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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Whoever can recreate this community feeling is going to be rich. Why did people spend so much time in specific phpbb forums? Maybe the problem is that there are too many communities out there now and so people just give up because you're in all of them and you're part of none of them at the same time?

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Communities don't scale. This is the reason why nobody has done and why you couldn't get rich forming communities. Communities are handcrafted to accommodate the unique personalities of the people involved. Communities involve activities where a handful of people can socialize and bond. A service with a million users can never become a community because our social/grouping instincts don't work on that scale. A community should always be a few dozens of core people, with maybe a larger number of non-core people participating occasionally.

When they establish personality archetypes and roles bonds form readily. That's like, the purpose of roles in an organization.

If their goal is becoming rich, then this is doomed from the very start. How would it be monetized? Ads? Great, then you have no incentive to actually build a healthy community. Signup fee? Not going to work, way too much of a barrier.

Discord servers are the closest. People do build up friendships, relationships, enemyships, and a public persona / reputation within a Discord server.

Discord is centralized, heavily censored, and surveilled, so it can’t serve this purpose for many communities (such as most of the ones in which I participate).

My limited experience with discord was either no activity at all, or so much activity it’s hard to follow what’s going on.

I suppose I never found the right place

I’m sure an anthropologist can clarify, but once a community reaches a certain size, it seems that emergent properties take over.

Indeed, I think the size of the internet these days is partly the problem. The community in GameSpy and Zone were super small from my memory. We had crappy websites that tracked singles and team ladders. Then Steam came along.

They did, and it’s called Reddit. Then it got enshittified.

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