I come from a Guardian house. My parents have read the Guardian six days a week - resting only on Sundays to pick up the Observer - for at least 20 years. It's always been a loyalty based on familiarity and the feeling that ownership of their paper is worth more than the money paid for it.

At first glance, net users seem the exact opposite. It's the rule of publishing online: users are promiscuous. If they can't find what they want with you, they'll look elsewhere. And, unlike newspapers, it's spectacularly easy to do that - they're only one click away from the opposition. So, if you can't get them to come back regularly, the chances are that someone else will. It takes quite a lot to get someone to change their daily paper. It only takes one missed story or a slow download to get fed up with a favourite site.

That's down to the nature of the web. If ever there was a medium which instilled an "everything now" attitude, it's the internet. Justifiably, users get resentful if a site they've taken the trouble to go to has a page which is slow to download or is missing something they want. But, just as cars encourage people to cram more journeys into their day, the faster the net, the more people want - immediately.

Size matters, too. A research paper published last week by searchenginewatch.com, a Dakota-based site, found that the web is around 500 times larger than the maps provided by the best and most popular search engines. There are now more than 550bn documents stored on the web. Incidentally, that is also the best indication of the growth of the web - Lycos only indexed 54,000 pages in mid-1994.

According to the report, all the net search engines combined only index about 1bn pages, which means that if you're a user looking for a very specific page, you're increasingly likely to go to a bookmarked site where you know you're most likely to find what you want. So, creating a site where users feel comfortably at home is vital.

That feeling of being at home was reflected in a strange phone conversation I had recently. The call was from a user asking permission to alter the topic of a talk thread on our site.

This was strange only because the talk areas are the one part of our site where users are most in charge. They control the context and the conversations within certain limits, ie no racism, sexism, homophobia or abuse. Simply working on a site gives you no more power than the average user - and you become a party host, rather than a performer. And any power that exists in the ability to delete or alter a conversation is tempered by the fact that if there's one thing that annoys the hell out of net users it's the idea of censorship. Maybe it's just plain easier than writing a letter - while the Guardian newspaper receives about 1,000 letters a week, the Guardian Unlimited site talkboards get more than 10,000 postings.

And that self-policing works. Just as you wouldn't walk into a party of like-minded people and shout abuse at them, talk users generally don't, either. Who wants to be embarrassed in front of people you're trying to impress?

It's a strange sort of ownership that the web brings. When home secretary Jack Straw went online for an hour, we had more than 500 questions, many from people who would be too embarrassed to stand up and ask something at a public meeting. But, because users had mailed their questions in, they expected them to be answered - with none of the cynicism that might be expected from the net generation, they displayed a touching faith in the simple democracy of the medium. If you bother to send in a message, then someone has to reply, don't they?

However, there's a big difference between knowing who makes up your audience and wildly aiming a site at a pre-existing community and hoping you can get it online.

A survey I like quoting comes from California research firm Cheskin Research, which looked at the burgeoning numbers of Hispanic Americans going online. Now the marketing people who come up with dodgy business plans would probably have us believe that Hispanic Americans want their own sites and special portals such as Quepasa.com.

But the report found that, actually, Hispanic users are just like everyone else. They would rather use the big-name sites such as Yahoo! or Alta Vista to find specific things, such as movies or news.

Which just illustrates the madness of trying to create sites that appeal to a particular community. Why, for example, would a woman go to a specific women's site rather than a site where she could just get what she wanted?

People hate being told what they want to do, after all.

• Simon Rogers is deputy editor of Guardian Unlimited