Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mistake was thinking they owned a community. They may have started it, but once grown, the community is its own thing. A successful migration to an external website would require a wide buy-in from the prominent community members, and cannot be done by fiat by whoever technically controls the means of discussion.
Reddit communities aren't the same as in person social communities, they don't have any real structure beyond the moderation class. The "buy in" you're talking about is the fact that this site was built. I don't think this will "succeed", but not because of anything related to migration; it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user re…
WRT. communities - no, there really is more to it than "moderation class", just like there's more to HN than pg, dang and sctb. Regular submitters, regular commenters and people voting are what creates a community, what makes visitors go there, what makes one subreddit better than another on the same topic. They're the soul of a subreddit. Despite what the subreddit creator or moderators want, nothing can prevent those regulars from deciding to stay, or to move elsewhere. 'fourstar built a site and wanted to migrate the community by fiat, but people didn't move, and instead reported him.
> it's just not that good of an idea, from a business standpoint. If they redefine success as something other than growth and user retention, maybe they can create a fake kind of success, but this site will not grow users or any of the things a normal startup looks for when launching a product (...)
Here is a thing: nobody in the community cares. The regular posters, commenters and voters don't care about "growth and user retention" beyond "people like it in here". Lurkers and irregular visitors don't care about it either, they're interested in actual content the community curates. Communities like subreddits exist so that people with like interest can exchange thoughts and media about those interests together. That somebody monetizes them indirectly through ads is an artifact of hosted platforms, but nobody will be willing to abandon a perfectly good one just because someone related to the community wants to take this money for themselves instead.
Imagine this: a guy got together some people and started organizing regular open poetry evenings in a coffee shop in the center of a city. The event became successful, grew quite an audience; the coffee shop wanted it there (as it drove foot traffic), so it kind of kept organizing itself. Fast forward couple years, the original organizer suddenly announces that from now on, the meetings will take place in a coffee shop he just opened on the outskirts. How do you think the regular guests and performers would react? I imagine they'd laugh the guy out of a room - it's ridiculous to leave a perfectly good meeting place and move to the middle of nowhere just because one person really really wants to make money off them. I imagine if the guy was telling the guests to go elsewhere next time, the coffee shop itself would step in and kick the guy out.