[TeMPOraL]

That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers. Many of them remain lurkers. Surely someone run a study on this, but at least in my personal experience on HN and some more discussion-oriented subreddits, the most interesting/valuable submissions are often one-offs done by users who otherwise don't submit or even comment much.

Also: moving the community from an open discussion board to a closed chat strongly favors the most active participants - i.e. those who are dedicated enough or otherwise have nothing better to do with their days than to actively participate. It's not a problem if the "community" is just a bunch of friends and regulars shitposting. It starts to be a problem when large open source projects move from open boards to closed chats, as they effectively shut off anyone who has a day job, kids, or... well anything else to do, tech or otherwise.

Also: lack of (or bad) indexing and search affects not just outsiders, but community members themselves: it's not just that some rando can't find the fruits of your discussion via Google search - it's also you who can't find it one month later.

[SkyPuncher]

> That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers.

I generally disagree with this. I tend to find communities and either (1) engage in them immediately (because they're interesting) (2) forget about them forever.

Most of my community recommendations come either as referrals from other sites or happy accidents. I rarely join a community simply to lurk on it.

[TeMPOraL]

I think there's a clear difference in how people relate to the on-line communities, but I struggle to find words to name or even describe it.

Maybe it's partly ADHD thing. I specifically don't engage with any chat-based communities, because from experience I know that

- I only have mental space for ~1-2 such communities at a time,

- If I engage with one immediately, it'll capture most of my attention, to the detriment of everything else I'm doing or caring about, and

- It stopped being sustainable around the time I started working full-time in the earnest.

I have enough trouble staying off HN, and that's a relatively slow-moving discussion board. A Discord equivalent? I just know I won't stick around, I couldn't possibly maintain active commitment to it for more than few days. As for more transactional cases - like, e.g. (real case) official Clojure community Slack, which I joined once to ask about some underdocumented aspect of a library I've been dealing with at work? It's something that I'll do only as a last resort - i.e. if Google, Kagi, Reddit search and Algolia fail me, re-reading the docs and the sources yield no insight, and the problem still remains something I need to solve - only then I'll bother with Slack/Discord, as the entire endeavor feels increasingly costly. It takes time to join and find one's bearing, and then asking the question several times until I do it in the right timezone so the right person sees it, ... I'm feeling exhausted just from thinking about it.

And, FWIW, I also don't lurk in communities, in the sense of regularly reading it while not participating. Rather, I pop in, look for specific thing I need, and close the tab after I found it. I love when this process is seamless and doesn't require any commitment, or bothering other people. Also, when in the process I read something interesting/useful, I love it when I can go back to that same place a week or month later, and still find that thing I read. Something that's nigh-impossible with no indexing or broken search.