Happy 10th Anniversary, Wing of Madness (WoM)!
People crave community. They will create a community around a shared hobby, like sewing or model railroads, or around something more weighty such as the struggle against an addiction. Online communities in particular fill a need for people who don’t have the time to get together in person or perhaps are not geographically near enough like-minded people.
Although I am myself an introvert, I accidentally created one of the most successful depression communities online, exactly ten years ago. In the summer of 1998, I was trying to figure out how to handle all the emails I was receiving through my depression website, Wing of Madness, WoM for short. A completely unexpected consequence of creating it three years prior was being contacted by people visiting the site. I had put my email address up so that anyone who found an error or omission in my articles could contact me, but that was rarely the reason that people emailed me.
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