Ask HN: Creating a solid Community
Hey HN.
I usually don't make submissions or comments here, but a few recent posts on HN have caught my attention. Another Ask post was asking about phpBB and why it's been dropped for other platforms.
This has sort of sparked me to want to create my own community, similar to HN but different enough that it's not a ripoff. But the point of this post is to ask: how does one promote and get members to their forum (or whatever medium) and have them stay there.
I know that people would probably find enjoyment in most communities, but I have never found an effective way to get it known.
Thanks. The initial community of HN was the readers of the blog posts^W^W articles of pg. The initial community of Stack Overflow was the readers of the blog posts of spolsky and codinghorror (the two founders). So the recipe appears to be to make a interesting and unique blog. And after you have a nice technical community, you need moderation, a lot of moderation. There was a lot of work initially by pg and now by dang to moderate the site. A lot of that is invisible, but you can take a look at the recent comments by dang https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang