As if on cue from my entry last week, famed community blog Boing Boing posted an item today discussing its explosive growth in popularity. Apparently the site’s popularity is reaching a point where, if the trend continues, the bandwidth costs will exceed the amount the site’s founders can afford to put into the site.
The ensuing discussion has been underwhelming, if that’s a word (I know it’s not ‘cuz I looked it up, it’s one of the skills I learned in my school). The responses have varied from the obvious “charge a subscription fee” or “show ads”, something that’s never well received by those used to getting their daily infoporn delivered free and unmolested, to the positively naïve “put up a tip jar” suggestions from people who have never actually had to sell something to someone. And of course, there have been the techno-centric solutions: use mod_gzip to compress data, redesign the site user interface to use less text/images/data, and limit the amount of old information presented on the front page. All very fine ideas, and all already used to some extent by the designers of Boing Boing.
The part that interests me: this is a longstanding and recognized problem for community web sites. These sites struggle in obscurity for ages, only to suffer a meteoric rise in popularity that is the ultimate undoing of both the site and those footing the bandwidth bill. Boing Boing is just the latest in a long list of community web sites to face this problem. Just ask Rusty.
Given that numerous readers (and writers) of Boing Boing are aboard the Creative Commons and EFF bandwagons, it seems that some thought should already have been directed at solving this problem: how to allow free content to flourish at the interface between those resources that are made freely available by their creators (content, in this example) and those that are not (bandwidth, in this case)? What’s even weirder is that this problem has remained unsolved for so long, especially given the nearly endless supply of software developers that usually comprise these sites’ readership.
One of my MBA professors was fond of pointing out the folly of believing we will move to a pure service-based economy: we can’t all make a living by giving each other haircuts and massages – someone has to make the scissors and massage tables. And, chances are, they want to be paid in cash, not hair clippings and “happy endings”. Well, not hair at least.
If Boing Boing really is a community, where the common currency is not money but something else (whuffie, for example, to use Cory‘s term), then the community membership needs to be willing (and able) to provide the currency required to keep the site running. Readers of Boing Boing already provide one half of the capital required by the site to keep it running, namely content in the form of submissions to the web site (and discussions, if they ever turn comments back on). What we need now is a mechanism that allows the community to step up and provide the other half of the currency Boing Boing must expend to serve the community: bandwidth and processing power.
In the case of community web sites, we can trick the bill collector to accept hair as a form of payment. Smart guys like Bram Cohen and Ian Clarke, creators of BitTorrent and Freenet respectively, have shown us that we can harness the collective bandwidth and CPU resources of Internet. And we can do it for “free” – if by “free” you mean the amortize cost of the maintaining the community over the user base, who will bear the burden, albeit willingly, as part of their monthly Internet bill or pilgrimage to Fry’s. It seems to me a distributed P2P content system that allows the community to be self-sufficient, rather than free-riding on the efforts of the community founders, is exactly the kind of solution Boing Boing needs.
All that remains is some smart guys like Bram and Ian to step up and make it happen – and aren’t these the kind of people that read Boing Boing regularly?