The end of an online community?
A sad thing has happened: an online community website I have visited on and off for the last couple of years appears to have finally given up the ghost. Personally I blame Digg (where some of the members turned up instead) and Facebook, which had a massive rise in popularity last summer (when I found it 
).
I wrote about Hedir .com last year in my post ‘Revenue sharing Adsense ads on a community website’.
At the time, there were occasional grumblings from moderators, and the regular population appeared to be declining. But there was a steady supply of newcomers, and regular input from developers and site owners, who occasionally organised new initiatives, such as auctions to win advertising spots on the home page.
Over the next few months, the site, which was a peer reviewed directory and forum, was swamped with spammers and new members who would submit a site for review and then never be seen again.
More and more of the regulars disappeared with the rise of other Web 2.0 sites such as MySpace, Digg and Facebook. I don’t know if the owners were making much from AdSense, but I know I personally made very little from hundreds of pages of shared Adsense ads, so I would guess they didn’t. The developer and most of the moderators left. Meanwhile, with most of the moderators gone, the last remaining stalwarts were complaining (with justification) that the site owners were ignoring their volunteers.
With one final high profile resignation, the last remaining moderator left in February. A few regulars came back to comment and say goodbye, but the site owners have not been seen again, and the forums are overrun with spam. It’s a shame.
As a freelancer, it’s nice to have an online community focused around your line of work, but many are too narrowly focused, and Facebook, with its silly applications, just doesn’t cut it. I guess the emergence of Web 2.0 sites is following the pattern of evolution in general: sudden proliferation being replaced by a few dominant forms. But I hope I find another online community to call home soon…