As some of you may have spotted, I haven't been as vocal as I used to around the site over the past 6 months or so. This is because - as some of you may know - I've headed off to university to study Computing and Cybernetics. I have now finished my first year, and can devote my time to managing bits of Mod DB again.
Unfortunately I seemed to come back to somewhat of a mess with regards to the community I am meant to be managing. I acknowledge this is a lot down to my absence, but also a lot down to a quirk of the human mind which is expressed as something called Dunbar's Number - the maximum number of stable inter-personal relationships which a person can manage in a given scenario or social group. It's about 150 people, past which point relationships start to become strained and stricter rules are required to keep growing communities in check since they lose the self-policing attitude of smaller groups.
Unlike in earlier versions where the regular members of the site all new each other and regularly communicated via the forums, Mod DB has now reached the point where there are so many people engaging in regular social activity on the site that the 'common community' feeling is starting to crack in places. This may not be an entirely bad thing; for starters it shows that the site is growing up. It encourages people to find things which appeal to their personal tastes and expertise rather than just being thrown into the melting pot. v4's groups feature helps this along by providing a stronger sense of community for the groups of a few tens or hundreds than the site of a few hundred thousand whilst still keeping them plugged into the community as a whole.
The green ones are off!On the downside, it means you're more likely to be dragged out of your comfort zone and into a group that you are unfamiliar with. As I write, Mod DB has 248,390 registered members and although not all of them are active it's still a big pond to be thrown into as a new member, or even as an old member who's been left outside of one of the newly forming cliques. I used to know the first names all the 'regular' members of Mod DB, where they lived, how their families were and so on. Now I struggle to remember which member I'm talking to or to keep tabs on how peoples reputations are doing, which is a bad sign for a Community Manager. I'm hoping to improve it with an increased presence now I've regained my life, but it serves to highlight that this site has definitely grown out of its own comfort zone and is now starting the inevitable break up into smaller, more specialised social groups within the Mod DB framework.
It's up to not just me and the rest of the staff to keep up, but you as well. We're not standing still, and we can't stay the small close-knit community we once were.
