I believe that if a community grows big enough it gets ruined, but “enough” may be bigger than you think.
> Have you ever seen an example where anything became better than before when it grew big.
Yes, many times.
When your community is too small it’s boring, there isn’t enough user-generated content. As the community grows bigger users produce more content. Popularity encourages creative people to join and existing members to put more effort into their work (motivated by a larger audience and more competition), creating better content.
I think Geometry Dash and Trackmania are examples of communities which seem to be doing better than ever despite growing a lot the past couple years.
The issue is, when a community grows it creates disagreement: some users like different content than other users, users start to fight over which rules / goals / overall direction the community should go. Usually the overall community ends up in the middle ground, where everyone is only partially satisfied.
Case in point: Hacker News with informative / political articles. Some people only like learning, some people like tech drama and even general politics. The result is half informative, half opinionated pieces on the front page.
But it helps when the community focuses on a niche topic, and sticks to that topic even if it grows. Because that means everyone just talks about the niche, and people who aren’t and don’t get interested in it won’t join. It also helps when said topic is non-controversial and non-political, so there’s not much to disagree on and get mad about.
Trackmania’s community is still close because it is a very specific game: racing on a custom track to get the best time possible. There’s not really much else to do in Trackmania, so if you don’t like making custom tracks, trying to get the best time on one of them, or watching people do those things, you won’t like Trackmania. It’s also clearly not provocative.
Hacker News is kind of a niche because it focuses on tech from the perspective of professional software engineers. Nowadays Hacker News does get controversial, but I know it has systems and moderators in place to limit flame wars and politics as much as possible.
Large subreddits, Discord communities, Facebook groups don’t really feel like “communities” because the users’ interests are too diverse: many of the posts are uninteresting to many of the users, because it’s hard to imagine a post which can interest a majority of the users at once. They also get a lot of drama because people post about politics and those posts get encouraged and upvoted and reposted.
> Have you ever seen an example where anything became better than before when it grew big.
Yes, many times.
When your community is too small it’s boring, there isn’t enough user-generated content. As the community grows bigger users produce more content. Popularity encourages creative people to join and existing members to put more effort into their work (motivated by a larger audience and more competition), creating better content.
I think Geometry Dash and Trackmania are examples of communities which seem to be doing better than ever despite growing a lot the past couple years.
The issue is, when a community grows it creates disagreement: some users like different content than other users, users start to fight over which rules / goals / overall direction the community should go. Usually the overall community ends up in the middle ground, where everyone is only partially satisfied.
Case in point: Hacker News with informative / political articles. Some people only like learning, some people like tech drama and even general politics. The result is half informative, half opinionated pieces on the front page.
But it helps when the community focuses on a niche topic, and sticks to that topic even if it grows. Because that means everyone just talks about the niche, and people who aren’t and don’t get interested in it won’t join. It also helps when said topic is non-controversial and non-political, so there’s not much to disagree on and get mad about.
Trackmania’s community is still close because it is a very specific game: racing on a custom track to get the best time possible. There’s not really much else to do in Trackmania, so if you don’t like making custom tracks, trying to get the best time on one of them, or watching people do those things, you won’t like Trackmania. It’s also clearly not provocative.
Hacker News is kind of a niche because it focuses on tech from the perspective of professional software engineers. Nowadays Hacker News does get controversial, but I know it has systems and moderators in place to limit flame wars and politics as much as possible.
Large subreddits, Discord communities, Facebook groups don’t really feel like “communities” because the users’ interests are too diverse: many of the posts are uninteresting to many of the users, because it’s hard to imagine a post which can interest a majority of the users at once. They also get a lot of drama because people post about politics and those posts get encouraged and upvoted and reposted.