Community this and community that – everything on the web these days seems to have to be a community and a free access one at that. Gawd forbid if you should decide that people will have to fork over money just so they can belong to some web based community. It’s not like Web 2.0 and Social Media are the bringers of community greatest to the web. After all communities that existed on the web long before there was even a web. Long before some advertising supported pastel colored web site uttered the famous words of join our community people have been forming very strong communities on the Internet. Whether it be the FidoNet echos or the most illustrious community of them all – The Well – people have always managed to congregate together in the electronic hinterland.

In many cases those early communities where free because there was no real advertising model available but in its stead there were donation drives because at that time it was extrememly expensive to be involved in the early days of online communication. Then as the web became more of the norm and these older communities moved to the more modern web forum formats ways to make charging and collecting memberships became increasingly easier. These fees were never meant to make fortunes from but to help defray the still expensive proposition of maintaining these online communities.

Then along comes cheap bandwidth and even cheaper ways to create and maintain online communities. Along with this we started to see advertising companies increasingly finding ways to get involved providing many community owners a chance to actually make a few bucks. It still took a lot of work though and involvement to make a successful web community that people kept wanting to be a part of. In the last few years this has all changed thanks in a large degree to things like AdSense, blogs and the propagation of the idea that everything on the web should be free.

Where people once ran large communities supported by the membership either through involvement or by donations that were more than willingly paid we know have communities and services that expect nothing more from you than an email address that they can use to pump up their user stats with. Supported by either VC dollars waiting for the multi-million dollar payouts or by ad dollars flowing in by the bucketful these new so-called communities come and go faster than hookers on Avenue B on a Friday night.

At one time the idea of belonging to a community like The Well was something of value but with the ever growing glut of everything on the Internet now having to have some sort of community aspect to it; even when it really makes no sense to have one, the idea of being a part of a community has been cheapened. Not only is that membership now just a mundane thing that everyone has to do in order to use copycat services but when a company decides that maybe they should charge for that membership they are instantly derided as a loser across the Internet.

This was the reaction when the Wall Street Journal announced their own social network and that it would be behind a paywall. Well you would have thought that the world was coming to an end by the reaction of people calling this a step backwards and was one that was bound to fail. The only contrary opinion I have seen so far on this had to be from Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins in his post on Mashable where he took the opposite stance of Leslie Poston who said on Tech Blorge that this move was totally contrary to what community building was suppose to mean.

Mark’s point in his post was

While I’ve never been a fan of the pay-wall in general, there have been a number of situations where I think it’s a very viable business model. PEHub, for one, offers some of very advanced information that’s available by paid subscription only. The information contained therein is generally only useful for a very short and finite period of time, and the folks it ends up being useful for usually have the money to pay for it.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal came from those types of roots. In recent years, they’ve gone a lot more mainstream with their editorial policies, not to mention their readership. Chances are, though, if you use the Wall Street Journal as your filter on the news, you belong to a somewhat elite community.

Getting access to the minds and the contacts within that elite community are almost as much of a selling point for ponying up the fee to get behind the paywall as the content itself.

In other words, mark it on your calendar folks, because we may be witnessing the first successful attempt to sell access to a social network.

This is the biggest problem of this new breed of so-called community building – there is very little or no stickiness to them. There are no reasons for anyone to invest any time in these faux communities other than sticking in their email address and some beta code that they got. IT has become a case of flitting between all the new shiny perpetually beta networks or aggregators to see how they fit with your interests of that day or week. After all it’s not like it is going to cost you anything – so what does it matter if you never go back because there will be another one to replace them tomorrow; and another the day after.

As my papa use to tel me – you only get what you pay for. So maybe the time to actually start paying for some of these services isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe then we’ll be really serious about being a part of the community and be willing to invest the time past that first free cursory glance and make it a community to be proud of being a part of.

Free isn’t everything and it shouldn’t be.