Ask HN: How do you build an online community? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you build an online community?

I was going to write a lot of stuff, and I think that the longer my writing would have been the more responses I would have received.

I deleted it however because I realised that the question really contains all the information that is necessary and any content I would have added would have been a distraction.

If you have any experience, or even if you do not, of building an online community, how do you think one can be so built?

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From a technical standpoint, the primary domain of subject matter must be limited, the problems faced by individual community members must be deemed meaningful and there must be experts who are actively giving advice. Finally, the pipeline of new members must be filled due to events external to the online community…e.g. a person enters the pipeline for a Camry enthusiast forum when they purchase any Camry.

Of course that only gets you a help desk. For a real community, pathos is critical. The problems need to play out over time and entail setbacks as well as accomplishments. e.g. special order Camry is delayed three weeks. Helpful expertise needs to be provided even in the face of obvious tragedy, e.g. adding a Nitrous Oxide system to a 1989 Camry. Finally, there must be an outlet for off topic expression…no one but a fanatic can be all Camry all the time.

One attribute I have noticed about the sites to which I have been attracted is that they tend to be non-commercial and express the vision of a single person (though others certainly help realize the vision). A pattern I have observed is the migration of a community to a new site when a corporate controlled site radically changes the ground rules under which the community exists.

I seem to suck at building them from the ground up. All the email lists I started or co-founded went dead or are tiny and essentially stagnant (not growing, at least not significantly). But I have a decent track record for jump-starting conversation and increasing membership at a later stage. Two basic rules I followed:

1) Greet people warmly at the door. If they introduce themselves, say "hi", even if they haven't given you much to go on. My observation: People greeted warmly tend to join the conversation. People who are ignored at that point often never, ever post again.

2) Don't tolerate "orphaned posts". If no one has replied in X time (which would depend in part on the forum in question, but I used to use "3 days" as a guideline), then reply to it even if only to apologize for not knowing what to tell them. If at all possible, try to give them something useful/meaningful in your reply. Even if all you can do is acknowledge it, on an email list at least, simply replying will bump it back up and increase the odds someone else will have something meaningful to say.

Those were my two golden rules. They did wonders for several different forums I joined later in the game. In two cases, I was a moderator at one time or another.

If you get any good tips for starting one from scratch, I'm all ears. I can't seem to get the hang of that one.

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