The End of the Beginning Anyone who's scanned the right hand column will probably conclude that I've got an interest in web based community and developing communication on the web. Indeed this blog is an expirement in fostering communication and community in my undergraduate philosophy classes.

Today, a friend sent me an interesting link that brought me back tio one of the less satisfying moments in my search for a place in cyberspace to call my own: OJ article When Automatic's Teller Ran Dry I really thought that Plastic was going to be my home on the web, the web based forum/community I'd been looking. The canny stylized writing of suck, the intelligence and nerdy esoterica of feedmag. This was going to be great.

Of course, it wasn't.

slashdot, at its best, had shown just how stimulating and intelligent and useful community based commentary could be. Of course, the rest of slashdot should have been a warning about all the ways that things had gone wrong.

Also, slashdot had a core audience of Linux users. These people have interests beyond just a particular operating system, and that gives the site some of its general appeal. But the fact that so many of the core are currently involved in a significant common project. Thus, many posters had a particular agenda, but the agenda unified the community. User build Linux together, and Slashdot has been part of that.

The atmosphere has been called "grad school snarkiness", though my attempts to post quickly lead to a -1 karma, and I was both snarky and a grad student.

The core users of Plastic were, for the most part, people with opinions. There's a lot more team spirit among Linux people then there are among opinionated people. The ojr article gives some sense of the chronology of events in this sad tale. I suppose its not over. I still browse plastic.com, though very occsaionally. I definitely read suck alumni when they appear, especially Heather Havrilesky's column on Salon. What I'm really interested in now would be a vBulletin based discussion board with section on how to desing syllabi and exams, grading, and writing philosophy for publication. (I'd love to hear from anyone who's stumbled across this site and seen anything like that.)  ¶ #

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