[bird_monster]

When I hear community, I generally think there's some kind of connection or interraction setting a group a part from something like "a set of people that walked into a building at the same time." I don't really think of HN, Reddit, any generalized "forum" type website as a community, in that most of the people never get to know eachother, or worse, never even really try.

Most of the content is closer to set and forget, or set and debate. If you think of your _actual_ living communities, you might know your neighbor, and you might communicate with them about things when you see them. You might feel fondly towards them (of course, you might not). With these online forums, that doesn't really happen (ignoring celebrity accounts). It seems rare to remember someone's username and/or communicate with them frequently or outside of the forum itself.

I think if you are seeking community as I described above, HN and Reddit are fundamentally not about that thing. Maybe I'm in the minority, or maybe that's not how other people think, but it's definitely how I've used and seen others use Reddit/HN over the past decade.

[DoreenMichele]

The human mind can only follow all the social interactions of a group of around 150 people -- give or take. That number likely varies a bit from one person to the other and some historical figures, like Napolean, were successful in part because they had an amazing memory for personal details of people around them.

I was privy to the results of a good quality private study some years back when I was briefly the lead moderator for, iirc, the oldest community on a particular topic on the internet. The study was done internally by the very talented founder.

They found that 20 percent of members were active and regular users, 10 percent posted once or only occasionally, and the rest lurked.

Twenty percent is one fifth. If you multiply 150 by 5, you get 750. It has been my observation that when small online communities hit 750 members, they start having issues and needing to differentiate and/or formalize, which fits neatly with the above two piece of data.

The way humans deal with larger groups than that is formalization. Having formal customs and what not so you don't really need to personally know an individual to have a recipe for how to successfully interact with them is how people cope with having to interact with people they will never know well.

Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have.

A subreddit can become a community, but you would need to keep it small. It might also help to make it private.

I hypothesize that you could foster more of a sense of community for HN by expanding the leader board to 150 names.

[bird_monster]

I think HN and Reddit are closer to blogging/microblogging/RSS. Seeing what other people are saying about a topic. Maybe asking a question, maybe getting a response etc.

> Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have.

Yeah, I think that this is essential to a successful forum but also brings up exactly what the issue is, I think. If you're optimizing for signal to noise, you're already beyond the scope of "community", in that you've already got too many people and too much content to ingest. Optimizing signal to noise on a forum is great with the microblog/RSS lens I apply, because it means I'm not seeing offtopic or irrelevant content in my feeds.

I also kinda think that a part of community (when thinking about community being defined as a group of people that are connected and feel involved in eachother's lives to varying extents) _is_ offtopic conversation. "How are you doing?" "How's your grandpa", etc. You can't allow this type of post/behavior on HN, because if you open those floodgates you're getting way too much noise to handle, but I also think that's why the shift has gone the way it's gone. You can't learn about eachother beyond subject matter that's attached to the topic of an individual post.