How to Build a Community: Starting with “Why?”(clrcrl.com) |
How to Build a Community: Starting with “Why?”(clrcrl.com) |
These things are different and I think it matters. You say “members of a community” and it’s easy to imagine people who live within a half-day walk of the same river. But it’s not that at all, anymore. You used to be a member of a community. Now you can be in as many as you want.
There’s a trade off for that. Are the people on the forums I frequent going to show up at my wedding, my funeral? Will I watch their kids while they take care of their sick parents? No, none of that.
We’ve sliced ourselves so thin. There are benefits and costs to that. Any niche interest I have, I can find 100 people to talk about it with. I don’t have to worry if my neighbor is into it. I don’t have to worry about him at all.
community /kəˈmjuːnɪti/
noun
1. a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. "Montreal's Italian community"
2. the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common. "the sense of community that organized religion can provide"
And that shift is accelerating. Agriculture caused a big jump. The industrial revolution caused a big jump. The internet caused a big jump.
I don't think it's all bad. It's just different. My idea for the healthiest setup (covid aside) for modern work is remote in a friendly, local coworking space. That way if you change jobs, you only change half the people that you spent 9-5 with, not all of them. There's a resiliency from diversification.
So you want to talk "before", so let's say 1850 to go far enough.
For the first group, the affective partnership group, you had your family, often large and extended, and a few friends you met along the way.
For the second group, the social need group, you had you childhood friends still living around, your village, the other farmers around you, your clients and your trading partners (animal food providers, if you raised animals, stuff like that).
Your community, an American concept we don't have in French (in French it has a religious/isolated meaning like a monastery, I feel we would rather say "village"), I suppose would be the second one. People who depends loosely on you and on which you depend loosely (but you can switch, there's no personal feelings if you stop contact with part of it etc).
A forums on the internet, if you're an at home programmer, for instance, will be the same. You need some of them now, they're like a group of traders in your village you use to get stuff for your own farm. Now if you dislike their pricing or advice, you can change forum just like you could look for another group in the village before.
In short, I think your mistake is to expect community members in the past would go to your funerals (well there was a sense of duty in a village to do it because church, but it didn't mean people would cry at it or deeply miss you). A family and friends, a concept that has existed forever and still exists to this day, would and will.
And if you're not a programmer, the internet might be a lot less important, it may be to discuss guns for instance, and have fun comparing and sharing experience. But I guess calling that a community is more a PR move by people trying to sell you a social aspect to an experience, rather than a proper usage of the word to describe what the concept is. I'd call it an online forum, which is what these things are (the word has this underlying "discussion" meaning, in a multicast way)
Really this doesn't has anything to do with the "forums". Depends on the relationships you've build on those forums. It could be that strong that they will happily come at any important event of your life, and if they can't because of physical distance, they would still be happy/sad/whatever about it.
It can happens yes. The obvious example is a couple meeting in a game like WoW, marrying and inviting their in-game friends. Or that stories of a kid with rare genetic disease who could only socialize online and got people his parents didn’t know at his funerals.
I wonder the original mix and how it’s shifted over time.
For me, browsing HN is a low effort way to get exposed to tech stuff I might not otherwise, and read industry news and interesting takes on that news. There's nothing particularly high minded about my usage. Don't get me wrong, the high quality discussion is pretty special, but the "riff raff" comment really rubs me the wrong way.
> But if these are the primary motivators for why you’re building a community, I’m skeptical that you’ll succeed. These reasons put the benefit of the company ahead of the community member, and I’m pretty sure that any of our community members would see right through these motivations.
What I read in the quote from the article above is that it may be less about why one is building a community and more about for whom one is doing it. I've generally found for myself that this question motivates me more: "For whom am I doing this?"
Just seems that the why answers are rationalizations that we often give after doing something, whereas for-whom answers may motivate us to do something before we have done it.
I don't know though, I'm curious to hear your experiences.
I'd like to see an article on why you should not build a community.
I'd like to see an article on why you should not learn to program.
https://www.google.com/search?q=not+everyone+needs+to+learn+...
I'd like to see analogous skeptical articles about community building.
This abstracts to a set of unlimted topics, so essentially you're asking for justification to not learn about anything. This seems a little absurd so perhaps the question is framed incorrectly and should be "why you should not learn to program and instead learn [something else]" i.e. the basis for time/energy/focus being scarce and deciding how to allocate them for maximum utility, however you define that.
https://simonsinek.com/product/start-with-why/
TED Talk as well, tho' I don't think it does the book justice.
I'd say that more than 90% of mentions are not intended for me, but for other Simons. [0]
[0]: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40simon&src=typed_query&f=live
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
How can one build a community without video and livestreaming in 2021? Not that I like it but even hard-core tech communities, eg in the embedded space, have some video exposure. Or big discords have often some video/streaming outlet.
Multiplayer game communities - not the watchers but the players - are also one.
I enjoyed the article but realized reading it there are different types of community. The form discussed there is more business/promotional, which is different from HN or MMOs.
b) Video/Streaming is not for everyone. I prefer my technical discussions in text, with a few well chosen illustrations. There's nothing that makes my heart sink more than hearing "well, if you just watch this rambling, 2 hour stream of consciousness explanation, it will all become clear to you" (Worst of all, there are companies now doing this in lieu of manuals).
Religious beliefs aside (read: it's simply an example), look at Christianity. One guy and twelve disciples. I'm not a preacher but I don't think Jesus was elitist :)
* The same can be said of product. That is, established a core audience. Establish fit. Evolve from there.
I am usually impressed by the ability of folks on HN to disagree while keeping the conversation civil & interesting, especially when compared with other platforms. That said, I suspect that the demographics that frequent HN represent a pretty narrow slice of humanity, and like any subculture this narrow slice of humanity is subject cultural whims and various ugly forms of groupthink and gaps in perspective that any culture on Earth is. That's specifically what rubs me the wrong way about your previous comment about "civil facts-based conversation" (and framing of people on other platforms as "riff raff").
Maybe we describe others as "less thorough and more emotional"?
To your point about HN, there's definitely - at least on some topics - a very narrow view; plenty of group think. Plenty of times, I've been down voted for not staying in line. Not for being wrong, or adversarial, etc. But for not thinking with the group.