> "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

> "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.