Passive Communities

With all the tools we have at our disposal these days, building an online community has become increasingly accessible. You can use Facebook groups, Reddit, Telescope, and even Slack to whip up a fully featured online community. While these tools have made it simple to set up a place for people to meet online, they haven’t made it any easier to create a genuine community.

What I’ve been seeing on larger online groups is a rise in passive communities. These are places where lots of information gets passed around and many people exchange comments, but a high quality community is nonexistent. Here are some common issues I see in passive communities.

• Lack of a clearly defined common purpose about what posts to share
• Low quality posts that have already been discussed
• Lots of self-promotion that isn’t balanced out with giving back to the community
• Lack of high engagement on most posts. For example, it were a Facebook group, lots of posts that have potential for great discussion or insights would be left ignored

Most of these issues arise from a bad signal/noise ratio. Unfortunately, it gets harder to curate a community when it grows larger. I don’t think it’s impossible though and there are some very defined steps you can take to try to build a successful community.

Starting off small and vetting members before scaling up can help ensure a community starts off on the right foot. Product Hunt does this by limiting who can join in on conversations and by reviewing each submission before it’s posted. Building up slowly also makes it easier to observe pain points specific to your group. It’s easier to take action and fix things when dealing with a smaller user base.

Another thing to keep in mind is that setting up some structure can help clarify the purpose of the community. For example, Stack Overflow has strict regulations about questions users can post, and it leads to higher quality posts and focused discussions. This is where having a good set of admins and administration rules can help. It can be tricky to define a framework that promotes high quality posts without making users feel limited. But solving that problem is highly specific to each community.

So while it’s become easier than ever to try to kickstart a community, it’s still just as hard to build a healthy, active community. If you have your own insights, examples, or disagreements, write a response! I’d love to read your thoughts.