Single Digit Community?

I'm always here

I wonder if most communities don't just have a dozen or so prominent members next to hundreds of less visible but just as frequent visitors.

What surprises me is the number of hits the videos get. At this moment, the last episode of This Week on Channel9, received over 31,787 Views. That’s pretty fantastic for a bunch of chin rubbing and belly scratching!

-Josh

@Bas:It would be interesting to see how this relates to real life social interaction. Do reserved people participate more in online communities, or do they follow their own natural inclinations?

13 minutes ago, Bas wrote

I wonder if most communities don't just have a dozen or so prominent members next to hundreds of less visible but just as frequent visitors.

Here's a social graph I made a while back from randomly scanning 100 threads for some other message board.  It proves exactly that...there are a dozen or so individuals (the big vertices labeled "common") that are next to less visible users (small vertices).

I wanted to do it for C9, but the way I choose random threads (url thread id) is incompatible with C9's pretty urls.

Except Richard, I know all of you guys. See that's rather scary for me because I am terrible at memorizing people . What I fear is the place almost feel like an exclusive club. I fear there are some reasons we scared the newbie away. Is there something we can do to improve this?

I'm usually here multiple times a day and have been since near the beginning. I don't post nearly as much as the other regulars though. In fact I sometimes wonder if I've abandoned more posts before clicking submit than I've actually posted

@DCMonkey:

I did that many times too. I type something and gave up.

@magicalclick:Or type up a post, have it get eaten by an error when I click submit, and give up.

The more technical the discussion becomes, the less emotional it becomes. The less emotional, the more "quiet" people participate. I don't find the Microsoft versus whatever discussions to be interesting at all. Discussions about algorithms, implementation details, etc are very interesting and this site has some great videos about these things.

@magicalclick:  I guess I haven't been as active as I would like.  I also changed my user name a while back, switching to my real name, and that changed how I post.  I used to be more anonymous, and feel like I could say stuff that might be more controversial, and less fearful of making mistakes or wild conjectures about the possibilities of various technologies.  However, sometimes it is just about being really busy ... I am on a new team and still trying to learn the codebase and earn my stripes, so I've been focused on that.  I scan the Coffeehouse daily to see what's up, and don't have a lot of time to post.

@magicalclick: Well, I switched to lurker mode a few years ago, partly because I stopped programming for a living, partly because, well, things seemed to die down, the videos got a lot of attention but the forums didn't.

But I still have the C9 RSS feeds in my googlereader. And even if I don't usually read them all, I do scan them sometimes and pop in if I have something to add.

Actually, now I think of it, I have noticed that several long-term niners have joined Microsoft as employees -- and no longer seem to be as prolific as they were prior to joining. Is MS keeping you all too busy, or are you worried that you'll be accused of inherent partisanship?

Herbie

I use Channel 9 as a background to the work I am doing and being pretty iscolated (I am out in the countryside) it is nice to be able to post thoughts somewhere and feel part of a Community. 

When I think about it I tend to post tech stuff on my own blog site, social stuff (crap) on Facebook and things I find amusing (mostly) or directly related to things going on within Channel 9 / Microsoft here. 

I've been around here for Donkeys years (I used to post under my real name "Ian" but now use a clever 'nom de plume').  I'm probably a typical geek - like Star Trek and Gadgets (plug this), fairly crap social skills (but can wing it), like to keep myself to myself  most of the time.

I read a lot of the posts but usually don't have anything intelligent to say. Spending a lot more time on twitter these days

@gadget: If I didn't post if i didn't have anything intelligent to say, I doubt I'd post much at all. This post is a case in point

Herbie