Even after doing this for almost 10 years, I'm still fascinated by the dynamics of online communities. A recent thread on CoasterBuzz made it known that we have a member-only forum, and the responses are interesting to me.
I started it because it required zero coding on my part, and I've heard from a lot of members that they're disenchanted with the noise level as of late. So it seemed like a no-brainer to just create the forum and see what happens.
While not setting the world on fire, it's getting some decent use so far, and I've really enjoyed reading it. It's a totally different caliber of discussion that I haven't seen in years. This gets me to thinking about two things.
First, the paid members are obviously the people who care most about what you're putting out there, and as such also have a certain respect for it. Right away that seems to mean they're more likely to be civil to each other because they have the highest stake in the community. Perhaps knowing that you are not, in fact, anonymous at that point makes a difference as well, but seeing as how people who pay didn't likely do so to start trouble, I suppose that's probably not a big factor.
Second, the responses by people who seem to feel left out post comments that almost imply they're hurt or something. That makes sense, because even if they aren't a paid member, but post frequently, they still have a stake in the community. But a lot of those same comments are representative of the reasons the paid members enjoy "their" forum too, in that they're salty or sarcastic much of the time.
Certainly it's not going to be a love fest in there, and people do disagree, but without the sarcasm and general bullshit, disagreement is a lot more palatable. The thing I'm most curious about is how it scales. I have been a paid member on other sites before, much bigger than mine, and have found that generally people are more civil to each other when it's on their dime.
Amazing how you never stop learning new things in this environment.
I read that post at lunch this afternoon and was very tempted to post "this is exactly why a member's only forum was created...so we don't have to read this bullshit".
But I figured that would only egg them on even more.
Thanks for the member's only forum. Whether the non-paying crowd believes it or not, they do contribute most of the noise.