When an Internet icon crumbles, can we learn anything from its passing? Case in point: The WELL may go out of existence soon, and from a certain perspective, that's a surprise.
Once called "the world's most influential online community" on the cover of Wired magazine, at its peak the WELL counted users like the sci-fi authors Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow; visionaries like the musician Brian Eno and the virtual community expert Howard Rheingold; EFF founders John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor; and even rock stars like Billy Idol and David Crosby. The quality of its users' posts -- smart, funny, creative, and provocative on every imaginable subject -- inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs and thinkers.
But after years of slow but seemingly stable activity, the WELL's corporate owner, Salon Media Group, suddenly announced it was up for sale. Some of the WELL's last remaining members hope to buy it from Salon, but their efforts may not be enough.
In any case, as a longtime WELL member, I'm not shocked by this apparent nadir. However, if this is the end, I hope other online communities, which often exhibit similar ailments, can learn from what went wrong. Here are three key factors in the WELL's demise.
Failure to adjust its revenue model and platform to fit the times: "In the biggest picture, the fate of the WELL was sealed once the Web began serving as a near-universal, free commons and the idea of a for-pay general-interest online community became a dead end," Scott Rosenberg, a WELL member who went on to co-found Salon, told me. The WELL was initially accessed through BBS dialup (yes, it was that hardcore), and it was difficult to scale it into the Web era and, worse, find another revenue model besides monthly subscriptions. Which leads us to another problem…
An insular userbase resistant to change: WELL users generally resisted the idea of changing the system to allow some free access (as was quickly becoming standard). And as I recall it, these users weren't overly welcoming to newcomers. Howard Rheingold agrees on that last point. "The culture of casual [expletive]-flinging tends to scare off all but those with thicker skins," he told me via email. "The culture could have been friendlier to newcomers and to each other, but it isn't easy to say what could have been done about that."
Real name requirements: Other WELL users may disagree with me on this point, but I strongly suspect the service's demand that people link their WELL account to their real names was a major impediment to growth. It was one thing to sign one's name to bracing opinions on sex, politics, and religion read by a few thousand other members. But as the number of members rose, so did the discomfort level. Few messaging systems have succeeded with a real name requirement, but even as pseudonym-friendly sites like Slashdot launched and grew, the WELL steadfastly kept to this guideline.
In the end, the fact that the WELL maintained enough subscribers to support itself for years gave the userbase a false sense of security. "If the community had truly faced death, as in pulling the plug on the [virtual] server, much earlier, it could have put something together," Rheingold said. "Maybe it still can. I'm pretty sure it won't completely die."
The WELL isn’t dead -- neither as a platform (hobbling along though it may be), nor certainly as a forever-diminished idea. "The spirit of Well-style community I think can still be found in other long-lived midsized online communities like Metafilter, Reddit, and so on," Rosenberg said.
For myself, I see eerie (if inexact) parallels to another virtual community I came to be involved with after the WELL: Second Life, which also once attracted hype and celebrity attention but now struggles to find a new revenue model. Its dedicated but largely insular user community shows little interest in substantial change.
There are also probably parallels in the fate of Digg, another once-popular and ballyhooed online community recently sold at firesale prices.
For that matter, in its struggle to find revenue, transition to the mobile era, and maintain user engagement despite a rule requiring real names, the WELL's fate may ultimately be shared by that somewhat larger online community known as Facebook.
— Wagner James Au is a writer and consultant in social media and gaming. He blogs about virtual worlds at New World Notes. Follow him on Twitter: @SLHamlet.
It's very sad though it speaks for Darvin. There should be some evolution to survive. If you want to survive- then you have to change.
However, WELL has done enough for the Internet world. I attended classes of Prof. Reihngold in UC Berkely and he will be always the best example of a brilliant educator for me.
I think you're right to wonder about Facebook. If I had to place a bet, I'd put my money on it weathering the storms and carrying on - it does have so many advantages over the competition. But a rapid demise is nevertheless a real possibility.
James - It's interesting to me the way Plurk has picked up a SL following. This goes back until at least 2007. Is anybody else using Plurk? If so, what are their demographics?
Second Life has historically been a community that crossed multiple platforms, as you've documented.
I find myself intrigued by the possibility that Facebook could be dead by Christmas 2013. I'm not ready to predict it will happen, but I think it could. No company would have risen and fallen so fast. It has the same fascination as watching wreckers tear down a skyscraper.
Kim, you may be right about a "natural lifespan" for online services. They are usually an artifact of their time, and when that era is over, so is the audience's attention span. A perfect example of a behemoth that lost relevence is AOL. At one point, they had over 20 million people logging in at least once weekly ("You're not male!"), but they would cheerfully drown puppies in a sack for a tenth of those numbers today. The WELL was an artifact of the 80s, when you actually had to know something to connect to the Web ("Okay, so I have to compile this Socks library into my Mosaic browser to get through the firewall...."). Nowadays, there are 500 different places I can go, any day I want to, and in most of them, the people are both friendly and reasonably conversant with conversation. I'm beginning to hear things like, "My MOTHER is on Facebook -- I'm going someplace else!" It makes me wonder just how long this particular brontosaurus will last.
Think the life span rule applies to all kinds of communities and clubs, online and off. If there isn't something new to address, or if a clique or faction dominates, or if unpopular action is taken, even the most robust of groups eventually starts to disintegrate.
"Was this the case with The WELL, or is it still a vibrant community?"
Well, there's a few hundred people at least who've pledged to buy it from Salon, raising what's likely a quarter of a million. Pretty vibrant...if also pretty small.
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