2 ms·

I wonder when the breakdown happens? I'm on mastodon.art and overall the donations (monthly subscriptions on Patreon) cover hosting quite well. Obviously we're

I wonder when the breakdown happens? I'm on mastodon.art and overall the donations (monthly subscriptions on Patreon) cover hosting quite well. Obviously we're talking 10-20k users, not 100M or anything, but wheres the line between those two when costs start overtaking what users will cover? Of course type of users matter too, niche communities might be more likely to pay out than the average, but i think that's a bit besides the point. There's a line for any given community and it seems to scale poorly when scaled up to Reddit. How do we determine what that line is? Is there something unique about large businesses that make scaling costs difficult?

bluefirebrand 3y ago
Personally I suspect it's when you grow to the point where you're no longer targeting enthusiasts who might be willing to pay, and instead you just want everyone. Once everyone's parents and children and dogs are using a platform, the free users vastly outnumber the paying to an unprofitable degree
- hakfoo 3y ago
  An enthusiast community can self-sustain basically indefinitely on things like premium-supporter subscriptions, the occasional fundraising pitch, and well-targeted advertising. But it will never be more of a revenue generator than "it keeps the servers running and finances a couple of volunteer moderators doing some logo swag giveaways once a year." I'd expect that in a targeted community, though, the "drive-by" users are a lot lighter of a burden. You get the search spiders swooping in and archiving everything, but by and large, even the most passionate lurker on, say, VCFed or Audiokarma, is not going to be generating thousands of pageviews and complex queries a day. They might browse a few dozen pages to figure out exactly how to fix their doohickey and move on with their life. Maybe they eventually convert and become a content contributor. Conversely, when it becomes a sOcIaL pLaTfOrM, you intentionally are trying to corral many more low-engagement users. Notice the key metric is always Daily/Monthly Active Users, not any form of "Quality Participant". So they're eager to have as many people scrolling their site 24 hours a day as possible, even if they're adding no real value. This spikes your infrastructure cost without creating users who are necessarily connected enough to contribute back, whether with direct payment or content. I also suspect that the "social platform" tends to have a different economic drive than the enthusiast community. Nobody really says "I want to build a community for ALL THE THINGS" unless they have some grand vision of going public, grand monetization, or becoming some sort of new-media titan. They're going to be much more finicky when these dreams aren't met.
jemmyw 3y ago
They have to pay developers, designers, product managers, which means also hiring a management tier. Those teams will feel the need to grow even if they could get by without. As a community effort you find need to fund the dev costs, even if you do find some money to donate in that direction.

bluefirebrand 3y ago

Personally I suspect it's when you grow to the point where you're no longer targeting enthusiasts who might be willing to pay, and instead you just want everyone. Once everyone's parents and children and dogs are using a platform, the free users vastly outnumber the paying to an unprofitable degree

hakfoo 3y ago
An enthusiast community can self-sustain basically indefinitely on things like premium-supporter subscriptions, the occasional fundraising pitch, and well-targeted advertising. But it will never be more of a revenue generator than "it keeps the servers running and finances a couple of volunteer moderators doing some logo swag giveaways once a year." I'd expect that in a targeted community, though, the "drive-by" users are a lot lighter of a burden. You get the search spiders swooping in and archiving everything, but by and large, even the most passionate lurker on, say, VCFed or Audiokarma, is not going to be generating thousands of pageviews and complex queries a day. They might browse a few dozen pages to figure out exactly how to fix their doohickey and move on with their life. Maybe they eventually convert and become a content contributor. Conversely, when it becomes a sOcIaL pLaTfOrM, you intentionally are trying to corral many more low-engagement users. Notice the key metric is always Daily/Monthly Active Users, not any form of "Quality Participant". So they're eager to have as many people scrolling their site 24 hours a day as possible, even if they're adding no real value. This spikes your infrastructure cost without creating users who are necessarily connected enough to contribute back, whether with direct payment or content. I also suspect that the "social platform" tends to have a different economic drive than the enthusiast community. Nobody really says "I want to build a community for ALL THE THINGS" unless they have some grand vision of going public, grand monetization, or becoming some sort of new-media titan. They're going to be much more finicky when these dreams aren't met.

jemmyw 3y ago

They have to pay developers, designers, product managers, which means also hiring a management tier. Those teams will feel the need to grow even if they could get by without. As a community effort you find need to fund the dev costs, even if you do find some money to donate in that direction.