
University of California Davis: Internet Communities Can Teach Amateurs to Build Personalized Governments. “The internet has its perils with privacy breaches and fake news, but on the plus side, a whole generation of youth have been teaching themselves skills in leadership and community-building, according to a new University of California, Davis, study.”
Search Engine Roundtable: Google Moving & Closing Support Forums. “We saw it happen with a number of support forums already, including the Google News forums. But now it looks like all Google support forums are moving to the new platform. The interesting part is they are not migrating content from the old to the new platform, instead, they are making the old platform read only and opening up the new platform for new topics.”
BBC: My disabled son’s amazing gaming life in the World of Warcraft. “Robert and Trude mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life for their disabled son. But when Mats died, they discovered that people all over Europe lit candles in his memory.” Before you read this make sure you have some tissues handy.
Nieman Lab: “So many times we forget to listen”: How Spaceship Media moderated a Facebook group of 400 political women without it going off the rails. “When I spoke with Spaceship Media’s cofounders a year ago, they were about to embark on creating arguably the most ambitious news-centric Facebook group in existence: A goal of 5,000 women with diverse views in one group, talking about politics without everything self-imploding.” Forum moderation is an incredibly tough and thankless job, but when it’s done well, it’s amazing.
Nature: How Facebook and Twitter could be the next disruptive force in clinical trials. “Amber Sapp was browsing the Internet late one night in August when she happened to find out that her 12-year-old son’s clinical trial had failed…. The thought of wasting Garrett’s limited time with a failed trial was hard enough. The news was all the more disturbing because it didn’t come from the trial organizers, but through a Facebook post from another parent.”
Quartzy: The Cruelty And Kindness Of Social Media In The Midst Of A Disaster. “There was a time, long before social media was blamed for many of the world’s biggest problems, that digital communities were posited as the utopian replacement to the small-mindedness of staying close to home, close to what we know. Of course, that didn’t turn out so well. We know now that compassion, empathy, and community can’t be provided by a large tech company with a clear profit motive for winning our attention. In times of disaster as well as in times of normalcy, that part is up to us.”
The Atlantic: Facebook Groups as Therapy. “Over the past year, the company has been consciously emphasizing groups—part of an effort, per Mark Zuckerberg, to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.’ These groups cover interests ranging as widely as the human imagination. Many are ‘closed,’ which in Facebook terminology means they are findable, but only members can see their content. Some are ‘secret’ and unsearchable, and membership is by invitation only. It’s not surprising, then, that Facebook has turned into a gathering place for strangers sharing their deepest secrets.”
University of Arizona: Facebook Status: Sick. How People Use the Internet to Cope with Illness. “In his new book, ‘Coping with Illness Digitally,’ University of Arizona communication professor Stephen Rains explores how people use digital tools like social media, online health forums, medical information websites and even email correspondence with physicians to cope with illness.”
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Popular Science: How to block toxic comments all over the web
Popular Science: How to block toxic comments all over the web. “Some corners of the internet act as bastions of healthy discussion, but out there on the wild web, discourse appears worse than ever before. If you’re tired of feeling your blood boil every time you get to the bottom of an article or open up your social media app of choice, here’s how to clean up your internet conversations.”