"The shutting down took us totally by surprise," complains Vrolyk. "There was no warning ahead of time -- I think Netscape should have said, months ago when AOL bought the company, that the forums might be shut down. Then we could have prepared for it."

Instead, the community members were suddenly homeless. Netscape made no attempt to redirect them to a new space to continue their community or friendship; in fact, Netscape gave no official explanation for the decision at all. And although two former community members immediately launched a private bulletin board system elsewhere on the Web -- poignantly named "A Place for People Who've Lost Their Nethomes" -- to house the bereft community, it has proven difficult to locate all the old members and lurkers from the Netscape forums.

"I'm really disappointed, but I know it was a business decision on AOL's part," says Polito. "The problem with community is that it's a personal thing, but when it's done by a company it's also a business thing. People get hurt."

Why did Netscape suddenly shut down the forums, only six days after relaunching them? The official response is a non-answer. "The forums have been a great first step in the community area. We're looking to move towards the next level of creating community on Netcenter," says Julie Herendeen, director of programming at Netcenter, who promises that more "robust" communities will be announced in upcoming months. "We want to provide a better platform for providing community on Netcenter. To do that we need to transition from what we have today to our next generation."

Others are more blunt about the reasons for the removal. "It would compete directly with AOL; that's probably why Netscape killed it," says one former Netscape executive. In fact, he says, the community areas were a neglected portion of Netcenter since day one. "They just thought, 'Oh, we'll build a community.' But a community has to be integrated into the total system -- it became orphaned as a concept. They couldn't hook it into anything else on Netcenter."

The former hosts agree with this assessment. "Netscape liked the idea of community until it realized how much it costs. It didn't realize that if you just put up a forum without hosts, it will end up like Usenet, just junk," says Lewis. "The company wanted to have something that attracted professionals, and to do that it hired hosts -- but it put up the forums, and never advertised them, and never promoted them. So how the forums are supposed to have grown is beyond me."

If Netscape never learned how to take care of its community areas, it's now looking to AOL for inspiration. Herendeen says of AOL, "They were community pioneers. We are looking at leveraging the resources and expertise of AOL, together with what we have with Netcenter, to create new community offerings." Any new Web forums that Netcenter develops will likely be integrated with AOL's new online community efforts, which were previewed last week; although AOL is famous for the chat rooms and bulletin boards on its proprietary service, it still lacks any cohesive community areas that are open to the entire Web.

But not everyone is thrilled to hear that Netscape plans to mimic the community-building techniques of AOL.

Many of AOL's chat rooms, for example, are famous for their breeziness and sex-heavy conversation. And unlike Netscape, AOL hasn't paid the majority of its community hosts; instead, thousands of volunteers coordinate the chat rooms and bulletin boards, and serve as community leaders that offer specialized advice to the members -- a tactic Lewis calls "strip-mining idealism." Netscape's former community hosts suspect that the cost of their salary may have been a factor in the community's demise. (Herendeen denies this: "That really didn't factor into the decision ... there may be areas [in future communities] where we will want paid hosts or guides or moderators; you do get a higher quality of interaction in that situation," she says.)

Besides the simple issue of reimbursement, community leaders from AOL have other gripes about AOL's lack of respect for its communities, as documented by sites like observers.net, a news outlet for disgruntled AOL community leaders. More than once in recent years, AOL has abruptly shut down big community areas without any warning. After all, what are a few thousand disappointed community members when compared to the millions of people who come through AOL's systems every day? The departure of Netscape's idealistic community would be a tiny fraction of the member churn that AOL regularly undergoes. And the community areas, after all, are just one victim of the AOL takeover of Netscape. Over 500 Netscape employees were let go on April 1, and countless projects were brought to a halt. "Netscape is killing everything, everyone is really upset. People there are so depressed they can't even think about anything," says one observer who visited the offices last Thursday.

One of the most prominent complaints about the changes afoot at Netscape was written by Jamie Zawinksi, the force behind Netscape's Mozilla.org project. He quit the day of the Netscape layoffs and immediately posted a scathing critique of the changed Netscape on his Web site.

"The company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big companies just aren't creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is," Zawinski wrote. "The company I helped build has been gone for quite some time."

Apparently, many of the disappointed members of the community forums now agree with Zawinski's assessment. Although both Einhorn and Vrolyk aren't boycotting Netscape -- Vrolyk laughs that she is still using the Netscape browser -- and say they would consider returning to Netscape's communities if they reappeared in the future, Einhorn says he isn't hopeful that positive communities would return. He worries that any future communities would end up resembling the teen- and sex-laden chat rooms of AOL.

Sighs Einhorn, "To me, the forums were the heart of the Netcenter. It's like they had open-heart surgery and yanked it out. The pulse is gone."
salon.com | April 6, 1999

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