
What makes different Internet Forums/Social Media communitys different? - AnInternetUser
Why is 4chan different than ycombinator and what makes Reddit the way it is? How does one influence how a community develops in a forum. Is it feasible to &quot;engineer&quot; future forums to encourage leading to a specific outcome? (Nitpicking where you advertise to get a specific crowd of users, site layout, anonymity or not, etc).
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CM30
Generally, it's a mixture of things. Namely:

1\. The topic. Obviously a tech site will tend towards being a bit more
respectful/sophisticated than a political one.

2\. The initial group of users. As you may have guessed, your first few users
set the tone of the community to follow, so if they're particularly
intelligent/knowledgeable about the topic/whatever then your community will
likely keep at least a bit of that culture going forward.

3\. Moderation. Generally, a forum or community has to strike a balance
between being too moderated and not moderated enough, with the former leading
to a stifling atmosphere filled with yes men and the latter becoming
anarchy/troll heaven. Something like Ask Historians is far towards the heavily
moderated site, whereas something like 4chan and competitors are towards the
anarchist side.

4\. Barriers to entry. Invite only or paid services tend to have higher
quality content than free ones where anyone can join.

5\. Site layout has some effect, generally the harder it is to use, the more
determined people will need to be to participate, which can (sometimes) push
up quality. The minimalist/old school design here drives away a certain
percentage of the 'mainstream' audience.

6\. Anonymity is a mixed bag. A small, paid/invite only community of
professionals in a certain field that's not anonymous can do really well, but
it won't make a lick of difference on the scale of Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.

Either way, you can certainly engineer forums to encourage a certain
culture/type of community, though it's still kinda luck based whether you
actually get that.

