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by keerthiko 1100 days ago
Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits where I have contributed information/knowledge because I happened to visit them but had more information than the discussion already had, which is still valuable to the community even if I do not become a regular member.

Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit, or to a lesser extent from a forum.

4 comments

Communities rarely want to maximize growth: at most, they want a slow and steady growth, and at least they may wish to shrink. You'll find most long-lived communities that actually still have a sense of identity and norms have some form of barrier to entry: whether that be obscurity, extremely aggressive moderation, a strong set of norms which are actively policed by members, or a culture sufficiently toxic (at least superficially) to keep most people away. Often a combination of all of the above. I think for most moderately sized communities too much growth is more of a problem than too little.
> Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit

I've been working on a platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the longer form content tilt of Reddit. It's sort of a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.

Here's an example community:

https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending

Interesting. Planning to keep the code private or offering to others as well? I've been wanting to try something like this.
I couldn't identify the wiki aspect (implied by reddit), however looks awesome so far.
At the moment, I think they are just looking to hang on as much of the community as they can, as a bridge to the next thing/until Reddit comes to their senses.
"Longevity"

LOL