Passion and User Generated Content

I've been involved in administering user generated content for a long time - my friends and I came up for the idea for RateItAll in early 1999, making us one of the first commercial, 100% UGC sites on the web.

One of the things that never fails to astound me is the passion with which people apply themselves to these sorts of communities.

It takes a special sort of person to be one of the small percentage of "creators" - folks that are contributing hours of their time towards creating content and building relationships in an online community.  It takes passion.  And when something goes wrong, that passion can very quickly turn to anger.

If you're interested in seeing a taste of what this passion looks like, take a look at this thread from the RateItAll blog.  Our community is going through a bit of a crisis - four very prominent, very respected members of the site have decided to exercise their rights as RateItAll Reviewers and permanently delete their accounts.

While the number would seem to be tiny (versus 1.1M visitors last month), the impact is huge.  Between the four of them, they accounted for about 20,000 pages of (high quality) content, not to mention they were people's friends, mentors, and co-collaborators.

It's hard to see these folks go, especially with in some cases, a lot of anger.  But I've been cheered up by the fifty or so messages of support that I've received from other members, telling me to "stay the course."

I'm oddly flattered by the drama.  As they say, love and hate are pretty close together - it's the indifference that's the killer.

So what are the practical implications of this?  It means that everything that isn't core to the community (Facebook Apps, Widgets, etc.) needs to take an immediate backseat to addressing the concerns of our superusers.  If you don't have the community, you become just another hollow web app.  And without the people, what fun is it?