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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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I'm not talking about monetization, I'm talking about there being a cost no matter what. It can absolutely be "free" but someone's making food or using their space to host or something else.

I think that the problem here is that you do not understand that organising a community takes time and effort.

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.

Au contraire, I understand that organizing a community takes time and effort.

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.

There is not monetary model behind the community. If you read again my comment, you will see that the intention is only to maintain the operational costs by everyone together and a fee is way of getting commitment from everyone.

I basically organise the community because I enjoy reading books and sharing opinion with other professionals, that's it.

I hear what you're saying and I genuinely believe that is your intention.

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.

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