[runnerup]

Measuring community engagement makes sense when your primary mission / core goal is to build a strong community. When I was building a large online third-party Discord community for a university during COVID, I was very glad that Discord exposed a lot of metrics for admins/mods to track. It's obviously important to not "game" the metrics by falling into short-term gain traps like over-pinging users, or encouraging high-volume but low-quality participation, etc. But as long as you are laser-focused on "providing real value" to members, then long-term or multi-cyclical trends of community engagement is a useful benchmark.

But it doesn't make sense to focus on these metrics if your mission is to create a great product -- focusing on community engagement should be just one small aspect of your overall marketing strategy, which should be a relatively constrained part of your overall budget (both in labor and money). And even within marketing, there are many other important metrics besides community engagement.

Soylent had great community engagement but not enough focus on scientifically-guided product engineering. Tons of businesses that get this wrong.

Generally I interpret overcommitment to community engagement as a signal that the founders are overly narcissistic and usually apply a discount the expected future value/evolution of their product.

[JohnFen]

> Measuring community engagement makes sense when your primary mission / core goal is to build a strong community.

But measuring community engagement doesn't tell you anything about the nature of the community. Only that it "engages" people. If your goal is to build a strong community, isn't it more important that the community be a good one?

[MartinCron]

Lynch mobs are strong and engaged communities, after all.

[wussboy]

Strong does not mean good. Those are two separate goals. The most important developments of the next 100 years will be in determining ways to make strong and good communities that scale.

[runnerup]

The most important things (quality of community) are not generally quantifiable and proper “measurement” depends on the leadership ability of those who choose to foster the community.