I developed and ran social networking features for a fashion site with an almost entirely female audience, age range 20-50. I was fully expecting bad behavior but was surprised as it grew that people were unfailingly nice, supportive and encouraging to each other, with only a few exceptions. Of course I'm aware that females, like anyone else, can be nasty to each other, but it barely happened here with membership in the thousands. It would be an interesting social experiement to replicate that on a larger scale while limiting the demographic by gender, age, and so on to see how it affects the behavior of the group.
I would guess fashion-interest is a better selector for positive interaction than female. Try an all-female board about veganism and watch them eat each other alive in a race to the righteousness bottom.
Reddit doesn't really work like a traditional forum. In a traditional forum everybody has the same visibility, in reddit it's very easy to create like-minded communities because anything controversial gets out of view very fast.
I've noticed the same thing on Reddit in subreddits where women make up 50% or more of the population. When I'm posting in these communities, I tend to be given the benefit of the doubt and receive a lot more supportive or cheerful replies instead of walls of text/sarcasm/"well, actually". It's made me unconsciously change my posting habits.
I can confirm that the general quality and civility of discussion in TwoXChromosomes spiraled downward extremely quickly once it was made a default subreddit. It was designed as a haven for women to discuss women's issues with other women on reddit, and has become one more public pool for gentlemen to tip their fedoras and "raise a debate" on paternity law, when the community was never meant for that sort of discussion in the first place. The day it went public every thread was full of long time community members begging for it to be reverted immediately, and pretty much everything they predicted came true.
That just shows that any time you open stuff to participation by the general population and lift it out of obscurity, it turns to shit. Just look at our elections. We'd be better off just having a monarch.
I think the factors that make, or break, an online community are: The number of active users, the visibility of posters (so reputation is at stake), and the ability for the community to self-moderate.
There seems to be a magic threshold when the user base size crosses it and suddenly people are more disruptive. Based on my observation of a few online groups I've participated in.
As an additional data point, I moderate a forum that's coincidentally mostly male (a function of the industry it serves), and they too are (at least on the forum in question) pleasant, friendly and supportive, with only a very few exceptions.
it barely happened here with membership in the thousands. It would be an interesting social experiement to replicate that on a larger scale while limiting the demographic by gender, age, and so on to see how it affects the behavior of the group.
If you want the results of that experiment, you'll find it in the conventional wisdom among reddit moderators and dedicated users. Subs with under 10,000 subscribed users are not only good interpersonally, the content of the subreddit is in it's heyday. If the userbase balloons, or the content quality nosedives, then you get bad interpersonal interaction.
I ran a popular blog and message board for Dave Matthews Band fans called WeeklyDavespeak. Anecdotal, but I put an all female staff in place in charge of the boards and there was effectively no drama.
I ultimately had to take to boards down due to waning interest in the band and the continuing attention cost of keeping the server and message board software up to date.
