It’s easy to build an adversarial relationship with your community. It’s hard to recognize and encourage really cool things in the community. One of the things that’s really cool in communities is when they go meta.

Exhibit A: Raph always says you should reward good behavior in your communities. One of my favorite non-gaming sites, the Comics Curmudgeon believes in this, and every week posts a winner of the ‘best comment of the week’. Hey, if wit and snark is what your community centers on, reward it! The comment threads are almost always entertaining as a result.

Exhibit B: may only be amusing to me. Read the discussion thread about this Fark story, and see how the community has hijacked the thread to amuse themselves.

Exhibit C: Tonight, a character on the show My Name is Earl was quoted as posting the following to a message board.

No, I don’t think shows should do more meta jokes that cater to the online bloggers and I’m sure everyone at Television Without Pity Dot Com agrees with me.

Turns out someone actually posted exactly that on Television Without Pity yesterday. The fact that the quote is, itself, meta makes it even more wonderful. When you dig further, you discover the guy also purported to be terrified of being crushed by his Murphy bed. This ended up being how the character in the show dies.