Ask HN: How are online communities established?
HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. are all established communities with users. How do you start a community when you don't have any users?
(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.)
And this reminds me of how some people theorize that life on Earth came from another planet.
In one way it answers the question, but also does not answer it at all.
My guess for origination online communities from scratch would be advertising and already having a small community. Well obviously content too. But I think the reddit founders early on pretended to be many more people on reddit, because no one wants to join an empty community.
The founders provided the startup community. PG's essay were the advertising. And both slashdot and the people who posted PG's essay there, where the advertising of PG's essays.
BTW, there are some YC founders that have join dates several months before us - HN was open to internal YC batches about a half-year before it went public.
Sorry, but I had to make that joke.
It's true that sorting through the low quality fics on ff.net is complicated. Though I appreciate being able to leave a positive one-liner as a review (when it's negative, I usually try to elaborate a little more).
Instagram had filters and photo editing -- and could then also post to Facebook. Even if you knew no one else on Instagram, there was a reason to use it.
Github is still a great UX for Git. You can host your own repos and work with your own team, even if you never look at others.
Why do people want to join first?
Communities start around passionate, interesting individuals. Reddit initially got popular because it was chuffed full of technologists who were openly sharing juicy details about their work. There were hundreds of other websites at the time that allowed you to curate bookmarks and such, but reddit had the people who made interesting comments on those bookmarks.
Reddit is awful at news aggregation, the front page is a hot mess of memes and clickbait. You have to weed all that crap out to find the people you actually want to listen to.
1 - Not all people who have same preferences or like the same things are willing to discuss or share ideas about that.
2 - I like to think people gathering around some topic is a secondary move, the primary thing that make people gather around is 'VALUES' and 'Principles'.
3 - We like to discuss ideas with people who we value, we like to talk about what we like with friends, not strangers, why? Because we know that we share values, principles and a cosmovision with our friends, family, etc.
So if you want to build a community, build around 'principle and values' and from this common ground you can set a main topic to be addressed by everyone.
Not always will be a single topic, but a niche, like the hacker news, our discussed niche is "hacking things", our values? Defy the status-quo, think out of the box, catch the black swan, see through the non-obvious, seek for excellence, etc.
It wouldn't be so successful try to discuss how to "hack things" with a bunch of douchebags ;D
Edit1: Also I saw people talking about the moderation drama but if you have done the principles, values, rules... you are going to have your own community policing who doesn't reach the cultural/behavioral fit.
Rules must be the very first thing to avoid a 'broken window' culture.
Furtherly, You can be open to discuss and aggregate more and more if necessary...
Rules can be more specific and based on your values and principles, the rules are the way you make the principles and values be followed/respected. Rules can change and adapt towards the behaviors but, on the other hand, I think principles and values shape behaviors, indeed.
Thanks for asking that ;)
I used sock puppets with different personalities and views that created threads, replied to each other and encouraged real users to reply and made them feel welcome.
I also moderated as myself and was welcoming to real new users, (and the puppets :)
This did not last more than two months, as there were enough real users that the puppets were able to largely hibernate. But it did happen, and it worked.
I never outed my puppets and they were not used longer than necessary.
Puppets will not sustain a community, but they can help establish one.
Nobody wants to join a barren community.
That's also why clubs and other social gathering places entice people with free drinks, VIP passes and get some cliques to be in early, to generate movement.
I wonder if it was them trying to shape content.
But not because there wasn’t community.
I had a solid moderation and community admin staff and people writing content for the blog.
To your point yes. Any community, band fans to burning man needs new blood constantly or it will die. People move on.
There’s a lot of talk about this in the DOTA 2 community—-fear it will not stay at the top of esports if it doesn’t do more to make itself welcoming to noobs.
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.
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.
Like you said, it takes effort from the person starting it to create activity and get people coming back / building a habit of checking for new content. Then you must empower the people that are passionate about what you're doing and treat them more like an equal / admin / mod vs a simple user.
This ted talk explains how I feel about building a community really well: https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_moveme...
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.
The structure of a discussion board is usually a chronological feed of discussion topics, so you’ll want a pipeline of topics to keep the discussions fresh(ish).
And of course you’ll be competing with a saturated “discuss things online” space, so there are strategic questions you’ll need to answer. Are you going to provide a place to discuss things people can’t discuss elsewhere? Are you going to provide a stream of topics people want but can’t find elsewhere? Are you going to provide a uniquely engaging discussion format? Etc etc etc.
I don’t know that anyone really starts communities, honestly. We’re already in a global one and it just breaks down into smaller ones depending on geography, beliefs, interest, etc. The thing you might provide isn’t a community, it’s a platform. Give a community that already exists a refreshing new way to connect and you’ll be in business (scale tbd).
Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design
Here are the chapters:
* Encouraging Contribution to Online Communities
* Encouraging Commitment to Online Communities
* Regulating Behavior in Online Communities
* The Challenges of Dealing with Newcomers
* Starting New Online CommunitiesI'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 Design Claims, and then backs up those claims by synthesizing the results of previous studies and analyses done by the research community. If you're less interested in the scientific literature, you can just read the Design Claims and still get a lot out of it.
Here is one example Design Claim from the book (you can see it on p29 in Amazon Look Inside feature): Compared to broadcasting requirements for contribution to all community members, asking specific people to make contributions increases the likelihood they will do so.
(Or to operationalize things more: if you want people to do something, don't send a mass email, send the request individually. I've personally found this to be a more effective way to get things done. Remember to only use this power for good, though.)
Also, let me clarify my conflict of interest: I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the same department as one of the authors (Kraut), who I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people doing scientific research on online communities would say is a clear leader in the field.
1. You start small ( pick a topic and be the best place to discuss that topic)
2. You can fake engagements with multiple accounts to get the ball rolling ( reddit did it, indiehackers did it etc...)
https://www.google.com/search?q=indiehackers+how+to+start+co...
As Steve Huffman described it in his old Udacity course (no longer available), no one wants to visit a ghost town. So when they were making Reddit, they'd create multiple accounts to post from so it "seemed" like a thriving community already existed. It does bring up interesting questions on where it sits in on the ethics spectrum, but the cold start problem is still very difficult with no one solution.
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/03/545635014/live-episode-reddit...
At about 19:40 is where they talk about seeding the community.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/movies/the-social-dilemma...
A film is cool, but 5,000+ people who are willing to go evangelize to their family, friends, and elected representatives is a whole different story as far as actually changing things.
"The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation" (2012) https://g.co/kgs/P2V1kn
"Tribes: We need you to lead us" (2011) https://g.co/kgs/T8jaFS
The 1% 'rule' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) :
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.
... Relevant metrics:
- Marginal cost of service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
- Customer acquisition cost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_acquisition_cost
- [Quantifiable and non-quantifiable] Customer Lifetime Value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value
Last words of the almost-cliche community organizer surrounded by dormant accounts: "Network effects will result in sufficient (grant) funding"
Business model examples that may be useful for building and supporting sustainable communities with clear Missions, Objectives, and Criteria for Success: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324
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 think a reasonable definition for online community is a group of people who regularly and continually participate in the same online platform.
That doesn't feel like a community to me. Every new submissions/feed is filled with new people with new advices, there is no continuity on HN.
Not saying it's bad or a good thing though. That's just how I feel.
I don't see the unification around a single idea when they are so many disparate views among the people that come here.
- 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
1. Stream of new content
2. Preserving a (possibly revolving) core group of contributors (20% of the userbase generates 80% of the activity)
3. Quality control/moderation (we know what happened to Quora)
An online community has to be aspirational (as in participants want to be part of an exalted peer group, e.g. SV founders) or serve a need for knowledge somehow.
very true but 100% of the userbase will consume 100% of the activity, extreme numbers but point being that whilst only 20% are creating content a greater share, assume everyone, will consume it.
In the UK there is a community called mumsnet - I know so many people (including me) who consume from it but do not generate back.
Here's one anecdote: personally, I haven't yet found anything that captures the feel or social vibe of early/mid-2000s LiveJournal. I think what another commenter referred to as "Single Player Mode" actually had quite a lot to do with what drew me to LJ in the first place - at least initially a lot of what it was about for me was personal blogging just for me, and I gradually explored other personal blogs and communities while I was doing it, eventually forming real friendships/relationships with other LJers.
Existing groups or constituencies (software users, professionals, academic community, sport club or fans, entertainment/music, etc.) are other options. Artificially-induced growth is another option --- several subreddits have grown from nothing to 100k+ members in a few months
Starting a generic commuity these days would likely be difficult (though see; Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc0.) Even well-capitalised firms fare poorly at this (e.g., Google+).
Likely better to have a specific community in mind. Or some idea as to what you hope to achieve.
Otherwise: good content, consistent posting, cross-promotion, and time.
Like if it's a community about a type of car, you'll want some initial owners or prospective owners (if it hasn't released yet). Maybe some DIY guides for basic maintenance, news section for OEM and aftermarket releases, etc.
This way newer visitors find already-established and useful content and stick around to discuss and add to it.
StackOverflow Podcast #1 https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange/stack-overflow-podcast...
- HN: discussions and news
- Reddit: niche topics and conversations
- StackOverflow: ask questions and find answers
All these reasons are different for the target demographics. Hopefully you can get people to come to the site to read, then participate and generate more content for others to discover and read ad-nauseum.
Sites which make it fun/useful for people either consuming or generating content, are the ones with thriving and growing communities....
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.
A community is first formed by humans. The online piece is just a platform, or a place of logistics.
This may throw you back in time but read Scott Peck's The Different Drum, to get a real feel of what a community is.
An area I’m particularly interested in is, given that anonymous forums require moderation, but “moderation doesn’t scale”, what would happen if you only allowed moderators to contribute to the discussion. Or rather, what if you only allowed people who have the required attitudes, ability and emotional intelligence to be an effective moderator to contribute to the discussion?
You’d obviously grow much slower if you’re restricting contributor growth to a small subset of users. And maybe that constraint on growth would mean you never become a viable online community. But if you could get to some threshold size, you might find that the quality of discussion is sufficiently different that a lot of people might want to read such discussions without necessarily taking part directly.
Ideally, the contributor community would make decisions about what those required qualities are, and how to assess new applicants. But we already have communities like this offline - this is exactly how academic communities behave. Existing “contributors” (professors with phd’s in the subject) decide who they accept to their community, based on evolving standards decided by that community. It’s also interesting that this, at least from my outsider perspective, is also how YC operates - they have a particular ethos, norms of behavior etc, they admit people who they think are consistent with those norms, and then enforce those norms: https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/
I think there’s an interesting analogy with professional sports. Baseball is a super accessible game, all you need is a stick, a ball and a field, so almost anyone in the world can play. But the way to get high quality baseball that people want to pay to watch is not by allowing anyone onto the field, but by restricting the players on the field to those with the required skills.
Regardless of how my particular “experiment” works out, I think it would be great to see more innovation in this area.
i became passive a few months ago. sorry dang, but no matter how you wanna look at it or defend it, hn is now, for me, a hivemind. but i just logged in for the first time in a while because i truly love this question.
a community is a place where people go to and talk about things they like. it is a place they can escape to.
i have been part of far too many. i have seen communities started by 12yo and 50yo. some are still there while i moved on. some are dear and near to my heart. i left some for personal reasons. people were getting far too close and personal and you get scared. but you keep in touch with those people you truly love to talk to.
great communities don't die, they just take up a new name.
I'm going to assume the kind of community you're referring to is one where the primary focus is social networking / discussion in the vein of Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
The way you build a community is to start with an existing community.
What I mean by that is you have to find an existing pool of users who are interested in what you offer and bring many of them in at once. From there you can focus on slower organic growth. Examples: YouTube and MySpace both began as dating sites. YouTube focused on getting people to upload introduction videos of themselves. Once they had accumulated a number of people who were willing to film themselves they pivoted over to content creation. Similarly, MySpace was a very crude dating site that allowed people to customize their page. Brad Greenspan was a serial investor who bought up a large number of tiny dating sites. He cannibalized all the revenue from those sites to promote MySpace as a "free" dating site. They had millions of users coming from other sites.
reddit was promoted heavily on Hacker News and focused on a tech crowd at first. Paul Graham threw his endorsement behind the platform a few times and that also helped interest people in checking it out.
For my successful community sites, I'll just mention one experience - I had built a Q&A site from scratch. It was finally done one Sunday night and I decided to go to bed. There were eleven posts on the site, mostly from myself, but also a couple from friends I'd asked to test the site for me. It was obvious there was no community there. I bought a single ad - for $10 - at $0.01 CPC on a Quiz site, then went to bed. My intention was not to launch the site, but to throw a little real traffic at it and see if any bugs cropped up that neither I nor my friends had found. When I got to work in the morning and had finished catching up on my emails I decided to check the site and see if anyone had posted. There were over 100 posts and people were using the site exactly as intended. Not only that but there was about $0.50 in ad revenue already, meaning my monthly run rate was net-positive from day one. I had hit upon a great fit between people who were already interested in asking and answering questions (the quiz site I advertised on) and my product.
In each case I'm familiar with, the formula was to find an existing audience that had an interest in the product in question and bring them on-board ASAP. If the internet were brand-new and no community websites yet existed I would build one by building a non-community website that provided a useful service, and building a community around that once I have captive eyeballs. In other words, to belabor the point: I would start with an existing community.
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.
Stack Overflow offered a better alternative to expertsexchange, which was fighting with google over how to show content (remember the scroll to the bottom of expert sexchange to see the non paywalled answers hack?)
Have you noticed that HN was originally a small group of smart industry knowledgable people, and gradually they trended towards disengaging as it got too big and busy and it became a crowd of jeering Redditor plebs like me? HN is a marketing machine for YCombinator, not a real community. If what you want is really "to build a big site with lots of users", the word "community" doesn't really apply, ask what you want "how do I build a site which tempts large numbers of casual users?".
Communities stay small. If your reason is you want a place where people who like X can discuss X then become a good place for those people to do that, be present, engage all the time, invite appropriate people to it and make it interesting enough that they have reason to come back, make it about what they want (could be a mailing list) instead of what you want ("my new forum written in React with a mobile app backed by an IRC channel!"). That will likely stay small - people probably already have a place to discuss X, there's probably a Reddit about X, and the real thing they'll be interested in is who else goes there (and who is excluded), not where it is or what software it uses. There's way more community in 50 people discussing a thing than in some mega-site built for ad revenue. Not much prestige or excitement in that, though.
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.
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 all the stamp collectors on my site??" like they were collectible things, instead of going to a stamp collecting group and joining and contributing and observing what they might be missing that they don't know they are missing because they aren't technical enough to be aware of all the options, which OP could maybe build or contribute towards.
but that's not at all as exciting as being in charge, which I'm cynically suggesting might be OP's motivation.
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.
I agree. I think most communities are created because of a need for them, not so much because somebody wants to create a community.
I disagree, a large percentage of people that are here for the interesting articles and curious discussion, but have no interest in YCombinator at all...