Websites shut down everyday. It’s a fact of life online. Just take a look at the TechCrunch Deadpool.
Still, it’s crummy when your favourite website shuts down.
This May, Disney will close the doors to its Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK), a popular massively multiplayer online game. As Disney explains on their FAQ:
VMK was created and launched as part of a promotion to celebrate Disneyland’s 50th Anniversary. The game/promotion has ran well beyond the original time it was intended to.
The closure has upset many VMK fans, and online petitions have sprung up to try and save the game.
This brings up an interesting question: What do the owners of an online community owe their members, if anything?
Original photo by Wyscan.
I would compare it to any other digital technology or media that we have lost. In the analog world things faded or degraded slowly over time until it could no longer be restored. Digital media seems so crisp and almost perfect a first, but is also transient. It seems that things from our digital world can be lost without the hope of ever getting them back, and in some cases they are never even really documented. I don’t know if anyone remembers an IM chat program called “PowWow” way back when people had never heard of an IM. Then there was ICQ (It’s still out there but nobody I know has used it in 10 years or more) Dare I say that perhaps someday even Facebook with suffer the same fate. There was also that fateful day when Napster stopped working. I wonder what kinds of efforts are being made to document these things as they vanish. It seems that documenting something that is so interactive should also take more than just a series of screen shots.
jimmy
At the very least, I feel that an online community owes its members advanced notice of closure. I can completely understand a decision to close up shop if a business finds that it’s simply uneconomical to keep an online community going. However, Morally speaking, there should be some consideration for people who have made friends with others in that community. These communities can become as important as actual places to people. It is easy to think of them as structures which will exist indefinitely despite their insubstantiality. Having them suddenly disappear could be quite a shock to the membership.
Interesting points. To me, one of the things about online communities and social networks is that the people who comprise them are contributing a lot of the content with their free labour, as opposed to other services.
I think about this issue a lot lately, as I see on-line community members assert an “ownership” in a place as a result of their participation in the site.
I weblog at livejournal, which has had a recent controversy in that the new ownership instituted a plan to add advertising to new free accounts as a revenue device. I was surprised by the vociferousness of the response by some, including rather extravagant linking of the concerns to the fact that that ownership of LJ is with a Russian company, when monetizing websites, to me, is the quintessential international dialogue, which transcends all borders.
Similarly, flickr.com has recently instituted an ability for users to submit short videos up to 90 seconds as a kind of moving image.
Some 22,000 people joined a flickr group to protest this, as if adding a feature were somehow an act of betrayal.
It is more understandable to me in the eBay community, when fee increases and structure changes have a more direct economic impact on the traditional collectibles sales community that launched the site.
My brother runs a simple website which celebrates the modern Cadillac automobile. It’s one of those crosses between a neat hobby and a kind of side business. He reports that even “lurkers” seem to develop a sense of “home” in the site, though they rarely participate. There is certainly something communitarian in all this on-line community.
I release music on netlabels, and for some years my music got a lot of exposure on disfish dot com, a donationware label. The one constant about donationware netlabels is that rarely anyone (but me) donates. However, I was sad when it shuttered its doors, and my music was no longer hosted in a cool place. But a friend of mine and I started our own netlabel–and perhaps the lesson is that one can create community on-line, and not just look to Disney to do so for one.
@Gurdonark,
I wonder if that level of investment has to do with the way these sites are both community-oriented, but also part of a personal, private activity. I mean usually you’re by yourself in front of your computer…it kind of feels like a personal ritual a bit….
@Nora,
I think you're right that the "at-home, personal" form of community participation at LJ or at flick fits in there somewhere to explain the sense of loyalty to the sites "never changing". It is a personal ritual–and there's a lesson somewhere in this about how few years it takes to create a devotion to a particular brand of shared ritual. I could never have imagined I'd still be weblogging assiduously in my LJ community after 6 years–and it's unimaginable to realize the inevitable fact that this private ritual I share with many friends will itself be superseded, like a marathon dance contest in the 30s finally winding down, as if it had never existed at all.
@Gurdonak:
A great deal of the “vociferousness of the response” of people at LiveJournal was because of the other change that LiveJournal tried to sneak in at the same time – they stopped a number of interests from appearing on their “popular interests” page. (Including interests like “sex”, “fanfiction”, “depression”, and “bisexuality”.)
I, and many other people, felt that this was wrong for two reasons:
- it misrepresents the Livejournal community to advertisers, making them think people aren’t interested in talking about the “shadier” interests.
- it was a homophobic thing to do, since a whole bunch of gay-related interests were hidden (like “faeries” and the aforementioned “bisexuality”).
After all the complaints, LiveJournal did stop hiding the interests.
To me, the most important thing an online community should provide for its members is transparency. (The same could be said for ISPs regarding traffic-shaping and blocking of certain sites.)
If a site like Livejournal or Flikr is going to close down, they should give serveral weeks’ warning (and hopefully provide ways for people to download all their content conveniently, but the most important thing is that they give warning, so communities can move elsewhere and people don’t lose data). (When GreatestJournal, for example, went under, they didn’t provide any warning, which caused chaos.)
Facebook has actually done this quite well – people complain when they commericalize things further, but they do provide warning and ways for people to opt out.
@ Angela
Sometimes companies can’t give a warning. I’m sure that the people running such enterprises would love to provide these types of recovery systems to their users as they shut things down. The problem is that they often seem to operate as if everything is normal until the bank pulls the plug on the entire operation. Setting up those systems costs money and takes time.
Also, many web based companies have issues with lawsuits. So a company is doing fine until they get a letter from a lawyer or an order from a judge telling them to shut down, or face legal action. Like the sudden death that happened to the Napster community.
If the company is publicly traded and are facing bankruptcy, they have rules they are required to follow with regards to their investors and the stock markets. They would need to file for bankruptcy protection and sort things out with investors before dealing with their online community.
It’s a good question and I think one of the biggest examples of this here in Canada is the closing of Zed that was run by Radio3. Users of these online communities are encouraged to feel a sense of ownership but when it comes down to it that ownership is pretty superficial. Companies like flickr have thrived because, although they call the shots the management actively listens to the feedback from the community and provide well thought-out responses to criticisms (as best they can). Most of the time the community is satisfied if they feel like the people working to keep things running have thought things through.
I think that online communities owe their members a great deal. They created the space for you to join and be active. They benefited by your activity and presence. I think this goes even further then when sites shut down though. I have been a member of a forum for two years when they changed one of their most attractive features they kept me there posting. You truly feel violated and that your opinion should count. Sadly, most sites operate for the bottom line and there is usually a financial reason for closing whatever the site or part of the site.
I’m talking in circles now, but this discussion hits close to home for me. Unless something makes it financially impossible, they should respect their community and their communities wishes.
There’s a really interesting flip to this question: what happens when online communities engage in mutiny? At about the 23 minute mark of the video, “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And you can too)” the presenters talk about voting the head of a project off the team.
There are little bits of technical information in the presentation but for the most part it’s talking about community dynamics. The project that they’re talking about (subversion) is a software program that allows developers to “track changes” on software code. It is used by many, many collaborative software projects.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645
@ Emmajane,
That IS a really interesting idea. In an interview I did which will air on the May 14th/17th show, one of the issues that came up is what happens when members of an online community decide to leave (collectively) and go to another online community.
The football game lasts until the kid who the ball belongs to, has to go home for supper. The party ends when the hosts decide it’s bedtime.
Calling it a “community” may serve to mask the ownership element, since clearly “members” are there at the pleasure of the site providers.
In my observation, what I’ve said is pretty self-evident, and fully grasped by most people.
When companies use social networks as a relationship building/branding building tool, they need to realize there will be consequences to their customer relationships and their brand if they stop delivering.
When you ask your customers to invest their creativity, their time and their energy to create a ‘community’ or another digital property, you should assume that they will not positively respond to the destruction of their investment.
Companies do need an exit strategy for this type of ‘user investment’.
I sincerely believe that companies who create online social networks or “communities” in which the users interact, play, and communicate for free owe the users nothing. Sure, the users have provided some of the content; however the company has provided the framework, the storage space, the bandwidth, and the reliability of uptime for free. That is $0.00. Therefore, there is no “I pay for X, so you provide me with X” trade, so the company owes you nothing.
User agreements expressly explain that the company may terminate service at any time. They give notice to the user as a courtesy and as opportunity for a “transitional” period to a new service. All major online services have discontinued services at one point or another; perhaps they were non-profitable, a profit drain, or not performing as planned. In the case of Virtual Magic Kingdom, Disney has stated that it was always intended to be temporary, and that they maintained the environment for far longer than they anticipated. That, in fact, was rather considerate of them.
What would be nice would be for Disney to facilitate a way for the children playing the game, in which they cannot disclose certain personal details, to transpose their online persona to a new system, so that they can maintain the young friendships they have built online with other young cyber citizens. It is painful for a child to lose any friend, in person, imaginary, or online.
This topic kind of hit home.
I am a moderator on an online fansite forum. A few months ago the owner and I, after dealing with a number of issues, wanted to shut the whole site down. We came to the realization that there were a number of our younger members who relied on our site for their social interactions…
I remember our phone conversation vividly when we asked “What about *****?, if we are gone when she tries to log on, she will probably kill herself” and we both knew that we weren’t being melodramatic.
What started out as an amusing pass time is now a responsibility.
There are two sides to the coin… this community is something that we grew and nurtured and as much as the users provide a lot of content, without our moderation and administration that community would not exist. So what is an owner to do when they no longer want to be a part of the community?
Handing over the reigns is not an easy option… it is like handing over a piece of artwork and then having the new owner alter it… the artwork may be under new ownership, but it is a reflection of the original artist.
I think this issue could evolve from just prevention of personal human connection, established on the virtual world, to the connection with artificial interactive creatures, that could inhabit virtual world. In the first case, you can juct share real world contact details, but dealing with virtual creatures (pets, friends) could be more complicated…