What You Should Keep In Mind When Building Communities

Building a community is like building a startup.

What do I mean by that?

  • It’s a High-uncertainty problem you can (and should) tackle with all the high-uncertainty problem solving methods available (aka. Startup Methods)
  • You don’t care at all about pleasing the general public. You want to create the strongest enthusiasm possible in the largest group of people—but when you need to/want to choose (and you will need to choose), you want to pick the greater enthusiasm for the smaller amount of people. Always.
  • Your success depends on the Subculture Creators you draw to it. You want to make sure your message reaches and activates them.

Building a community means building a garden.

You want and need to create a space a certain subgroup of people really enjoys, and then is able to spend time under the social rules you (the initial group) set up in it. It can change with time, of course.

Seems reasonable, right? Yet it has two not-so-easy-to-get-right parts about it.

  1. It’s important that some people really enjoy being there. Otherwise, nobody will come.
  2. To make that happen, there have to be some rules (be they explicit or implicit, social or otherwise). What is important is not what they are, but that you enforce them. If you don’t fight for it, your garden will die.

And Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. Meaning you need to be very, very clear about whom to allow in and to participate and whom you don’t allow in.

Normally, if you already got found by some people, 1. is not the problem. I’m worrying you’ll fail at the second one.

For enforcing the rules, you 1) need to know them and 2) be prepared to defend them.

In the case of the School of Moral Amibition, you have the rules and know them.

How do you prepare to defend them? You collect every instance of someone that didn’t fit/alienated people, and.

From the onboarding, I think can out the following prototypes:

  1. People that don’t want to actually work on the cause, but only be part of the community (MOPs in Subculture terms)
  2. People that only want to find people for their own cause—and not contribute to this one
  3. People that only want to show off (consciously or unconsciously)

And, coincidentially: All of them are also people that make it on average less joyful for the ones that are morally ambitious to participate in the community.

So, defend your garden.