(this was originally published as Implausipod E0033 on June 10th, 2024)
What happens if your community disappears? How do online groups deal with the challenges of maintaining their social ties across fickle and fleeting platforms? And are there lessons to be learned by the TikTok creators from the online MMO communities that were shut down in the early 2000s?
https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15146242-e0033-tiktok-tribulations
[00:00:00] DrI: On the last episode of the ImplausiPod, we asked what happened if you built an app and the community was still toxic, like, whoops, what do you do next? But there’s a darker side to that question. What if you built a successful community and then it disappeared? On April 24th, 2024, the US President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package bill that included legislation demanding that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, divest itself of those holdings to an American owned firm or face banning in the United States. If the sale doesn’t happen within 270 days, TikTok would be prevented from appearing in app stores, as well as certain internet hosting services. Now, of course the story isn’t over, this will be contested and appealed, but for those individuals who had developed or participated in communities on TikTok, it can be a significant loss.
A loss that we’re going to look at in episode 33 of the Implausipod.
Welcome to the Implausipod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And today we’re talking about the closure of online communities. It’s rare that a thriving online community is shut down, or explicitly banned. Often what happens is that a new competing service opens up and the user base dwindles until all that is left is a shell of the former community.
Other times, the service gets sold off, changing hands, and the community gets parceled off, the data being sold, the policy changes making the community lose interest and find alternatives. The latter can be seen in services like Yahoo Groups, Tumblr, Google Groups, Google Wave, Google Plus. There might be a bit of a trend there, is what I’m saying.
Examples of services actively shutting down can be seen more often in the video game market, especially in MMOs. The glut of MMOs in the early 21st century, all built on the assumption of online play and needing an engaged community to drive the operation, led to the abandonment of that community when the service shut down, the game was canceled, or the servers were closed.
Now, in some cases, the community was strong and was able to keep things going after a fashion, but in most cases, closure of the servers meant the end of the game, and the dispersal of the members of the community. Sometimes the community knew it was coming and were able to go out with a blaze of glory, as seen on the Matrix Online or the original City of Heroes, but sometimes the community just ended.
The server’s turned off, and the light’s no longer on. And this closure, with a looming deadline, is what communities and creators on TikTok are now facing. The announcement on April 24th started a ticking clock, a 270 day countdown timer with a date for divestment of the app by its parent company. And, in late April and early May following the announcement, a number of creators on the app, some recognizable figures, some longtime lurkers, first time posters, made heartfelt appeals.
To the communities that they built or discovered during their time on TikTok. I’d like to share a couple of those with you right now. They’re short because, well, it is TikTok after all, but if there is a video version of this podcast, I’ll try my best to splice them in. The first is by a creator by the name of Vegas Starfish, an events planner in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
At the time of recording of this episode, Her post had received a quarter of a million views, garnering 40, 000 likes and several thousand comments. Here’s her post, in her own words.
[00:03:39] Vegas: This is my farewell to TikTok. As you know, TikTok was just banned in the United States. This app changed my life. This is me before TikTok, and this is me after.
I was a miserable, mid level casino executive. I started making content about my city and how much I loved it, and then I started living life. I have never made this platform about me. It was always about the city, but I want to show you a glimpse at the creator behind the videos. I’ve always been socially awkward.
And it was through this app that I was able to meet other creators and most importantly, meet so many of you, every single one of you changed my life. Suddenly my voice mattered and I had a purpose and I started living boldly. I began traveling all over the world. As my self worth and self confidence grew, I became a better parent, a better friend, and I’ve never been great at making friends, but the best ones I’ve ever had came through this app.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with incredible artists and creators, people that I would have never had access to otherwise, and together by creating dynamic content, we’ve been able to change the paths for thousands of small businesses by directly highlighting great people doing great things. We’ve done so much good.
I know that the loss of this app will hurt creators and businesses financially, but I’m afraid of losing the human connection. We’ve been able to take you along for amazing resorts opening and iconic ones closing. Together we were among the first to discover a massive corporate hack last fall. You were with me when the sphere opened and we saw F1 cars race down the Las Vegas Strip together.
I have shared thousands of moments with millions of people. It has fundamentally changed my life and the lives of so many others. I am eternally grateful for every experience and every interaction. It has been a whirlwind. And I appreciate you more than you know. I hope to see some of you on IG. And thank you for following me for all the Vegas.
A special shout out to the feral cat from the Rio who helped me go viral in the beginning. You’re the real MVP.
[00:05:40] DrI: Here we can see how a person was able to change their career, find and build a community, and increase their personal happiness by becoming more engaged with the job they were doing. sharing that and then reaching out and taking a more active role within the community to the extent that they experienced better mental and physical health and career growth and wellbeing.
Pretty awesome all around. And while her story was specific to TikTok, there are similar stories like hers on many other platforms. During the same week that Vegas starfish posted, there was another post that was made that also. went somewhat viral, and it went into the benefits of TikTok for that person.
This was a first time post by a long time lurker, who felt compelled to reach out to her community for the first time because of the impending ban. I’ll play a portion of that post here, as the full post is over four and a half minutes long.
[00:06:36] Katy: Hi, my name’s Katie. And I’ve never posted on TikTok before, and I probably never will again, but I was watching the live vote today on TikTok, um, for Congress to ban it.
And I just started really reflecting on the past four years that I’ve been watching TikTok. I’ve been just a lurker. I don’t post. I just watch. Um, but it’s meant a lot to me and I wanted to maybe record my first and only video as a thank you. It’s going to be pretty rough because I had to look up how to do all of this.
So I apologize for that. I found TikTok in 2020 during COVID when my children with disabilities came home from school and instead of just mother, I was mother and teacher. And it was overwhelming. And I lived in a pretty homogenous suburban neighborhood where there was very much one way to be. And. I had a mental breakdown.
I know I’m not the only one and I was prescribed more antidepressants or maybe a stay in a treatment facility for an eating disorder. But instead, the thing that really helped me was discovering TikTok and all of you. I Learned a new parenting language toward my children that was very different from the one that I was taught from Mama Cusses.
Um, I was diagnosed with ADHD, as were we all, and I learned how to manage it and do struggle care, closing duties, and reset to functional with Casey Davis. Um, I learned how to normalize being normal from Emily Jean, I, um, watched TV shows and movies and pieces that I never would have watched before because of ADHD and anxiety comfort.
Always like watching the same thing. I learned that it’s. Um, normal and okay to cosplay, to, um, treat your fandoms like old friends, to like to read spicy fiction. Um, I learned more about my neurodivergent or neurospicy children in the last four years on TikTok than I did online. Almost all of the earlier childhood.
[00:08:49] DrI: And from there, Katie goes on to thank some of the specific creators that she followed and whose content she enjoyed. And we can see within her posts some of the challenges that she was facing, both as a mother and a teacher, dealing with a mental breakdown and parenting children with special needs, learning concepts like struggle care and normalize, and being exposed to new media, new hobbies, new fandoms, basically learning in all of these instances.
And in her post, we can see how much community contributed to that. And this is the power of community to the audience. Now, sometimes they’re derogatorily referred to as lurkers and the level of involvement and investment that they perceive to have of themselves with relation to the community. These can often be referred to as
parasocial relationships, and this can be true. Parasocial relationships are one sided relationships where someone develops a sense of connection or familiarity with someone they don’t know, like a celebrity or a media figure. With the rise of social media, creating more media figures than ever before, People have observed the rise of these relationships, but the term has been around since the 1950s when Horton and Wohl observed it in television audiences.
These relationships may look fake to the outside observer, but we can also see the power that these invisible social ties have. This is the demonstration of a well known phenomenon in the social sciences. In 1973, Mark Granovetter wrote a famous paper called The Strength of Weak Ties. You might not have heard of the paper, but judging by the nearly 40, 000 times it’s been cited, perhaps what was in the paper has been filtered out to become common knowledge.
In this paper, Granovetter was looking at job hunting specifically, and how people use their connections when searching for a job. And found that it was the secondary social ties, not your best friends, but your more casual acquaintances, that were more likely to come through in something like a job search.
Because your best friends, your strong ties, are more likely to run in similar social circles. They would be aware of similar opportunities. But those more Distant ties allow for further reach, and can be helpful as one looking for a career change, for example. We can see the effects of both of these in the posts I included above.
Both creators spoke of new connections they made, the knowledge they gained, and how they both Benefited from those social connections. There was another benefit that both creators had as well, though it isn’t as obvious. In the second post, Katie’s post, we can see how easy it was for a first time creator to reach out and make a post that was able to reach a million.
This has been one of the strengths of TikTok as a platform. As a tool, it democratized content production, turning users into Creators able to produce fully edited videos along with effects, captions, and connected to other content at the push of a button. And I cannot stress this enough, comparing something like TikTok to what needs to be done to produce this podcast or YouTube video, for instance, is night and day.
As the saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does. A well known systems theory quote from Stafford Beer. And this is what TikTok succeeds at more than most. It isn’t just the algorithmic content delivery and sorting mechanisms that go on behind the scenes, but also turning more and more people into content creators.
To this end, TikTok democratizes the opportunity to create. It removes gatekeepers from the products and allows users to make the materials that they want to see. Often, when we talk about democratization, we’re talking about material things, but here we’re seeing it with informational objects as well.
People can create exactly what they want to see and then share it with everybody and perhaps find an audience for those kinds of things, whether they knew one existed or not. And as Eric von Hippel points out in his 2005 book on innovation, it’s more than just the products quote, it’s the joy and the learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities that are also important.
These experiences too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. End quote. And I really want to stress this because this is what pretty much every article that I’ve seen on TikTok misses the fact on. Everybody points towards the algorithm or the social network and those elements of it, but the true secret sauce of TikTok is the ease of use of the content creation tools.
It can literally, with the push of a button, turn anybody and everybody into a television producer. Or director, or actor, or creative of some form. If TikTok is the new television, which I argued four years ago or so now, then everybody who posts on TikTok is a TV content creator of some kind. And I’m gonna let that sit for a second.
To expand further on that idea of democratization, I’m gonna return to Eric Von Hippel and quote at length. User firms, and increasingly even individual hobbyists, have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to electronics to musical composition. All these information based tools can be run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price.
With relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new products and services, and music and art. At a satisfyingly sophisticated level, then if what has been created is an information product, such as software or music, the design is the actual product, software you can use or music you can play, end quote.
Now that was published in 2005, so we’re seeing him capture in writing the effects of both the dot com revolution and the wide scale rollout of new computing in advance of the Y2K issue. That saw a massive expanse in computing products as everybody was purchasing new machines that were Y2K compatible.
But let’s go back to Von Hippel’s quote there. So, individual hobbyists having access to sophisticated design tools. Check. Allowing musical composition, video editing, all at the touch of a button. Absolutely. That’s what TikTok does. They could run on a personal computer at the time or now just the phone that is pretty much readily available to everybody.
Check. Rapidly coming down in price. Check. Basically free with an app or several apps in some cases with relatively little training and practice. Yes, new products and services and music and art all these things and we see some of this with AI tools Even though that’s not what we’re talking about right now and at a satisfyingly sophisticated level Good enough to show on the internet and a lot of people are obviously engaged with it and then software you can use music You can play Yes, the design is the product.
The thing that gets put out, gets shared with everybody, and that is the thing. And, as he said in the previous quote, this builds and allows access to creative communities, which ties directly to the quotes from the two TikTok users that we saw. There’s also another side effect of this democratization of content, and that is the increasing media literacy.
If we posit that literacy is not just being an informed reader, but also allows one the ability to write, so both input and output, upstream and downstream, then being more aware of content production The difference between what gets recorded, what gets seen, and how the audience reacts makes everybody involved more media literate.
Or at least it would if they’re paying attention. And I think to a large degree people are becoming more aware. However, more than just examples of democratizing content production and enhancing media literacy, Both posts from the users that I shared are evidence of the positive benefits of community.
We’ve referred to Howard Rheingold’s work on the virtual community earlier, and he quotes at length from M. Scott Peck’s Different Drum at the start of his book, and Scott writes, quote, We know the rules of community. We know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives. If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world?
We human beings have often been referred to as social animals, but we are not yet community creatures. We are impelled to relate with each other for our survival, but we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community.
It is clearly no longer enough to be simply social animals babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in business and over boundaries. It is our task, our essential, central, crucial task, to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed.
It’s a rather lengthy list that Scott has there in the middle of that quote. Inclusivity, realism, self awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community. But, I think it’s an essential one. When we think of the world around us, those are all things that we could use a little bit more of.
And as sociologist Richard Sennett notes in his book, Together, this community can be vocational as well. That working towards building the community can have such significant effects that it’s beneficial to all those involved, even the bystanders. As we saw with The Lurker in our second quote, that the audience gains benefits from the community as well.
The communities described by both creators are both meaningful. real despite being online. As we mentioned last episode, and probably often, is that there is no difference between online and offline communities save for the annihilation of distance and time. The distinctions made between cyberspace and quote meat space is often a false dichotomy.
Within academic writing on online communities, social networks, and the like, This difference was sometimes highlighted early in the literature, though more recent critical or reflective writing may no longer make that distinction. And that happens because in the 30 years or so since the publication of Rheingold’s Virtual Community, we have some Fantastic real world examples of what happens in online communities, especially when they go away.
And the reason there are so many online communities that went away is that in the early 2000s, having an online community was part of the business model of a number of companies. Including companies that were developing online games. And specifically those developing MMOs. The wave of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games that relied on a monthly subscription model.
This largely paralleled the shift to Web 2. 0 that was occurring at that time. around 1999 to 2004. But as we’ve been seeing with a lot of things gaming related during the course of this podcast, the gaming community somewhat preceded it, acting as a harbinger of things to come. Web 2. 0 is of course the change in the web from static web pages to user generated content, or UGC.
The MMO boom started in 1997 with the release of Ultima Online. where the term was coined, but it really took off beginning in 1999 with the release of EverQuest, and then heading straight to the moon with the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, and not 2001’s Shadows of Luclin expansion as maybe three people listening to this podcast might have been guessing.
Within the window of the MMO boom, numerous MMOs were launched based on a wide variety of intellectual property. Some licensed, some original, and all developed a community of some fashion around them. Even though the subscription based model that most used during this initial period represented a kind of Software as a Service, or SAAS, They were really more like community in a box.
The games relied on the volunteer labor provided by the community in terms of guides, maps, strategies, and communication hubs, external to the games themselves. In many cases, the games would be extremely difficult without the shared knowledge bases that the communities provided. It was the epitome of participatory culture that we discussed back in episode 16 on Spreadable Media.
And the communities. built around these games in part on the shared labour and collective action that was put into their creation. MMOs lived and died by the communities that existed around them. Alas, in a very dense and competitive marketplace, not every MMO succeeded, even if the community was there.
So I’d like to take a look at three that had high aspirations but ended up shutting down. These three were Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies, released in 2003, Cryptic Studios slash NCSoft’s City of Heroes, launched in 2004, and Monolith Productions 2005 release of The Matrix Online. Each of these were big budget MMOs with a large fanbase.
Some due to the tie ins with existing popular media licenses, and in City of Heroes case, being a generic superhero simulator in the era prior to the rise of the MCU wasn’t a bad thing. It emphasized team play, with groups of heroes working together to complete missions and fight larger threats, emulating the fiction of the superhero comics in general.
Star Wars Galaxies was developed by Sony Online, with a rich user driven in game economy developed by Raph Koster, one of the more notable MMO designers from his work on Ultima Online, who pushed for a simulationist view, where players would be crafting all the gear and materials used in the game. At least, initially.
And the Matrix Online provided a rich narrative experience, providing what is called transmedia storytelling, as the events taking place in the game are part of the larger continuity of stories told about the Matrix, coexisting with the events of the movies and other properties like the Animatrix. Each of these games managed to develop a dedicated community of players, active participants in engaging and extending the world.
But despite this active community, each of these properties failed, and the MMOs were closed. For The Matrix Online, it was shut down in 2009 due to low player numbers, as competition was tough, and honestly, the 2008 crash saw a number of properties struggle with their business model. For Star Wars Galaxies, when it closed in 2011, it was stated it was due to the loss of the license for Star Wars gaming,
which is a risk for any media property as well. For City of Heroes, without the licensing issues of the other two, it was a change in the focus of the publisher as the stated reason for its closure in 2012. At least, for a little while. The interesting thing is how these communities reacted to the closing of the servers, of knowing that the community that they had lovingly built was was going to disappear at a specified point in the future.
Each of the games had a massive farewell event, with the community coming online to celebrate the last moments. The Matrix Online turned it into a story event, and you can check out the link to the videos of that storyline in the show notes. The fans of Star Wars Galaxies created a similar event, and I’ll link that one too, culminating in a massive battle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance that was live streamed on the internet.
City of Heroes had a number of player run events leading up to the servers being shut down. When they went dark, all three Of these MMOs saw their communities dispersed, a virtual diaspora drifting out to other online places and virtual spaces.
But for both Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, the game lived on. Fans of each game had started private servers using emulation software, allowing the members of the community to meet up again and play the game, after a fashion, much the same as they had before. Not every member of the old community signed up for the emulator servers, of course, and they did skirt the bounds of legality, but it allowed the games to continue.
It allowed the community to continue. And for City of Heroes, the under the radar private server launched in 2019 became an officially licensed private server in 2024, free to play but funded via donations for server costs and the like. The online community was able to rebuild and bring it back to an audience 12 years after it closed, at least officially.
SInce the private server relaunched in 2019, the devs working on the game have added new material, new missions, and new features, showing that an active community can still support a game enough to allow future development. The gaming community may be showing the TikTok community a path forward if the proposed legislation goes through in the United States.
While there are current alternatives to the short form video that TikTok popularized, like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Clapper, and others, each of those have appealed to a different community and haven’t seen the wholesale move of the TikTok user base. It may happen, as often users will move to a site or page or app or whatever that they find most appealing, but this isn’t always the case.
There may be an opportunity for users to build their own. Tools like loops. video, which is currently in alpha testing at the time of this show’s publication, allow a very similar short video format. built on the ActivityPub protocol that we’ve discussed last episode and several times before. And much like Meta’s threads was built in record time to capture disaffected Twitter users, we may see other options spring up if TikTok is truly banned in the United States.
We’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops, and come back to it in a few months to see what the results are, and where the community goes.
Once again, thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI tools were used in the production of this podcast, save for the transcription software, which I believe is just machine learning. You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we described the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated.
You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a, buy me a coffee link on each show at applausopod.
com, which would go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time. So consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.
Coming soon on the ImplazaPod, we already have some episodes in the pipeline, though I’m not quite sure of their release order yet. We have a two part discussion on the first season of the Fallout TV series, as well as a recap of the most recent season of Doctor Who. And we’ll be looking at a few other online activities, including the emergence of the dial up pastoral and the commodification of curation.
I hope you join us for them, they’re going to be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.
Bibliography:
Bartle, R. (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Press.
Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press.
Koster, R. (2004). A theory of fun for game design. Paraglyph Press.
Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. MIT Press.
Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Yale University Press.
The Matrix Online Videos—Giant Bomb. (2012, July 12). https://web.archive.org/web/20120712062536/http://www.giantbomb.com/the-matrix-online/61-9124/videos/
There Is Another: The End Of Star Wars Galaxies – Part 01 – Giant Bomb. (2012, January 7). https://web.archive.org/web/20120107150559/http://www.giantbomb.com/there-is-another-the-end-of-star-wars-galaxies-part-01/17-5439/
von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. The MIT Press.
Links:
City of Heroes: Homecoming
Implausipod Episode 16 – Spreadable Media
The Implausi.blog Newsletter