{"id":1,"date":"2011-02-14T04:09:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T04:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1"},"modified":"2022-06-03T11:23:08","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T11:23:08","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/hello-world\/","title":{"rendered":"What makes a successful investment bulletin board?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Originally written for Chapter 3 of the book (but removed in editing)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Properties of successful bulletin boards<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Operating his own bulletin board, Nigel has thought about the conceptual ingredients of successful online discussion communities.&nbsp; Most popular boards have most of the following properties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Pseudonymity:<\/strong>Many people do not want their postings, particularly on a sensitive topic such as personal investments, to be searchable by employers or casual acquaintances, or even family members.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Persistent identity:&nbsp;<\/strong>Although pseudonymity is desirable for privacy reasons, any meaningful discussion amongst users requires some form of persistent identity, that is, a stable one-to-one mapping of aliases to users.<a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Reputation systems:<\/strong>&nbsp;Most communities have features facilitating the association of reputations with users, for example<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>displaying a user\u2019s cumulative count of posts;<\/li><li>searching all of a user\u2019s past posts;<\/li><li>showing users\u2019 votes (up or down) for particular posts or users.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u2018Threading\u2019 of discussions:<\/strong>&nbsp;Posts on a particular topic need to be displayed in a single chronological \u2018thread\u2019, with posts on other topics filtered out. Various forms of threading exist, including \u2018semi-threading\u2019 and \u2018full-threading\u2019.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Search function:<\/strong>&nbsp;An ability to search for posts by criteria such as user name or stock ticker code or date of post or any keyword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Moderation:<\/strong>&nbsp;Any community needs moderators or \u2018super-users\u2019 who police other users, applying a scale of sanctions (<em>eg<\/em>&nbsp;warning, temporary ban, permanent ban) to those who are judged to be disruptive.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Private messaging:<\/strong>&nbsp;This allows any user to enter into two-way \u2018off-board\u2019 communication with another user, without compromising the anonymity of the users\u2019 real-world identities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most of these requirements can be met by free software.&nbsp; Siites running on proprietary software don&#8217;t significantly improve the user experience, which has not changed much in the past ten years.&nbsp;<strong>Improving the user interface of bulletin boards is hard design problem.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Moderation is the trickiest of these requirements.<\/strong>&nbsp;Disruptive users generally use a site&nbsp;<strong>exactly as intended&nbsp;<\/strong>from a technical perspective, so moderation is difficult to automate: substantial human judgment is unavoidable, but also contentious, because one person\u2019s robust discussion is another person\u2019s disruptive behaviour.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Free to users.<\/strong>&nbsp;Successful boards are either completely free sites run as non-commercial ventures by enthusiasts such as Nigel, or else \u2018freemium\u2019 models: a free basic service, with income generated from advertising and user charges for optional services such as Level 2 prices. This is counter-intuitive to many users, but operators who have tried charging &#8211; for example ADVFN in its early years &#8211; have found that the fraction of users willing to pay even a small charge to use a BB is extremely small.&nbsp; For an online community, the only sustainable price is free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Originally written for Chapter 3 of the book (but removed in editing) Properties of successful bulletin boards Operating his own bulletin board, Nigel has thought about the conceptual ingredients of successful online discussion communities.&nbsp; Most popular boards have most of the following properties. Pseudonymity:Many people do not want their postings, particularly on a sensitive topic &#8230; <a title=\"What makes a successful investment bulletin board?\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/hello-world\/\" aria-label=\"More on What makes a successful investment bulletin board?\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}