They exist in theory at this point and I would like to see that change. But I don’t know how.
Here are three examples of addictive forums:
Y Hacker News: It has default settings to keep you from spending too much time on the site.
Facebook: Different in organization and theme from Y Hacker News.
Stack Overflow: Different from the other two but also qualifies as addictive.
There are others but those represent a range of approaches that have produced addictive forums.
I’m not looking for a “smoking gun” sort of answer but some thoughts on what lessons these sites have for creating other sites.
Not just for use in creating a topic map forum but for creating topic map powered information resources that have those same characteristics.
An addictive information service would quite a marketing coup.
Some information resource interfaces are better than others but I have yet to see one I would voluntarily seek out just for fun.