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Ask HN: How are online communities established?

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Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#11

Post by djmobley »

jodrellblank wrote: post #6

Why do you want to? So you can extract money from them? Don't. So you can have someone to control and moderate and exercise power over? Don't. So you can have the prestige and status of a community owner and/or high traffic website owner and/or successful person? Don't. Have you noticed that HN was originally a small group of smart industry knowledgable people, and gradually they trended towards disengaging as it got…

Don’t know why you’re being downvoted.

I’d add that it’s a lot of work moderating and dealing with the drama that online communities tend to create.

Nowadays there are also legal implications, with certain jurisdictions making you liable for user-submitted content.

Unless you’re really passionate about creating a community of like-minded individuals, I wouldn’t bother.

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#12

Post by bserge »

You get users. The most important part imo is the regulars who stick around and talk to everyone, answer everything. They make the core of a community and help turn others into regulars.

I used to have 2 small niche forums and there were always 2-5 people that created the bulk of the content (along with myself - I had to post a lot to start and keep it going, I was the first user!). Always making threads, checking in, answering questions, posting updates and pictures.

New visitors would read all that and either never return, lurk or join in. They were passionate about the topics. Giving them special/higher privileges helped retain them for longer, as well, but eventually they just visit less (or leave completely) and someone else takes their place.

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#13

Post by nostrademons »

Usually they splinter off an existing online community or fanbase of a prominent writer/net-celebrity. Hacker News was initially populated by refugees from Reddit. Imgur also got started off Reddit. Reddit's initial userbase largely came from readers of comp.lang.lisp and Paul Graham's essays (PG funded it, and posted announcements there when it launched, 3 weeks after it started). StackOverflow largely came from the readers of the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Github's users were recruited from people the founders met at meetups.

(I was an initial user of both Hacker News and Reddit, checking both out the first day they opened. Also was an admin at FictionAlley.org, which grew from 1881 to 100,000+ users while I was there. That one was largely founded by refugees from Fanfiction.net, along with the readers of two mailing lists devoted to prominent HP fanfiction authors, Cassandra Claire and AngieJ. Same pattern: refugees from an existing community, + followers of a local Internet celebrity.)

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#15

Post by larrykubin »

I think the best way is to pick a niche interest and start there. When I first joined Reddit, it was mostly just LISP programmers and there were no subreddits. They served that niche well, then grew from there. Facebook started out serving Harvard students, then all college students, then everyone.

I started a YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/parttimelarry) last year and was wondering if anyone would find me. I had zero subscribers for my general programming channel, then decided to focus on something I was interested in learning myself. I narrowed my focus to Python for Finance / Automated Trading and documented what I was learning in public, and turns out there are plenty of people looking for information in this niche and they are happy to find a place to discuss it.

Now I am on track to reach 10,000 subscribers this year and have an audience that is very engaged and gives a lot of feedback. So start small, get the first 100 users. Once you have 100 users, you know you can get 1000. And once you get 1000, you feel like you can get 10,000. And then more people start noticing.

I also used to run a message board to discuss the band Tool. It's just one band, but people like discussing their music and lyrics. At the beginning, I needed to be the lead content creator and give people a reason to stick around. They wanted some discussion of lyrics, photos, show reviews, links to news articles etc. Eventually, certain members started posting more than others, like thousands of posts. I made some of them moderators, and they became leaders of the community, and it grew from there. The hardest part is getting the initial 100 or so people who are engaged, are passionate about the topic, and are willing to contribute.

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#17

Post by dawg- »

I was very involved in the Center for Humane Tech community back when they first started and was a volunteer mod for a little while. CHT is still a thing but I believe the forum no longer exists. I saw the press release about the organization being formed and it was something I really cared about so I found the forum on their website where a lot of people were joining and very excited to actually get something done about these issues. The people joining had impressive bios, connections in every corner of the tech industry, as well as educators, psychologists, researchers, etcetera. The energy was very real and very exciting at first. It went stale after a few months because everybody was just there spinning their wheels, not accomplishing any action. It began to feel more like talk therapy for people who hate dark patterns and manipulative app design. The leadership of CHT had an amazing start to a real national grassroots network that they could have engaged to push for policy change in states across the country. There could have been organized film screenings, letters to representatives, pushes for legislation, all the usual stuff. But I think they weren't ready or able to take advantage of something like that, and the momentum died.

So based on that experience if I had to outline a simple 2 step process, I would say: 1. Rally people around something they are passionate about, and 2. Give them something to do besides talk. My experience was disappointing because #1 happened in a really big way, but #2 did not.

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#18

Post by luckylion »

djmobley wrote: post #11
jodrellblank wrote: post #6

Why do you want to? So you can extract money from them? Don't. So you can have someone to control and moderate and exercise power over? Don't. So you can have the prestige and status of a community owner and/or high traffic website owner and/or successful person? Don't. Have you noticed that HN was originally a small group of smart industry knowledgable people, and gradually they trended towards disengaging as it got…

Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. I’d add that it’s a lot of work moderating and dealing with the drama that online communities tend to create. Nowadays there are also legal implications, with certain jurisdictions making you liable for user-submitted content. Unless you’re really passionate about creating a community of like-minded individuals, I wouldn’t bother.

> Unless you’re really passionate about creating a community of like-minded individuals, I wouldn’t bother.

I agree. I think most communities are created because of a need for them, not so much because somebody wants to create a community.

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#19

Post by iKevinShah »

The key (for any product), from what I have learned and have no experience of it, seems to be finding a `beachhead market`, a startup term for finding a smallest possible subset of a niche, where you can dominate (establish a community in this case) and then grow from there one step at a time.

Re: Ask HN: How are online communities established?

#20

Post by PaulHoule »

YCombinator was a successful startup accelerator, then built HN.

The folks behind Stack Overflow ran a popular blog (Coding Horror)

In those cases they had a smarter-than-average population that had some shared interest (e.g. "COMM-unity".)

When those sites came around, Google was recognizable as what it is today, but Facebook was not. Hyperlinking wasn't seen as a crime back then, and Google didn't see organic search results as competition for paid advertising.

Circa 2000 I helped someone build an online community of 400,000 in Brazil -- the start of that was sending 10,000 spam emails, which got us 2,000 sign ups (as incredible as that sounds today.)

Pay attention to retention. If you think it is a hard to get people, then it is all the more important to retain people and to think about the path of getting them to contribute.

I think a lot of people who want to try marketing don't understand how much work it takes. If I wanted to advertise a concert at a college campus I'd expect to put up a (8.5x11) poster for every 10 students or so. I see a lot of people print 1 poster per 1000 students and call it a day.

Some people don't want to make extra designs and wait for the printer, other people don't want to spend the $, other people don't want to walk to every building on campus.

You will hear stories of someone who got an exceptional break (that 20% effective e-mail blast is one) and wish you could get one. Don't let that wishing get in the way of doing the hard work, in fact often it seems you get the "break" by accident when you are doing the "average" work.

Avoid the Girardian ("mimetic") traps that are popular in many places. In particular, do not be "part of a herd" without a well-examined understanding of why your actions benefit you (incl. 'your brain thinks that cocaine raises your utility function but it doesn't)

Specifically, those "Like us on Facebook" buttons feed data and traffic back to Facebook from hundreds of sites. The ratio of engagement the world gets from those buttons is vastly less than the engagement that the world gets.

If I was talking to customers on the phone and trying to get them to buy into a bad deal like that I'd have a hard time, but when people see that "everybody else is doing it", it's hard to get people to think the consequences through.

Those sites you mention all predate the Facebook age. To linear order, "new communities are not being created". If you look closer, new communities are being created but they are smaller and separated from the social media lamestream.

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