Web as History by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder

Author:Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2017-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Beyond imposed community: the peer-driven glue

The first method by which GeoCities built communities was ‘community leaders’. They helped new users settle into their homesteads, edited newspapers, reviewed websites and provided an accessible human face for people figuring out the World Wide Web. While they provided different services in different communities, in general at the very minimum they were frequent participants in chat rooms, newsgroups and made their emails accessible to users (GeoCities, 1996b). GeoCities (1996d) presented these leaders as a response to user demand – ‘many homesteaders have asked us how they can contribute to the development of the GeoCities communit[y]‌’ – but it is unclear whether their role evolved organically or whether the GeoCities leadership team created it. These leaders were selected volunteers who were delegated responsibilities ranging from responding to user emails, to identifying particularly promising sites, policing content guidelines, and acting as the primary intermediary layer between GeoCities management proper and users.

It is testament to the power of community that so many leaders took to the program with such aplomb. Volunteers received few perks: a bit more disk space and a few GeoPoints that could be redeemed for consumer products such as GeoCities clothing. Yet as the program itself admitted, these were miniscule compared to the work asked of the volunteers: ‘If that’s the only reason you want to be a leader, think again. It’s hard work. Many of our leaders spend several hours each day answering questions and helping their neighbors set up their sites’ (GeoCities, 1996d). Applicants were selected based on the quality of their own GeoCities pages, past leadership experience, and an essay on why they would be a good candidate.

After making it through the selection process, the volunteers were assigned a given block of addresses to steward. Some neighbourhoods assigned leaders based on their addresses: for example, if in March 1997 you resided in the 2650–2999 block of the Heartland neighbourhood, your leader would be ‘Alison (AKA Alaithea)’, who was an expert in a host of things ranging from HTML to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (GeoCities, 1996b). Alison’s own website provided information on ‘color, layout, navigation, graphics & more’, and sensible advice on how to create an attractive website (with still valid advice on the ideal size of text blocks and limiting length of pages). She also provided galleries of attractive backgrounds, even allowing users dynamic previews for their own home pages (Alaithea, 1997). She was the model of a community leader: helpful, generous, accessible and welcoming. Alison also shows how GeoCities provided community leadership roles to women users: in Heartland, 15 of the 25 community leaders were female, drawing on their use of pronouns in their third-person descriptive biographies.

Other neighbourhoods operated on an ‘at large’ model: each street did not have a dedicated leader but was served instead by a general pool of leaders. Much of Athens, for example, operated on this model (GeoCities, 1996a). Universally, however, these leaders offered help with basic HTML and design and offered themselves as the first contact when users had complaints.

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