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What makes these communities different from the one that did not succeed?
One thing that does work is maintaining a critical mass of "influencers". Likeable people who post high quality content with predictable regularity ;)
Observable is one community I follow. I think a lot of people had the idea to create of network of Jupyter / Collab notebooks (like Tableau's Gallery). But few have gained mainstream reach outside of their niche
ps Observable is hiring in SF!
Fake it until you make it.
I believe reddit did the same.
The people who start then have built a significant following in their field over the previous decade or two (eg HN), or they have a large amount of money to spend on marketing (eg StackOverflow), or there's an existing loose community who are looking for a home (eg Shadertoy). Starting a successful community without any of those things is extremely unusual. "Built it, they will come" generally doesn't work.
I've launched and grown/run a few forums over the years and the key for me was to always seed it with as much quality content as possible. Fake it until you make it. I believe reddit did the same.
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the...
The people who start then have built a significant following in their field over the previous decade or two (eg HN), or they have a large amount of money to spend on marketing (eg StackOverflow), or there's an existing loose community who are looking for a home (eg Shadertoy). Starting a successful community without any of those things is extremely unusual. "Built it, they will come" generally doesn't work.
Didn’t Stack Overflow piggyback on the existing and quiet sizeable audiences of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky?
https://www.amazon.com/Get-Together-build-community-people/d...
"Nearly every challenge of building a community can be met by asking yourself, “How do I achieve this by working with my people, not doing it for them?” In other words, approach community-building as progressive acts of collaboration—doing more with others every step of the way.
The throughline of our book is this simple concept: “build with.” It lives in each of the recommendations we make as we take you through three stages of building a community: sparking the flame, stoking the fire, and passing the torch. "