- Anton P Nym
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- Exalted Mythic Member
Wow, I followed my own advice and read the whole thread before posting. (Hey, where's my Scoobie Snack?)
I'm glad to see so many folks contributing here, because I think that one of the problems here in the b.net community is that so few members seem to contribute and so many seem to wait until someone else does something. (And then either glom onto it or tear it down, depending upon personality.)
"But Steve, " I know some folks will be thinking, "there are plenty of people posting.." To which I reply, "Posting, yes. But contributing? There's a difference."
And the difference is this; people contributing to the community leave folks feeling more involved, or more interested, or happier or more informed. It's not just banging on keys and hitting "submit", it's not about attention or a quick rush from "pwning" someone, it's using those keys to make others feel better.
Now, out of the several million posts out there, how many fit that definition? Yeah, and I wish that number was higher too. (Note that I'm still including the posts where people are working out guesses and theories on the latest trailer... the constructive ones, at least, and not the attention-seeking or selfish ones. Without those, the number would be drastically smaller.)
This dilution is in part due to the massive influx of members that started with the pre-release of Halo 2, but we can't chalk it all up to that... despite what some of the elitists would hold, we've gained as many good members (perhaps more) as we've lost since then. However, the sheer size of the community does make it harder for those who do contribute to stand out. It's a scale thing, really; what works for a 50,000 member community doesn't work as well for a community twenty times that size. It's vastly harder to get meaningful community interaction now in part because the community is so big.
The community is so big, in fact, that we can't reasonably count on Bungie to hand down the seeds of our every contribution; I don't care how many staff and moderators you put on here, serving a million-plus people isn't going to work with a top-down community model. At this scale we MUST encourage all those who want to contribute to do so, so that we can recapture some of what arose spontaneously with the smaller community.
In one way I'm really looking forward to some sort of reward system akin to karma that would encourage people to contribute instead of just post... but in another way I'm kinda sad that it seems to take a "carrot and stick" approach to move this community in the direction it really (by and large) wants to go. *mourns for lost altruism... if it was there in the first place, that is*
-- Steve'd like to thank all those who've contributed to the Bungie.net community by their active participation, even if it was just to email or PM a mod with a question or a warning about problems in the forums. It's you guys who really make the community work. (Now, let's find and encourage more folks like you, shall we?)
PS: here's one way of thinking about bungie.net and the ways we can contribute. The point of groups is to have a little chunk of bungie.net that you can shape to your desires for the enjoyment oor utility of your friends; the point of the main forums is to have pre-defined place to socialise with other like-minded members about common themes. (For XBLers, think "custom games" and "MatchMaking playlists".) Does that help in any way?