You’re kidding right? Charging 50 euro for access to basically a Discord, Slack, etc. channel.
There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free. When you do stuff peer-to-peer, it always costs money if you want it to be sustainable. Like for example, a book club. Either everyone is going to take a turn hosting, or everyone is going to give the host a few bucks/bring snacks/wine/etc. (or you're going to go to some commercial space that sells food and drink, and buy food and drink.)
None of the options are free. Peer-to-peer (as opposed to sponsor/consumer) will never be free. We should support models like this, not act like we somehow deserve better.
Using the in-person book club example, I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where 1) nobody pays anything to anyone, 2) the same person hosts every meeting, 3) food and/or drink is provided and not pot luck style.
If you're in an in-person book club you'll be paying money either directly or indirectly. Small sums absolutely, but still something. This seems comparable in cost.
And if you're really lucky, a large corporate enterprise will let you have hosting space for _free_ at _very specific times_. Otherwise, you must find local community resources who usually: 1. Charge a fee 2. Request you do something for them in exchange (run some publicity, sweeping floors, etc.)
Sorry, where in the original link are they providing food? I might be more interested in that case. :D
It's wild to me that you can't imagine a non-transactional club. Do you not have groups of friends? Sure, there's some give-and-take in every healthy group, but the idea that it somehow needs to be monetized is absurd.
Creating a slack instance is not building a community.
The "fee" is just a simple way to get commitment from the other side. As you can imagine, this is not a business that will allow me to quit my job.
I just don't feel that the rewards I receive from community organizing are monetary, and certainly don't need to be.
Nor do I want to be part of a community whose organizers are only motivated by money and don't even see any other form of motivation as valid. If that's how you see yourself and the community you're organizing, that colors everything you do and it makes you a bad community leader.
I basically organise the community because I enjoy reading books and sharing opinion with other professionals, that's it.
But your execution doesn't match that intention. What you have created is a business. You're talking about "commitment"--that's a business concern. "Sustainability"--also a business concern. I've had plenty of rewarding conversations about engineering books with people who I never saw again, and I've gained a lot of knowledge at book clubs that no longer exist. A lot of that knowledge came from people who only showed up once.
What you lose when you demand commitment and sustainability, i.e. a business model from your book club, is spontaneity and diversity. The kind of guy who commits himself to a book club every week for years is going to miss the life experiences that give context to his work. It's how you end up with solutions that are perfectly engineered to efficiently do the wrong things.
I live in a city that has many free tech meetups.
One of them involved going through fast.ai. Tech companies were happy to host us for free.
Another was about doing Kaggle competition to practice ML with fellow newbies. Again, tech companies allowed us to use their space after hours, or we'd just to the library and book a room for free.
Vice versa other groups that revolve around learning specific languages or going through specific technical books.
If you gave the service away for free and allowed people to be anonymous, there would be no private data that needed managing. In the 90s, a major proportion of websites on the internet had forums like that, which people set up on a weekend (think phpBB). What the hosting provider charges is small change.
If you do charge, you suddenly have sensitive data to manage, either eating into your profit or creating a liability for you and taking away from people's privacy if you don't do it right. So much so, that it might even generate a loss at 50 bucks per year.
Where you lost me is that I don't need your help getting people together to talk about books. Sure, that's worth bringing some snacks, in person, which might add up to 50 Euros over the course of a year, but doing it on the internet with a bunch of unknown randos makes the value go down, not up. And putting a fixed price on it means you get less interesting people: on the one end, it excludes the broke intern who needs the mentoring the most, and on the other end, that senior, experienced, well-thought-out guy who brings a fuckton of knowledge to the table brings more value than the host just by opening his mouth.
Where you really go off the rails is this: "There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free." Yes, there is, actually. I don't know what it is about some people on Hacker News who can't comprehend that there are other motivations besides money. If you're only motivated by money, I don't want to be around you, let alone go to your book club.
The potential for one decent connection for future jobs/coworkers (referral bonuses!)/cofounders is very high with something like this. 50 euro is fine. If it's too high, the market will signal that. If it isn't, it will fill up.
You can find some examples here: https://community.circle.so/c/showcase/
We are using Circle for organising it and it costs us money, additionally, it will also take time to organise and moderate the community.
I also believe that paying for something brings more commitment, so this is why we have decided to introduce a small fee for joining the community.
Absolutely. People that are willing to pay are more serious and generally more likely to positively contribute. Paying is a way to signal that to oneself, even.
It is 30 people. If someone's an asshole you ban them. It's hardly a fulltime job. The fact that you took their money could actually complicate your ability to ban them if they really get upset.
I have discord servers of gaming friends that have as many people. I've also managed game servers (like Ark servers) with hundreds of strangers. It's not that bad. Bad people venture in sometimes and you just kick them out. Small communities like this mostly self-regulate because they are so small, people's individual reputation actually means something.
I can create a free Discord for this right now and it'll cost me (and the people joining it) exactly 0€
The idea is to create "online coffee chats" where everyone is able to participate.
I have used Circle with other communities and I can say that the experience is much better than using slack or discord.
But the reality is that you haven't.