I have joined two communities but I’m not sure that they are what I’m looking for so I may join another. I joined MySpace because I was invited by my friend, he started a group within the MySpace community called Buffalo Activists and he urged me to join. I expected to have some interesting discussions and get to know some people I had seen around Buffalo.
I also joined the Randi Rhodes Show Forum. Randi Rhodes is a liberal talk show host on Air America. I joined because there seemed to be a fair amount of political discussion going on.
Membership requirements are different for each community. In the MySpace community your account is generated immediately and you can start editing your page and your blog right away. I also had to join the sub-community of Buffalo Activists, and was accepted immediately, without peer review. However I found out that I couldn’t make any posts untill I had been a member for 7 days. It seems that they don’t want Newbees fumbeling around the forums bringing down conversations before they have explored the community, and that they want to avoid spammers. From roaming around the community I have noticed that the number of friends and comments in one’s profile represents a sort of status symbol. So to be accepted you need to do more than just participate in the forums, you should be developing little personal connections through the space. Indeed the forums seem to be an accessory rather than the focus, this and other aspects lead me to percieve this community as a sort of glorified dating service.
The Randi Rhodes Forum revolves around the discussion board, the profile page is minimal you can add one picture and a couple parigraphs of info and that’s it. My account had to be approved before I could do anything besides browse the messages. After being approved newbies are on “probation” which means their first 10 posts are closely minitored for any violations of the rules. Status on this group is denoted right below one’s icon in every post, the range is from “newbie” to “fancy pants elitist member”. In order to move up in rank you must post more frequently.
I can identify many of the roles mentioned, some polinator commented about a similar discussion in another thread, one Core Participant with a Sparticus icon composed about 40% of the posts in one forum that I was following. I also noticed a greeter in a forum on the Randi Rhodes site welcoming and encouraging a Newbie, and received my very own greeting on MySpace from some guy named Tom (probably hired, maybe fake) who wanted to be my friend.
So far I am just a Newbie and a Lurker, I’ve just started posting on both forums, and haven’t been involved in any important exchanges. I anticipate becoming more active, maybe not quite a core participant but active and engaged in the conversations that I join.