Building online communities in modern society, a LinkDap Story

Lindap, a rising online platform, balances anonymity and identity, focusing on meaningful engagement over follower counts. It’s designed for nuanced discussions, not flippant remarks. Lindap values content, mirroring platforms like Reddit and Hacker News (HN), and encourages learning from others for informed decisions.

Through Lindap, users can explore behavioral science insights and social dynamics. Meerkats, for example, use social learning for survival. Such collaborative knowledge sharing is key to success in various environments.

Understanding the organization’s environment is important as it’s the source of resources and influences strategic decisions. Lindap, like early communities, fosters the spread of knowledge through social networks, accounting for the strategic exchange of information in these networks.

Lindap promotes building a robust online community focused on common interests. The platform adheres to reciprocation theory, providing users with benefits to compensate for their efforts. It also respects consistency theory and social validation theory, maintaining user commitment and fostering social acceptance.

Maintaining anonymity allows users to freely express their ideas, encouraging vulnerability and curiosity. Lindap ensures secure access to contents, allowing users to link and share while ensuring privacy for those who wish to remain anonymous.

Commenting on Lindap is dynamic, facilitating debates and reaching middle grounds. Comment sorting is based on scores that are hidden, preventing score comparisons while ensuring quality. Users can also view expanded posts without opening new tabs, enhancing user experience.

Content moderation is a key aspect of Lindap, with involvement of power users to ensure quality content and discussions. Moderation encourages good writers and incentivizes them to stay on the platform. Lindap even implements a system where moderators are voted for by the community, echoing HN’s approach of paid moderators.

User Roles in Online Communities: Engagement and Interaction

In the realm of online communities, there are three core participant types: ‘Watercooler’, ‘Scientific Conference’, and ‘Debate Team’. ‘Watercooler’ members engage in casual, anecdotal conversations. ‘Scientific Conference’ participants aim to build knowledge and resolve problems. ‘Debate Team’ members, on the other hand, strive to validate their points of view. A harmonious community comprises these participant types, each playing a crucial role in the ecosystem.

In addition to these categories, the user engagement journey is often marked by roles such as ‘Peripheral’ or ‘Lurker’, ‘Inbound’ or ‘Novice’, ‘Insider’ or ‘Regular’, ‘Boundary’ or ‘Leader’, and ‘Outbound’ or ‘Elder’. Each of these roles signifies different degrees of participation, responsibility, and connection to the community.

User Interaction and Interface Design

Successful user interaction is built upon a responsive and intuitive interface. Options to create text posts or content links, seamless navigation to threads, link previews, and an efficient ‘back’ functionality are fundamental to user satisfaction. A well-structured karma point system and features like bookmarking, sorting, tracking search history can enhance user engagement.

Moreover, UI elements like split view and modals enable users to multi-task, without losing their scroll position or switching tabs. A good user interface also allows for smooth transitions and sharing capabilities, ensuring an overall satisfying user experience.

Community Building and Management

The essence of community building lies in creating an environment that respects each participant’s role, fosters healthy communication, and promotes common values. The responsibility for this rests with community architects, managers, moderators, and administrators. They are entrusted with strategy formulation, rule enforcement, member assistance, and community promotion.

Crowdsourcing and User Engagement

In online communities, crowdsourcing plays a significant role in boosting user engagement. The combined intellect of the community, or the “wisdom of the crowd”, is often a superior source of knowledge and problem-solving. This, coupled with one-click interactions, real-time usage stats, and the provision for short form user responses, often results in a highly engaging user experience.

Code of Conduct

A well-defined code of conduct is instrumental in maintaining decorum in online communities. Clear group boundaries, rules matched to local needs, participatory rule-making, respectful behavior monitoring, and accessible dispute resolution are key elements of such a code. This ensures that all community members feel valued, heard, and protected.

In conclusion, thriving online communities are built upon the principles of active engagement, mutual respect, and efficient management. At the core of this lies a seamless user experience that encourages participation, interaction, and growth within the community.

Ant Communities and User Engagement

Much like ants in a colony, online users can also engage in shared tasks and communal activities. The concept of an initial user, or ant, leaving a seed of an idea can be mirrored in a user posting a new topic or thread on an online platform. This initial idea attracts other users who then build upon and modify this concept, eventually constructing a complex network of interconnected thoughts.

Users can act as ants, following scent trails of popular posts and participating in discussions that pique their interest. A highly engaging post or thread creates a strong “scent trail” that attracts many users, similar to a big food source for ants. Conversely, a less engaging or controversial topic may only generate a weak trail, attracting fewer users.

In the online ecosystem, pheromone trails can be represented by the interactions and activities of users. When a user shares a valuable resource, it can be broadcasted to other users who can then verify its usefulness. Users can create “alarms” or alerts that can be directed towards specific topics or questions, garnering attention from the community.

Just as ants communicate through chemicals, touch, and body language, online users communicate through comments, likes, shares, and other forms of interaction. Ants that come across danger release alarm pheromones, and similarly, users can alert the community about inappropriate content or behavior.

For businesses, the collective behavior of users can offer insights into customer behavior, allowing companies to show potential customers exactly what they’re looking for at the exact time they want it.

In an online community, maintaining a variety of content, high content quality, active community engagement, and diversity are essential values. Features such as signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, and app download interstitials, among others, can significantly enhance user experience.

Creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content is crucial for attracting and retaining a clearly defined audience. Users have questions, and the internet has answers, but sometimes, compiling all the information can be exhausting. Platforms can encourage users to share links to relevant content before expounding on the topic, making the process more efficient.

Avatar Customization and Virtual Currency

Similar to platforms like Gaia Online, users can have customizable avatars that represent their digital identities. These avatars can be modified in various ways, including skin tone, eye style and color, hairstyle and color, gender, race, and attire. Customizing avatars allows users to express their unique identities and engage more deeply with the community.

The concept of a virtual currency, such as Gaia Platinum or Gaia Cash, can be adopted to encourage user activity. Users can earn this currency by browsing the site, posting in the forums, playing games, and participating in other events and contests. This virtual currency can be used to purchase avatar accessories or other virtual goods, making user participation more rewarding.

Jobs

Editorial director: Cool way to make a living, surfing the Internet for content to share with others. Curious about lots of different types of content, quick to pick up on what other people find interesting, and not prone to spelling errors.

Rules	Description
Position	The number of possible “positions” actors in the action situation can assume (in terms of formal positions these might be better described as job roles, while for informal positions these might rather be social roles of some capacity
Boundary	Characteristics participants must have in order to be able to access a particular position
Choice	The action capacity ascribed to a particular position
Aggregation	Any rules relating to how interactions between participants within the action situation accumulate to final outcomes (voting schemes etc.)
Information	The types and kinds of information and information channels available to participants in their respective positions
Pay-off	The likely rewards or punishments for participating in the action situation
Scope	Any criteria or requirements that exist for the final outcomes from the action situation

Sources

EToro:

A “single trade” is a normal stock purchase a user makes on his own.

A “social trade” is when a user places a trade that exactly copies another user’s single trade.

Users can also “follow” all of another user’s trades automatically and review all real-time trades and choose which ones to copy.

All users have to open up their trading decisions, share their strategies and ideas, and let other people follow them.

Most users select several other traders to follow. Each time someone decides to copy another trader, that trader gets paid a small amount. Traders with a lot of imitators can make quite a bit of money.

One group of investors works in almost total isolation: Its members follow few other traders and come up with most investment ideas on their own.

At the other end of this spectrum lies a group of hyperconnected traders who follow (and are followed by) many others, and social learning guides a lot of their strategies.

Many of the investors using eToro fall somewhere in the middle—they engage in a moderate level of social learning but behave with a degree of independence that makes it clear that they’re not just following the herd.

*** LinkDap thoughts on social information seeking

We can alter the flow of ideas by providing small incentives or nudges to individuals, to encourage isolated traders to engage more with others, or traders who are too interconnected to engage less with the same group and explore outside their current contacts.

Gathering such information can be quite time consuming. ‘‘Receiver costs’’ are

an important component in communication dynamics:

If a reliable signal is very costly to assess, receivers may choose to rely on one that is less reliable but easier to obtain (Guilford & Dawkins, 1991).

A key design goal is thus to enable signals that are reliable yet not costly to assess.

It signals status in a society where ‘‘information prowess’’—i.e., having access to information, the ability (often termed taste) to distinguish between good and bad information, and the willingness to adapt to the changes brought by new information—is a fundamental part of the culture.

SubStack

Instead, established writers with large social media followings used Substack’s infrastructure to attract their own audience.

Users could directly subscribe to a writer’s newsletter (paid or free) without any further engagement with Substack.

In other words, writers owned the relationship with their subscribers. This led to a wave of high profile writers going independent via paid Substack newsletters (incl. journalists, tech professionals, etc.)— a market that Medium could not capture.

MISC

Let’s use Marketing & Branding Logic Here.

Facebook = Social Networking Site
Instagram = Photograph Sharing Site
Youtube = Videos Sharing Site
Spotify = Music Streaming Site

So now Information….

Wikipedia = Trust-worthy Information
Reddit =Information Engagement

Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, taking into consideration authority hubs such as cnn.com or mayoclinic.org. The rank value indicates the importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links“). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank.

A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the webgraph, created by all World

Webscraping

Requests – an excellent Python HTTP library for downloading post contents
Boilerpipe – a library for extracting an article from a webpage and removing all the boilerplate
BeautifulSoup – HTML parsing, for when boilerpipe fails
Gensim – robust topic modelling
Seaborn – Matplotlib extension for beautiful plots