I run 300 forums, and I had a startup for them. The lofty goal of the startup was to "cure loneliness" but I never told the users that. My path to doing this was to encourage interest based communication, in a way that would allow them to take it offline. How? Well to make it interest + geography, i.e. horology nerds in Cumbria, cyclists in London, petrol heads in Cornwall, audiophiles in Suffolk. By binding together…
I feel like it would be appropriate to share some of these forums in this thread, I think the immediate need outweighs anyone calling it out as self-promotion.
However the largest example is the London cyclist one https://www.lfgss.com . I started with cycling and the plan was to saturate one sport/recreational interest before branching out. So I run a lot of the cycle forums in the UK, from the Rapha one, through to Islington http://forum.islington.cc/ , Brixton https://forum.brixtoncycles.cc/ tiny clubs like Grupetto https://csgrupetto.microco.sm/
One of the newest is a sustainability forum for a group with a core around Cambridge but spread over the UK https://onething.is/
Some of the forums are private, and I'm fine with that as they can permission it the way they want and pull members from elsewhere as they see fit, i.e. the petrolheads in Cornwall.
Each forum is like a startup itself, they all have to find their first 10 users, then to get to 100 users, and to be aware of the 1% rule of internet culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
But I help nurture and guide, and show them how to do it.
Without funding I've slowed everything down though. It's funded by donations from users across sites today, but expansion risks cost cliffs as I'm just below the threshold for a few services I would need to pay for (auth0 free tier) and don't have time to engineer my way out. With neither time or money spare, it's stagnated.
But if someone wants a startup idea... this does work. Not wildly profitable, but it works.
How did it make money? I'd barely scratched the surface, but conversation around interest contains a lot of intent to purchase, and there are classifieds and meetups. So it's affiliates, a challenge against eBay (people into an interest have emotional attachment to the items and would rather sell to others into the interest), and ticketing for events, etc. And because it's all a platform, one instance, the traditional highs costs associated with running a forum were avoided. Lower costs, and actual revenues :)
I love what I do for work now, but I still believe this was an idea that is good for society.