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  2. What do you think makes a community?

What do you think makes a community?

Senthilnathan RM
13 replies
Have you built one? How did you? Share your journey. :)

Replies

Max V
A shared purpose, explicit or implicit.
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Max V
@senthil_nathan9 Explicit is when the community is well-defined. We agreed to get together to do X. Think of a subreddit. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/ - we are here to talk to each other about Rust. It's explicitly written in the subredit's rules. GitHub would be an implicit one - we are here to store our code. Then there is the PR feature with all the contributors and now we are a small community of sorts. We didn't agree to come together. We just contributed to a shared purpose without any explicit agreement. What binds us? The stake in the success and continuity of the project. Thanks for asking. It helped me clarify my thoughts. Hope it makes sense :) What community are you building?
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Wylo
@fluffypony , agree on the shared purpose, but, what do you mean by explicit or implicit?
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Wylo
@fluffypony , that makes sense. :) I guess we're doing an explicit one. We're building an interest-based social network called Wylo (https://www.wyloapp.com/), where people could hang out in communities, explore their interests, make like-minded friends and more on.
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Max V
@senthil_nathan9 You are walking a path well-trodden. How different is it from say, reddit?
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Wylo
@fluffypony , the whole experience from the structure to the design of each element. To mention some, everything in Wylo is organized in terms of interests. So the personalization from content and connection suggestions can be done to a whole new level. And I've hardly come across people stating Reddit works in networking due to the anonymity. Whereas, Wylo is non-anonymous. Along with a few other features in pipeline, it would easier for people to network with like-minded folks. Then, Reddit has millions of subreddits. Whereas, Wylo is super structured aka no redundancy or duplicate communities, so everyone who loves a niche topic would be on the same page aka community. There are also other minor elements like feed section to read articles and resources section to find tools/blogs based on interests. We’re also working on a few things besides this. :) Hope this clarifies.
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Preeti Chovoor
Common interests and goals in any aspect
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Saurabh Chandarana
zcal
Valuable and quality content in a specific niche or couple of related niches (not more than 2-3).
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Wylo
@saurabhc , agreed. But why the restriction like 2-3? Could be even more, right?
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Saurabh Chandarana
zcal
@senthil_nathan9 : Going after a lot of topics can quickly perplex the audience on what to expect in a community and can take its perception from expert level to generalist. This also seems to be directly proportional to the no. of loyal users that will stick around in a community in the long run.
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Wylo
@saurabhc , I get it, makes sense to a level. But I also believe it's the people that makes a community. As long as the communities have specific purposes, I feel people would stick to them. And it might not matter how many niche communities a platform has.
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Saurabh Chandarana
zcal
@senthil_nathan9 Yes, agreed. A platform can certainly have as many communities as possible. However, it benefits both creators and followers of those individual communities to have focused sets of topics to learn and share. 😊
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