Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, published a book called “The Tipping Point” in 2000. The book received a great deal of recognition for its thoughts about how ideas spread. He basically says that while some ideas spread slowly, many important ones spread in a way similar to an epidemic–a very few people, or even one person, pass them very quickly to a large number of people. He also explores how fashions and behaviors can become popular in a similar way.

I think the idea of the tipping point has a lot of relevance to the way online communities develop. But it doesn’t just apply to the popularity of the site, it also has to do with the personality that develops around the site and its users. Once enough people with certain qualities and behaviors get involved with a site, it assumes that personality. I think there are two tipping points–the one that makes a site popular, and the one that defines its personality. And the point at which each occurs can dramatically affect the future of the site.

Early popularity can damage a site, I think.

Many sites that solicit user input become widely known and available without developing a community. Think of Yahoo groups or any number of political sites (I’m not slamming Yahoo in particular here, it’s just that people can find and contribute stuff there without really thinking about it). When something is well-known and easily found, it hits its popularity tipping point rather quickly. At the same time, the vast number of users early on mean that there is a great deal of unthinking, poorly written, or knee-jerk commentary. And it quickly cements a reputation for that kind of content.

Conversely, when a site grows slowly through word of mouth rather than through sheer media presence, early users will know one another and will take greater care in what they put into it. This kind of site, like Metafilter, hits its personality tipping point earlier, so that when it becomes popular, that personality is well-established and less likely to be changed by large numbers of new members.

I’ll be talking more about online community, and particularly about Metafilter, in another post soon.