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by rufb
3525 days ago
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Growing up in a coffee farm in countryside São Paulo state, I was a late BBSer (from 1994 to the early 2000s). As other people have it with Usenet and early web forums, I just loved how tight-knit and contentful the Internet was back then. I don't subscribe to the Eternal September "newcomers ruined everything" feeling (in fact I'm quite a big fan of massified Internet culture), but I do love and cherish those sorts of small, focused online communities, every day more protective of themselves and thus harder to find. I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say, Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and oldest of the Internet. |
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It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular and/or "LURK MOAR."
no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet.
I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists, subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc...
The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the community has multiple ways to talk among itself.
You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social networks anyway.
If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb.
If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client.