The director of a site would actually harm the site if he were to interfere too heavily. One has to know where the project is going to lead in the long term ahead of time, and direct it before it reaches critical mass, if he wants it to go in a certain direction.

The reasons the communities like Slashdot, Flickr, & others are so “irreplaceable”, as you’ve mentioned, is because they are fulfilling a need. They also came about at a time when it was ripe. Something like Slashdot persists because it feeds this need, even if it is not the most efficient (look at the number of comments that are related JUST to complaining about the posts on Slashdot).

It’s a discussion that’s worth a more in-depth look. How to apply these common principles to an Islamic market becomes more complex, because we don’t want to enable people to do characteristically unislamic things with the software we write. The design, therefore, has to be clear from the beginning to lead the community only in the directions or manner we want. This goes against the more broadly-based principles of other social networking projects, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to direct the audience of a project. For example, take Slashdot - you don’t find many posts about cars, or psychology, or humanities, or other “non-techie” things, because they would never fly. And the comments generally follow that same pattern. This is due to numerous factors - not the least of which is that the content is targetted towards that kind of an audience. Moreover, the Slash engine provides the moderation & meta-moderation system, whereby the audience themselves can vote down inappropriate or irrelevant comments. Therefore, if you attract the audience you want, then put in their hands the tools to keep things working on a massive scale.

in the last couple of months, we have also kinda decided to structure out entire company more towards writing social software.

Though, certain communities do have a certain feel that seems not to be ‘replaceable’ such as slashdot, flickr, i dont think the same applies for any notable islamic online communities, just my thought.