As everyone has mentioned, it didn’t exactly used to be that way. When you went into one of those old-timey chatrooms (cue old-timey piano music), you had no idea what kind of people would be there. The site had to work harder to sell you on a theme.

WELL seems to be somewhere in between. They got journalists to sign up so they could spread the word. But they were also selling the idea that a certain kind of person would show up to a WELL discussion. The person you talked to might be a stranger, but you’d recognize their type.

Like a few people discussed on this thread, I remember going into chatrooms and forums and talking to strangers, much like WELL members did back in the hippie days. Now, while I am somewhat creeped out by the thought of talking to strangers online, I think my limited experiences with online strangers back in the day were fairly useful. I belonged to an online debate forum throughout high school (that’s when we got WebTV). I know, I know, I’m a nerd, but the example illustrates my point. I would pose questions and reply to threads under a pseudonym. Not only did I learn a lot from debaters all over the country, but I made a few friends online. Some of us would chat in the forum’s chatrooms and we met in person at debate tournaments. While this may be a rarity, I actually forged real-life friendships with the debaters I met online. So, talking to strangers online actually became talking to friends in person. Go figure.

And yes, some people do get online primarily to meet strangers (as evidenced by the success of online dating sites), but you don’t maintain your anonymity.

Basically I think the initial reaction to chat rooms, anonymous encounters, etc is one of excitement at the unknown. But now that we all know what to expect, we crave the personal connections, and then realized the Internet could provide that as well as more further explained in the other reading.

As for the WELL, I do like how it strives to be a creditable source with real names and such. I think that is a great model to follow. So many people hide behind the anonymity of the web and spout ideas as facts. It is a bit sad. Hopefully, in the future, others will follow this example and make the Internet more reliable for those gathering information. Unfortunately, that is all I really got from the article. Sorry I can’t give more!

I was a bit confused by the idea of the WELL community not being anonymous. Rheingold says the WELL users created pseudonyms. How is that not anonymous? Were other users able to view their real names somehow? I wonder if WELL was like the modern-day Web, where everything seems anonymous, but nothing really is.

It is funny to me to see how online interactions have changed. With WELL, people were mostly communicating with strangers. And as Brenna and Andrea said, when we first became exposed to the Web through AOL and other services, the norm was to interact with strangers online. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think most Web users have moved away from that now, using the Web mostly to communicate with people they know or to gather information.

For me this article said more about the idealistic dreams of aging members of the counterculture than it did about the states of virtual communities.

Online interaction will always feel partially hollow, as Brenna has already mentioned, so Anna and I will have to work on paring back our use of Facebook to feel better about our lives. My guess is that the allure of sites like Facebook will fade once the limits of its usefulness become clearer. There is always intense fervor with the introduction of new forms of interaction, but in the end practicality rules the day. Those utopean dreams are really just dreams after all.

If WELL started out as a credible source (or at least more credible than Wikipedia) why was this model not followed? Why not have people identify themselves by name on Wikipedia? Why not require people to prove themselves as intelligent on the topic? I guess if that was the case then Wikipedia wouldn’t be what it is today – a massive source of information.

I just wonder if anyone did follow the WELL model, and if so where are those sites? What are they doing? Is it working? What would the original hippie founders say about WELL now?

I, like Brenna, was a little depressed by this article. I too was thinking back to the afternoons of typing away with strangers in chat rooms - half the time I made up my age and location. Maybe this online community was exactly what these Deadheads needed, but wouldn’t they have been better off finding ways to congregate and communicate in person? Everyone needs to feel connected, but I can’t see how online communication can be an all-out replacement for socializing.