81–90 of 93 posts
Question is: what's an online community ? I don't think HN is one. At the very least I don't have a sense of being a member of an HN community.
I don't see the unification around a single idea when they are so many disparate views among the people that come here.
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This is a $150 textbook ($75 used $25 Kindle): have you read it and actually gotten value out of it? https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communitie...
The book shows for me as $35 on Amazon (paperback) and $150 for hardback, so I'd suggest getting the Kindle or paperback version. I've used parts of the book in a class I taught on the Social Web, and yes, I did find it really useful and I think the students did too. This book really is the best one out there summarizing a lot of the experimental scientific research by the research community. It presents a series of…
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…
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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.
Even if OP is really passionate about, say, stamp collecting - I'm asking why people who collect stamps should care that OP wants to rule a large community of them, why should they submit to it? There has to be more in it for them than "OP wants to be in charge, so we will go to OP's place and submit to OP's rules". And OP won't find out what that is as long as OP is asking a general place like HN "how do I collect a…
That's exactly why people who collect stamps should care. The community I mentioned is gone specifically because the very invested members couldn't do anything about the self-destruction. And we knew we were powerless as it was all falling apart. At this point many would be happy to move to a new platform simply if it provided some type of guarantees against a repeat. (Which I think could be accomplished by giving the moderators less power without compromising their ability to moderate. Somehow.)
As to your final point about joining and contributing, I've done that. I'm here asking about the general guidelines because there are people here who have walked the path of fostering a community, or know people who have.
- Shared struggles are stronger and last longer than shared interests (That is why a forum for solopreneurs (struggling with so much…) might have a more supportive vibe than a photo community.).
- Be an active and bold moderator: Answer questions quickly and be a role model
- Create clear guidelines for posts (What is allowed? What not?)
- Delete everything that violates the guidelines
- Let users flag posts
- Hunt and ban spammers
- Use captchas for newbie posts
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how is it doing now after 20 years? I feel the real challenge is once the community comes together, it invites or makes new comers feel comfortable. Also usually old members just move on for various reasons.
It was a Dave Matthews Band fan community and I shut it down in 2015 due to server costs, (which the community mostly covered Via PayPal but I had to do fundraisers) looming security issues (drupal and vbulletin integrations that became hard to get security updates for and my own passing interest in the band. But not because there wasn’t community. I had a solid moderation and community admin staff and people writing…
1. raise awareness. e.g. though word-of-mouth recommendations, or advertising (online, TV, events, IRL?)
2. it has to have something to keep attention,
3. it has to be worth coming back to
It happens through phased growth, sometimes explicitly planned, always interactively managed. A marketing and sales pipeline provides a google-able articulated view of a similar process. Or go as far "Manufacturing Consent"
They're built on positive feedback cycles, where contributions spur further engagement of viewing, and prompting others to engage. These are called virtuous cycles, when it's going in a desired direction (e.g. more contributions drive more views drive more contributions), and vicious cycles when they're not (bad drives out the good, e.g. toleration of off-topic / inappropriate content, deters helpful contributors from returning, while encouraging more detrimental contributions).
I would recommend reading Peter Hintjen's "Social Architecture"[1]. He addresses a question worded exactly the same as yours. He built a more narrowly scoped community as an integral part of building the ZeroMQ messaging library and tools, and ensuring that it was useful to as many people as possible.
Also, check out his other books [2]. Though, note that gitbook.com broke the links, and e.g.
https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...
becomes
https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/
[1]: https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/
[2]: http://hintjens.com/books
I'm planning to grow a group chat (matrix self-hosted) with friends, into a dev.to-forked blogging community, that I can share with other tech friends, non-tech friends, co-workers, and use to explain work successes to family.
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…
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It was a Dave Matthews Band fan community and I shut it down in 2015 due to server costs, (which the community mostly covered Via PayPal but I had to do fundraisers) looming security issues (drupal and vbulletin integrations that became hard to get security updates for and my own passing interest in the band. But not because there wasn’t community. I had a solid moderation and community admin staff and people writing…
Why not start a subreddit on reddit and use the wiki for a blog? Just an idea, I have no experience running a subreddit. Plus I am sure a Dave Matthews Band fan community wouldn't offend anyone. So, reddit can foot the bill for your community. Just keep a backup incase of issue.
I do have a backup and I may make the forum available again, but I am not sure. It was a lot of content to go dark suddenly.