Plastic - Hard To Break, Easy To Clean
10 US-magazines team up to found a community platform based on the Slashdot model
Is "community" back? Actually, it never went away. For the past few years, Slashdot has been one of the liveliest sites on the Web. Billing itself as "news for nerds, stuff that matters," Slashdot is driven by a huge community of geek-and-proud-of-it users who submit links to breaking news stories which are then often followed by literally hundreds of posts within hours. Hordes of geeks clicking on submitted links have even led online publishers to talk of a "Slashdot effect," a giant leap in pageviews for anyone lucky enough to get "Slashdotted."
Slashdot runs on Slash which its creators describe as "a database-driven news and message board, using Perl, Apache and MySQL." In other words, it's "a bona fide Open Source / Free Software project." Anyone's free to use it and the most potentially interesting example opened its doors to the public on Monday, announcing:
"Three of the most respected independent content sites -- Feed, Suck, and Altculture -- merged in 2000 and posed this question: 'If we were launching our sites today rather than five years ago, which ideas and technologies would we use that didn't exist then?' The organization that these three sites formed is called Automatic Media, and the answer to their question is Plastic."
Plastic would generate about as much media attention and general interest among Web users this year as Automatic Media did in 2000 -- i.e., not much -- if it weren't for the partners brought on board. There are no fewer than ten, each overseeing a section devoted to a broad subject. There's Spin for music, The New Republic for politics, the still relatively new Inside for media, Movieline for movies, obviously, Gamers.com for games, just as obviously, Modern Humorist for jokes, TeeVee for television (mostly US television, of course), NetSlaves for conversations about work, Stern-partner Nerve for sex, and Wired News for technology.
In other words, Plastic is Slashdot for, as Apple used to advertise, "the rest of us." At first glance, it might seem that Plastic's technology section would be competing head-to-head with Slashdot itself, but while their readerships overlap, Wired News has always delivered a more cultural and less militantly Open Source angle on tech news than Slashdot. Perhaps the most surprising of the batch, though, is The New Republic, a respected weekly journal of opinion founded in 1914 and quite an impressive coup for Plastic.
But the role of these partners isn't just to add all the benefits usually associated with name recognition. Each of them are also to act as editorial gateways ensuring the quality of the initial posts that launch the conversations. Even Slashdot, for all its egalitarian rhetoric, has editors hand-pick its stories.
As on Slashdot, users, once registered and logged in, can set their preferences to filter even further, ignoring comments by other users they never want to hear from again, for example. Users can also take advantage of the community's collaborative filtering; comments can be rated by all who read them and an individual user can decide to view only those comments everyone else likes.
Well before Plastic went live, Editor-in-Chief Joey Anuff, a co-founder of Suck in 1996, sent a message "a list of our 500-or-so closest pals" inviting them to beta test the system. All seems to have gone reasonably well, though as late as Sunday, Anuff posted a message admitting that there was still quite a bit of tweaking to be done. Sure enough, on Monday, the public rushed in and found the registration system gummed up. No one could get a password at first, but after a few hours, this glitch was cleared up and Plastic is now off and running.
What's clear so far is that Plastic, like Slashdot, will not be the sort of "virtual community" where members come to talk about their day and generally share the travails and triumphs of their emotional lives. The Well, that classic example of the sort of virtual community that enthralled pundits throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, putters along under the auspices of the financially troubled online publication Salon, but one hears little these days of the hype surrounding the potential of community that peaked in 1997 with cover stories in magazines like BusinessWeek and the publication of books like McKinsey consultant John Hagel's Net.Gain. With rumors flying that Deja.com may be on its last legs, even the future of Usenet is a wide open question.
For now, then, the Slashdot model seems to have prevailed. Like the blogging phenomenon, it's a model that's less about people "communing" online and more about instantaneous metacommentary on news of immediate and perhaps only momentary interest; stories, new sites and oddities whose primary attraction is that they are new. That may suggest a rather desolate future for the medium, but on the other hand, Slashdot has proven that a communal identity, even one with a certain amount of power in its collective voice, can evolve from the model.
As for Plastic, the question will be whether or not such an identity can form around ten thematically disparate sections. Of course, one can also hope that Plastic will result in at least ten thematically disparate communities.
David Hudson is a freelance journalist based in Berlin, and writes the MediaGrok for the Industry Standard Europe.