Friend of a friend passed on this essay:
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky. It's a little long but ultimately pretty fascinating, and talks a lot about what happens in places like this messageboard.
Specifically it talks about groups forming to ostensibly talk about a specific purpose (such as, say, gothic lifestyle, music, and horror fiction) but getting sidetracked easily by flirting and sexual undertones, the formation of a 'core' group of users who care and help in their own way to maintain the community, and are often beset upon by hordes of new users or other outside threats.
There's a little bit more about how to create specifically social software, but there are interesting things to be learned. For example, the new owners decided that the best way to avoid social dramas was to mostly stay behind the scenes -- but as a result, since they didn't appear to be part of the community, the community that had been around before them was seen as outsiders, and rejected by a number of people.
Anyways, I'm rambling. And there's more to the essay than just that...much more. What do you think?
