I have been part of many professional communities ever since I started my career, beginning with Society of Technical Communication (STC), a few blogs where we had active discussions (sometimes powered by Disqus), Product Hunt in 2014, Andrew Chen’s backstory (one archived URL), GrowthHackers, and a few more. Also, we had Google Plus (one of my favorites), Reddit (still doing well), and the LinkedIn groups. In the recent years, many communities are running on Slack and Mighty Networks.
In general, communities have a shelf life. Some of these die because that the idea and that goal are not more exciting to the participants. A others fade off because of an ineffective CoC (Code of Conduct)—the discussions go all over the place, and the owners or moderators just cannot steer it to the right directions. Gradually, the drivers start leaving the space.
In some groups, the discussions are not focused and the community leaders (owners, volunteers or stewards) are not proactive in building the right energy for the community’s goals.
A few more reasons when communities do not grow for the right mix of quality conversations and for the volume are:
- people start selling their work even when this was not the primary goal of community
- people don’t respect the CoC and guidelines, and nobody questions them
- community leaders are not proactive in leading or building conversations
Building a community is not about selecting the tool first. Tools are mostly a personal preference. I have a bias towards well-designed products, and this is why I like the communities running on Slack.
Recently, I saw Integral and I was curious to see how they plan to fix what the communities often lack—the stickiness and the steering. Integral sounds promising on their pitch but I have not seen the product yet.
When I say well-designed products for communities, there is a trade-off—value vs taste. LinkedIn is a poorly designed product (a toast for you if you disagree here) but I continue to use it because it serves my purpose just enough.
The modern community tools do not build the stickiness—something that makes people fall in love with the product because of the people, and with the people because of the product. The incentives are not well-designed, either in the tool itself, or in the communication by community owners and volunteers.
Also—one of the goals of communities is to help people find and build, or strengthen their goals—the work-in-progress goals. For example I like communities where I can find my own working practices, principles and standards also, and the learnability culture, the joy of random channels, and ocassional introductions for some work opportunity. There needs to be a like-ability to be there—the need is multi-dimensional.
Modern community tools should invest in identifying their goals more clearly rather than leaving it to the participants to figure out what they want.
