How are online communities established?

Usually they splinter off an existing online community or fanbase of a prominent writer/net-celebrity. Hacker News was initially populated by refugees from Reddit. Imgur also got started off Reddit. Reddit's initial userbase largely came from readers of comp.lang.lisp and Paul Graham's essays (PG funded it, and posted announcements there when it launched, 3 weeks after it started). StackOverflow largely came from the readers of the blogs of its two founders, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Github's users were recruited from people the founders met at meetups.

(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.)

I think there's also a very important step which is that often these successful communities have value even if others don't join -- what I've heard previously described as "Single Player Mode".

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?

Build a community goes beyond "rally people around something they are passionate about".

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.

I built a 30k+ member vbulletin community in the 2000s.

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.

You get users. The most important part imo is the regulars who stick around and talk to everyone, answer everything. They make the core of a community and help turn others into regulars.

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.

I think the best way is to pick a niche interest and start there. When I first joined Reddit, it was mostly just LISP programmers and there were no subreddits. They served that niche well, then grew from there. Facebook started out serving Harvard students, then all college students, then everyone.

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.

Online communities are basically just discussion boards, so you need something for people to talk about, people who want to talk about it, and functionality allowing them to talk to one another.

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).

Here is a very good book that summarizes a lot of the scientific research about creating and fostering online communities.

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 Communities

Lots has been written about this. There are several ways.

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...

The Reddit founders talk about this in their episode of "How I Built This":

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/03/545635014/live-episode-reddit...

At about 19:40 is where they talk about seeding the community.

I was very involved in the Center for Humane Tech community back when they first started and was a volunteer mod for a little while. CHT is still a thing but I believe the forum no longer exists. I saw the press release about the organization being formed and it was something I really cared about so I found the forum on their website where a lot of people were joining and very excited to actually get something done about these issues. The people joining had impressive bios, connections in every corner of the tech industry, as well as educators, psychologists, researchers, etcetera. The energy was very real and very exciting at first. It went stale after a few months because everybody was just there spinning their wheels, not accomplishing any action. It began to feel more like talk therapy for people who hate dark patterns and manipulative app design. The leadership of CHT had an amazing start to a real national grassroots network that they could have engaged to push for policy change in states across the country. There could have been organized film screenings, letters to representatives, pushes for legislation, all the usual stuff. But I think they weren't ready or able to take advantage of something like that, and the momentum died.

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.

You should read the book People Powered by Jono Bacon. Has some really good insights and is a 101 course on exactly this.

Question is: what's an online community ?

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 remember reading that the Reddit founders created fake users and posted links / conversation starters in order to make the site feel like it had some level of critical mass.

Here is a summary of what I read on community building.

- 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

Thoughts about maintaining quality of community:

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.

I think that's not quite the correct question to ask. The question to ask is: what purpose will your new community website/app serve that is not already being met by existing ones?

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.

An estabshed community migrating to their own platform is an option. Five-thirty-eight more or less started this way.

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.

Shared common interest. If you're building it for one community segment, odds are that you have connections that would find use in engaging with that community. So I'd start sharing with the ones who don't mind starting the community from nothing.

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.

In the case of StackOverflow, Spolsky and Atwood made podcasts from the beginning. There is a record of the whole process. It's worth noting that StackOverflow built a very narrow channel for community activity relative to typical online communities.

StackOverflow Podcast #1 https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange/stack-overflow-podcast...

There has to be a reason for people to go to the community:

- 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....

I'd recommend listening the early episodes of the Stack Overflow podcast for some insights. There are a lot of nuggets buried there.

HN/reddit/SO came there first, or at least during the boom times when the pieces are still up in the air. After the pieces fell, making a new community without a lot of $$$ is difficult, if the purpose is solely community. If however the service provides an additional valuable service , a community can form and grow as more and more users use the service.

You have to get people there, and you have to get them to want to bother coming back.

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.

Before thinking about creating, or participating in an "online" community, think about the same without the online.

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.

The key (for any product), from what I have learned and have no experience of it, seems to be finding a `beachhead market`, a startup term for finding a smallest possible subset of a niche, where you can dominate (establish a community in this case) and then grow from there one step at a time.

You fake it until you make it. Reddit just created users until they had a critical mass of engagement.

I’m trying to do this right now at conferacity.com, and it’s really hard. But I hope people will continue to try to experiment with new discussion communities online, not just based on the topic, but also on the governing rules and structure. It seems unlikely that 50 years from now, we’ll look back and say that the existing formats for online discussion were the best we could do, even though the existing formats are all clearly providing value to users in their current form.

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 gave up on hn.

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 am curious how does these online communities do content review to make sure it's not filled with all spams, porn or even illegal content? besides algorithm, how many human resources are spent on these things?

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008224FMC

You generate fake traffic until you get real traffic. That's how Reddit did it, at least.

I have built a couple communities over the years and currently run a community with more than 20 million monthly users.

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.

YCombinator was a successful startup accelerator, then built HN.

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.

reddit and HN were very focused when they started out. Reddit was like 70% talk about lisp when it started. HN was very much about building business with VC money (which wasn't talked about all that much when it started). They were also completely intolerant of the nonsense you see in comments today. Inane jokes and poorly thought out statements would be downvoted to hell. The idea that dumb comments would be mocked is what made it so attractive in the beginning.

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?)

Reddit was seeded by sockpuppets.

Here's a list of wonderful communities: https://www.2board.net/boardlist.html

Why do you want to? So you can extract money from them? Don't. So you can have someone to control and moderate and exercise power over? Don't. So you can have the prestige and status of a community owner and/or high traffic website owner and/or successful person? Don't.

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.