I feel like online applications and communities built around religion are pretty poor...
Your use of the word "poor" here is not merely delightfully ambiguous, but one of its meanings helps to explain the other: A lot of charities have poor websites because they are poor. Building sites costs money, as does maintaining them. And many people take a dim view of charities who spend more money trying to appear less poor than they spend on... the poor.
Of course, as the web matures nice websites cost less money. A lot of charities are turning to Drupal, for example, which in its simplest incarnations can be pretty straightforward to maintain, presuming you know how to set it up in the first place. ;) But beware the feeping creaturism...
I'm also pretty dubious about the facts of your statement -- not that online religious communities are poor, but that they're especially poor. A lot of online applications are poor, full stop. We're not going to run out of things to build anytime soon.
Your use of the word "poor" here is not merely delightfully ambiguous, but one of its meanings helps to explain the other: A lot of charities have poor websites because they are poor. Building sites costs money, as does maintaining them. And many people take a dim view of charities who spend more money trying to appear less poor than they spend on... the poor.
Of course, as the web matures nice websites cost less money. A lot of charities are turning to Drupal, for example, which in its simplest incarnations can be pretty straightforward to maintain, presuming you know how to set it up in the first place. ;) But beware the feeping creaturism...
I'm also pretty dubious about the facts of your statement -- not that online religious communities are poor, but that they're especially poor. A lot of online applications are poor, full stop. We're not going to run out of things to build anytime soon.