VERMONT – “On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is strictly prohibited,” wrote Will Oremus in the August 10 Washington Post (WaPo).
“Imagine an online community where substantive debates about Donald Trump, climate change and America’s culture wars nestle quietly alongside messages about lost rabbits and school board meetings,” he writes, continuing, “It exists and even thrives — in Vermont. Front Porch Forum (FPF) counts nearly half the state’s adults as active members. More than Facebook, Nextdoor, Craigslist or their local newspaper, the site is where Vermonters go to interact with their neighbors online, generally without disparaging each other.”
With half of Vermont residents signed up for the forum, from which they receive a daily email, most are familiar with it.
There’s a reason for that found researchers Talia Stroud, Caroline Murray and Emily Graham at the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin. Citing that research in “New_ Public,” the WaPo article notes “FPF is one of the few online spaces in America that leaves its users feeling more informed, more civically engaged and more connected to their neighbors, rather than less so. What’s more, its users seem to genuinely like it.”
That research indicates, “FPF users rated the platform as performing better . . . than Facebook and Nextdoor. For instance, 81% of respondents felt they could become a more informed citizen on FPF, while 26% said the same about Facebook and 32% about Nextdoor.”
The company “ultimately exists to stimulate real-world interactions among neighbors,” said its founder and CEO, Michael Wood-Lewis. “It doesn’t exist to be an online metaverse. We’re not trying to hold people’s attention online 24-7. We’d love people’s attention for 10 minutes a day.”
Don Heise of Calais is quoted as saying, “I can’t imagine life in rural Vermont without FPF.” He’s reported to have described it as “the glue that holds our community together.”
“The secret to its success: move slowly and moderate heavily,” writes Oremus
The WaPo article notes, “The process is slow and laborious, but it seems to work. Front Porch Forum is the highest-scoring platform ever on New_ Public’s “Civic Signals” criteria, which attempt to measure the health of online communities.
WaPo was given access to several local forums for several weeks, reporting, “In Marshfield and neighboring Plainfield, which were battered by historic floods in July for the second straight summer, most posts were about finding shelter and helping neighbors in need. But the discussion also ranged to climate change, with one resident raising the fraught question of whether it made sense to rebuild in an area whose flood risk may only grow in the years to come.”
Vermonters can continue to enjoy their slow social network in Front Porch Forum as Wood-Lewis is reported to be ”experimenting with an expansion into Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York,” but “intends to keep it to a manageable size, and he has rejected offers to sell it to a larger company.”
“I agree that something like we’re doing is needed in a way that’s not being provided in the vast majority of the country,” Oremus reports him to have said. “But if you scale up a successful small enterprise, you by definition will lose what’s special about it.”
The WaPo Article can be found at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/10/front-porch-forum-vermont-research-new-public/ and the New_ Public report at https://newpublic.org/study/3635/front-porch-forum
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
