[sankalpb]

Thanks, I appreciate the different examples you gave! Can you tell me more about what makes you believe that what makes a 'community' is its size, instead of say, for example, its coherence, or its norms, or its duration of existence?

[DoreenMichele]

That wasn't what I was saying in the above comment. I was saying "I disagree with the oft expressed sentiment than HN is a small community or small forum."

People say HN is small and then cite Reddit or Facebook as examples of large forums. I would say that neither Reddit nor Facebook are communities or forums at all.

I would say that both Reddit and Facebook are platforms that host communities. Subreddits are communities and Facebook groups are communities and that's what you need to compare HN to if you want to gauge how big it is in comparison to other communities.

Comparing the 5 million visitors per month HN gets to the half billion members of Reddit is an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think it works.

As a platform, HN isn't very big. Reddit, Facebook and many other platforms have more traffic.

As a community or forum, I think HN is quite large. As far as I know, it's the largest and most influential (English language) tech forum on the planet.

Size does matter. The human mind only really computes a sense of community for a group of about 150 people. Above that size, you start having social dynamics like a big city, not like a tribe or village.

I generally define online communities in terms of "a group with one set of overlords." Platforms that have many subgroups with many different moderating teams strike me as platforms that host many communities. This is how Reddit works.

HN has one mod team. It has no subforums. So I think of it as a single community because it has some degree of cohesion provided by having one set of moderators (and a single space -- it doesn't really get broken up by topic, etc, the way some things do).

This is one of the reasons I feel HN is actually a very large community. Most platforms of this size or larger are more like Reddit and have been broken up into smaller subgroups.

Those subgroups are your communities. The fact that different people are in charge of different groups will foster different cultures, etc, even if the topic is nominally the same and the rules are nominally the same. They will be interpreted differently.

I've left a few other comments here already touching on some of this, chiefly these two:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704995

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707047

[sankalpb]

Thank you for clarifying this, and I'm sorry that I misunderstood what you were saying. I appreciate the distinction you have made between platforms, forums, subgroups, and communities. I am also interested in the social dynamics you refer to (i.e. above a certain size, sense of community does not really compute) as well. I'm going to reply to your comments where I have questions!