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LCA: How to destroy your communityLCA: How to destroy your communityPosted Jan 18, 2010 21:09 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493)In reply to: LCA: How to destroy your community by dlang Parent article: LCA: How to destroy your community
Agreed. However, expanding the community that much would require a lot of publicity. That publicity could either be a result of money investment in an ad campaign, or due to an enormous general usefulness for everyone, so that the natural time to spread would be acceptable. The latter looks possible only for some of the projects, not for any. The former looks much more easy, but requires money.
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LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 18, 2010 21:16 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I would argue that publicity itself doesn't help. the program needs to be useful to people, if it's useful word gets around. you do need some publicity, but it's not expensive campaigns.
the real cost of growing a community is dealing with the 'whiners' when the community is small, bringing the new contributers up to speed, working with them to change their patches into something that's acceptable for the project, taking the 'works but is not quite right' patches and assigning someone to clean them up, writing documentation, etc.
when the community is small, these things will distract your paid people, but they are needed to grow the community. it's a long-term investment, and it doesn't always pay off, but when it does it can pay off in a big way.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 18, 2010 21:32 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
I agree again, but would notice that even if program is useful to people indeed (even if highly and extremely useful!), it won't get popular instant by itself. This can take years. With the right publicity, though, it can gain a lot of users in no time. Publicity means a LOT -- look at all of our beloved spammers out there and ask why do they exist ;) Remember the story of Firefox. Look at how fast Google's Chrome is gaining weight (and yet crashes all the time on my machine when I try it!)
Of course, if the program is an outright crap, no amount of publicity would hold the user base :)
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 21, 2010 11:44 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
I'm not sure it's a good example. Publicity may be the reason why people
try out Google Chrome (or Chromium), but usability is why they keep using it. I may be extrapolating from one example here (myself), but despite all the numerous bugs I find Chromium more usable than Firefox.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 24, 2010 19:36 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Building a community anew is very hard but there are ways of speeding it up.
If you're part of a larger community, say the KDE community, you can and should call upon the help of others like the KDE promo team, the forum ppl, the translators and others.
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