On participating in small communities // Community as writing prompt // When to leave
Three quick thoughts on participating in small communities:
1 // I have fond and formative memories of the 2010 era of Hacker News, when it felt like the whole community was working together to “figure out” early stage entrepreneurship.
Those early years were a real age of wonder📗. Each new day, the thrill of collaborative invention and discovery. I participated heavily and received huge value from doing so. Not from the traffic, but from the thinking.
These days, I won’t even bother to comment.
I want to have conversations with people who are there for the conversation, not for the audience. This is easier in groups small enough to remain overlooked by the marketers and mercenaries.
2 // One way to compensate for the high time costs of community involvement is to use it as a forcing function for the type of thinking and writing that you want to be spending time on.
Each discussion from another member becomes a writing prompt for a future standalone idea. Your reply becomes a first draft, with incremental feedback at each step: comment & discussion → idea & feedback → article & comments → book chapter & beta reading…
It’s one way to never run out of interesting new thoughts. Just join a couple of small, strong communities — not too many — that get you thinking about the right things.
3 // As long as a couple other people are also taking it seriously (and as long as it hasn’t yet been overrun by self-promotional sociopaths), the value is there. Of course, there are only enough hours to participate meaningfully in a couple of communities. For example, while you might join both a general gym and a climbing gym, you’d never want to join every gym. If your priorities change, or if a community stops serving its purpose to you, just leave it.
When you get this right, deep community involvement is actually saving time, not costing it. Instead of feeling like a big distraction (the oft-lamented “extra inbox”), it’s giving you more focus on the things you want to be thinking about.
Comments (7)
Point 2 is very true and I find being a community owner (CO) makes this even more true
Points 2 & 3 are really resonating with me. It's something I'm seeing regularly in a woodworking community I belong to. Member questions, discussions and shared progress are drivers for the content being generated as part of the online school. This feeds more questions, comments, etc.
While lots of people are busy, going on vacations, life stuff in general, there's at least a couple of members constantly engaging. It never feels like a ghost town, even when there isn't much activity.
“It never feels like a ghost town, even when there isn't much activity.”
^ I love this observation and feel that it is, in many ways, "the goal" of early-stage community design. (Or at least a strong guiding principle.)
Semi-related, a top fear of new community-builders is the question of whether there will be "enough" members, "enough" activity, etc. But as we've all experienced at dinner parties, it's more about having the right people than the most people.
“…It’s more about having the right people than the most people.”
🙌 that’s precisely the track I’m on with my community and video/materials:
I want appeal to those I want to have in the community, rather a niche group of people that care, than loads of people who are mildly interested; because that means I can do the nerdiest stuff I love to do 😂
I want members to be red hot with interest, so that “It never feels like a ghost town even if there isn’t much activity” like Misha commented, because somehow you know that they are working on their stuff!
You trust/know/feel that they’re doing their own thing.
And that’s fucking inspiring.
Great points. Thank you. The group I run has slowed down in participation, yet I am still seeing participation of value to (I hope) a substantial portion of the group, if they want to take something from it. I was getting overwhelmed for a time with the amount of traffic that needed to be moderated. Getting partners to help in the moderation was a huge relief to me. Things have slowed down for now, which is fine. Like this group, what has been shared in my own group is a resource for those who need help with various topics. Rob's weekly summary of new information added is helpful as a heads up for community members who may not realize topics of value that have been shared recently. It's a tightrope for moderators of energy and letting go of complete control.
For moderators and volunteers: 100% and something that I need to get better at. We've made a few "survival" improvements already, but there's a lot of further opportunity to do more in that direction.
The slowing down is always an interesting question... There's potentially the lifecycle of the group itself, or the lifecycle of the broader platform (in your case, Facebook). In some of the research on communities, they define a "mitosis stage" (splitting apart) that comes after the "maturity stage", where the group has grown large enough that it needs to split into several sub-groups along narrower interest lines to remain active. In some cases that can happen as subgroups of the same overall community, and in some cases the members will just drift off toward a more specialized community elsewhere.
As you noted, the lifecycle of any particular platform is unknown. I wish I could come up with a platform that is as easy to use as FB groups, with functionality that allows members to contribute to a searchable database. Perhaps this platform is closest to that, and at this point, I struggle to see how I would be able to migrate people from that platform to another.