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This article is nothing but fluff. The advice is essentially: use widgets, social sharing, and invites - nothing that really has to do with community building.

by teej 18y ago

This article is nothing but fluff. The advice is essentially: use widgets, social sharing, and invites - nothing that really has to do with community building. The rest of the article is a giant ad for Tip'd. If you're really trying to build a community, why not emulate Hacker News? Curate your content, encourage intelligent conversation, and define & enforce your community's culture. I feel like those ideas stretch farther than social news sites and, so far, it has worked.

ScottWhigham 18y ago
Now wait a second... Hacker News works for all the reasons you listed but also for another, very important reason that you left out: it isn't trying to sell us anything. Not to defend the article but you just can't blatantly say, "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" It's not that easy. There are different types of communities, different expectations of users, etc. There is no One Size Fits All in this arena.
- teej 18y ago
  > "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" I never meant to imply this. Building communities online is an incredibly hard thing to do, there is no secret sauce. I meant only to suggest that using those rough guidelines, instead of the buzzword-happy guidelines the article suggests, might be a better way to go. I know of several communities that are following those guidelines + domain specific value adds to build great communities. > it isn't trying to sell us anything I'd say this is something that works specifically for HN, but isn't applicable to the general case. For instance, Mp3car.com is building an awesome community around car modding and is building their business on selling directly to users. They have great content (a lot of it user-generated), they keep the conversation on topic, and they stick to what they're about - car-modding. In their case, selling to their users makes perfect sense - power users generate the content ( more time & skill to write guides ), motivated lurkers consume the content and follow the guides, and lazy lurkers ( more money than time ) just buy the parts from mp3car.com and have someone install it.

by teej 18y ago

ScottWhigham 18y ago

Now wait a second... Hacker News works for all the reasons you listed but also for another, very important reason that you left out: it isn't trying to sell us anything. Not to defend the article but you just can't blatantly say, "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" It's not that easy. There are different types of communities, different expectations of users, etc. There is no One Size Fits All in this arena.

teej 18y ago
> "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" I never meant to imply this. Building communities online is an incredibly hard thing to do, there is no secret sauce. I meant only to suggest that using those rough guidelines, instead of the buzzword-happy guidelines the article suggests, might be a better way to go. I know of several communities that are following those guidelines + domain specific value adds to build great communities. > it isn't trying to sell us anything I'd say this is something that works specifically for HN, but isn't applicable to the general case. For instance, Mp3car.com is building an awesome community around car modding and is building their business on selling directly to users. They have great content (a lot of it user-generated), they keep the conversation on topic, and they stick to what they're about - car-modding. In their case, selling to their users makes perfect sense - power users generate the content ( more time & skill to write guides ), motivated lurkers consume the content and follow the guides, and lazy lurkers ( more money than time ) just buy the parts from mp3car.com and have someone install it.