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Move fast and break things is the credo of the tech industry, which sees that strategy as the key to enormous profits. That model has been spectacularly successful — if your definition of success includes shoveling billions of dollars into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. But if success is measured by creating online town halls — places where people can come together to discuss matters that interest them, whether its politics or the latest recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie, without all the drama and chest thumping we find on Facebook or Xwitter — Front Porch Forum in Vermont is the model.

In 2006, Michael Wood-Lewis launched Front Porch Forum in 40 Vermont neighborhoods after several years running a neighborhood internet mailing list in Burlington. An engineer by training, Wood-Lewis was constantly tinkering with different ways of running the mailing list. Should users be anonymous or identified by their real names? Real names were best for building community, he decided. Should people outside a neighborhood be allowed to join? Not if you wanted to keep it feeling safe and intimate, he believed. Local businesses are permitted to join, but they have to pay for advertising. (Local ads make up most of the company’s revenue.) Should any topics be off limits? Not necessarily, but certain behaviors should be, Wood-Lewis decided.

What he learned quickly is that if you don’t set and strongly enforce rules for how people can talk to each other, things will get ugly in a hurry. “What we say is, attack the issue, not the neighbor,” Wood-Lewis told the Washington Post recently. “If your issue is a barking dog or hypodermic needles in the park, then let’s talk about that. But don’t say, ‘This particular person’ or ‘This particular dog.’ We can’t fact check that, and you could totally destroy someone’s reputation.”

Serving Vermont Since 2006

Front Porch Forum caught on quickly and began expanding across the state. In 2011, it played a leading role in mutual aid during major flooding. Growth surged again during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 when people used the site to offer masks and coordinate grocery drop-offs for elderly neighbors. Flooding the last two years in Vermont has spurred fresh bursts of signups and activity, with the site now claiming 235,000 active members in a state with just 265,000 households. Front Porch Forum says nearly half of the adults in Vermont are active members. It is where Vermonters go to interact with their neighbors online — without disparaging each other.

While Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have sought to frame their networks as forums for free speech, Wood-Lewis said he thinks of Front Porch Forum more like a corner pub. If a patron starts making a ruckus, moderators ask that person to tone it down, and they remove anyone who doesn’t comply. In rare instances, the site imposes a “topic timeout,” temporarily shutting down a debate the moderators feel has turned sour. But Wood-Lewis said the beauty of careful moderation is that, over time, most users learn to adhere to the site’s norms on their own.

At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community. It has achieved critical mass in the Green Mountain State not by embracing the growth hacks, recommendation algorithms, and dopamine-inducing features that power most social networks, but by deliberately avoiding them.

New research from the nonprofit New Public finds Front Porch Forum 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. “I can’t imagine life in rural Vermont without FPF,” Don Heise of Calais, Vermont, told the Washington Post. He described it as “the glue that holds our community together.”

 Move Slowly & Moderate

The secret to success for Front Porch Form is to move slowly and moderate heavily. It has no real-time feed, no like button, no recommendation algorithm, and no way to reach audiences beyond the local community. It offers users no reward for posting something provocative or sensational other than the prospect that your neighbors will see it and perhaps bring it up the next time you run into them at the grocery store. The company “ultimately exists to stimulate real world interactions among neighbors,” said 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.”

While most tech giants view content moderation as a necessary evil, Front Porch Forum treats it as a core function. Twelve of its 30 full-time employees spend their days reading every user post before it’s published, rejecting any that break its rules against personal attacks, misinformation, or spam. 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.

One recent topic that got a lot of attention was the decision by Tractor Supply to cut its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and abandon its climate commitments in response to a pressure campaign by reactionaries. The debate stayed civil, if sometimes testy, on Front Porch Forum. If anyone tried to post an ad hominem attack or denigrate a group of people, there was no evidence of it on the forum. Such posts are typically rejected by its moderators before publication. “I’m just not going to shop there,” one person posted. “Their bird seed is too expensive anyway!”

Front Porch users’ satisfaction shows how careful moderation and prioritizing civility over engagement can lead to a vastly different experience of social media, said Eli Pariser, co-director of New Public and author of a book entitled The Filter Bubble. “I think there’s a real social media fatalism that has set in, that it’s just irredeemably toxic, and never going to get any better. The goal here is to demonstrate that local conversations don’t have to be toxic. That’s a result of the business model and how they’re designed.”

81% Approval Rating

In a New Public survey of more than 13,000 Front Porch Forum users, led by University of Texas at Austin communications professor Talia Stroud, 81% of respondents reported feeling like the site makes them a “more informed citizen.” Just 26% of respondents said the same about Facebook and 32% about Nextdoor. Respondents were also more likely to report feeling safe and free to speak their minds on Front Porch Forum than on other social networks.

“It’s not totally shocking that the ‘slow food’ of social media is coming from Vermont,” a state famous for artisanal small businesses, Pariser said, acknowledging the model might not translate easily to larger, more diverse states. “But Vermont also has a class divide. And one of the things we think is notable about Front Porch Forum is it seems to kind of bridge those divides.”

While Wood-Lewis is experimenting with an expansion into Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York, he said he 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,” he said. “But if you scale up a successful small enterprise, you by definition will lose what’s special about it.”

The Takeaway

Those of you who have never been to Vermont may have difficulty understanding all the nuances behind this story. Vermont is one of the most beautiful states in America, with first-class universities, great cities, rolling farmland, and some of the most amazing fall foliage you are likely to find anywhere. One of its US Senators is a Democrat, one is an Independent, and the governor is a Republican.

I visited Vermont during the Covid pandemic at a time when the rest of America was losing its mind. At a local farmers market in Waitesfield, the public was expected to wear masks and everyone did. The customers walked in an orderly counterclockwise direction to avoid most personal interactions, there were systems in place to accept payment without exchanging pathogens, and about 80% of the people were driving either a Subaru, a Volvo, or a Jeep — all with 4-wheel drive, of course.

I had a classmate in college who got a summer job working for Vermont Power. He would drive up, read the meter, then knock on the front door and present the bill. He was always paid in cash and he claims he doubled his wages by separating out the rare coins people gave him from the jars they had stashed in the pantry or under the bed. Vermonters are hard working, industrious, and frugal. They are also keenly aware that changes in the Earth’s climate seem to have targeted their state in ways that could hardly be guessed at just a decade or so ago. See Bill McKibben’s book Oil And Honey for more on that topic.

To address the climate crisis effectively, we need to be able to talk to each other without rancor and without racist or fascist tropes. It’s hard to see how the model for Front Porch Forum can be extended to other areas of the country without breaking the mold, but it would be interesting to see if some of the lessons learned by that forum could cool the toxic nature of most online communications today.

Featured image by ngoc202020 from Pixabay