
Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup - Anon84
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/community_building_101_for_the_bootstrapped_startu.php
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brandnewlow
I call BS on this article.

Fact: Tipd has shown very strong growth. This is true.
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tipd.com/?metric=uv>

Claim: This growth can be traced to their great "community features" like an
inviter, a top domains page, a top ambassadors page and "maintaining focus on
community and continuously delivering tools to help them sort through the
noise that has become an unfortunate side effect of today's information age."

Problem: If Tipd is so great at community building, why are there only 6
comments across the 15 stories on their front page? And all 6 of these
comments are either Techcrunch style "Awesome article!" comments or spam
comments promoting some other site.

Community = comments/discussion and they appear to be struggling mightily on
that front.

What's more likely is that Tipd is powered by autosubmission scripts scraping
feeds they like. That their traffic is all organic, attracted by the financial
keywords. And that their comments are left by their own sock puppet accounts
as well as financial blog spammers.

I run a social news site myself. These approaches are all very easy and
tempting to take to boost traffic and activity. If someone does it, fine, but
then don't pitch a phony story to Read Write Web, chalking your growth up to
other factors. It hurts the cause by putting false information out there.

~~~
coglethorpe
I run a social financial news site. Although my vision for my site is slightly
different than Tip'd, I do admire their ability to promote the site.

I also kind of wonder about how social the site really is, when front page
articles have titles such as "6 Easy Steps to Make money from Cash Reward
Credit Cards or Point Rewards Credit Cards" with 21 votes and no comments.
Someone is likely gaming the system.

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teej
This article is nothing but fluff. The advice is essentially: use widgets,
social sharing, and invites - nothing that really has to do with community
building. The rest of the article is a giant ad for Tip'd.

If you're really trying to build a community, why not emulate Hacker News?
Curate your content, encourage intelligent conversation, and define & enforce
your community's culture. I feel like those ideas stretch farther than social
news sites and, so far, it has worked.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Now wait a second... Hacker News works for all the reasons you listed but also
for another, very important reason that you left out: it isn't trying to sell
us _anything_. Not to defend the article but you just can't blatantly say, "If
you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" It's not
that easy. There are different types of communities, different expectations of
users, etc. There is no One Size Fits All in this arena.

~~~
teej
> "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!"

I never meant to imply this. Building communities online is an incredibly hard
thing to do, there is no secret sauce. I meant only to suggest that using
those rough guidelines, instead of the buzzword-happy guidelines the article
suggests, might be a better way to go. I know of several communities that are
following those guidelines + domain specific value adds to build great
communities.

> it isn't trying to sell us anything

I'd say this is something that works specifically for HN, but isn't applicable
to the general case. For instance, Mp3car.com is building an awesome community
around car modding and is building their business on selling directly to
users. They have great content (a lot of it user-generated), they keep the
conversation on topic, and they stick to what they're about - car-modding.

In their case, selling to their users makes perfect sense - power users
generate the content ( more time & skill to write guides ), motivated lurkers
consume the content and follow the guides, and lazy lurkers ( more money than
time ) just buy the parts from mp3car.com and have someone install it.

