The right people

[Dilip]

Is your community mostly of the right kind of people? People with behavioural, emotional and professional patterns you actually wanted to build a community for?

[Nomad]

Frankly speaking I do not have organic activities on my forums. I get users and activities only when pay people to join my community and post on my community or only when I buy posting packages on webmaster forums. I have very small percentage of organic activities and thankfully, those users are geuninely interested on the niche and are passionate about posting in the community

[Kane]

In your life, do you always meet the right people? let me be more specific, do you always meet the right people in your workplace? I guess you know the answer. It is not possible to have the right people in the community. That's why we create rules to govern user activities and behavior.

[Dilip]

I humbly disagree. There is an amount of control over that factor. You can eliminate the influence of wrong people to a great extend in your life. It is even more easier on your forum.

[JoelR]

When you are small, i think it's important to define who you are building the community for (as well as who you aren't building for).  

As you get larger, you naturally start to approach the average person in society. 

[Kane]

On 5/14/2024 at 5:11 PM, Dilip said:

I humbly disagree. There is an amount of control over that factor. You can eliminate the influence of wrong people to a great extend in your life. It is even more easier on your forum.

You might be able to eliminate wrong people sometimes but not always. For instance, can you eliminate toxic people in your workplace (you might not be in a position to leave the job), can you eliminate your neighbors, possibly not.

You can of course ban rule breakers but what if there are users who do not break rules but they are not the people you want to have in your community.,

[Dilip]

To eliminate is one thing and to have control of influence in an entirely different situation. Bad neighbours and coworkers is an universal thing. There are ways to minimise their influence though.

Edited Thursday at 01:29 AM by Dilip

[JoelR]

Some thoughts:

1. I wanted to come back to this topic maybe not quite with the exact angle of the OP, but to point out that a lot of times, we try to be too welcoming.  

Everyone is invited to join!

All are welcome! 

I know I'm guilty of using these phrases myself, but in many cases, no, we're not actually interested in certain people joining.  If you're a dog forum, maybe you're only focused on professional dog breeders of one breed.  You don't want new dog breeders, you don't want other types of dogs, and you definitely don't want snake owners.  We try so hard to onboard as many new users that we don't set the right expectations up front of who should be within the community, and who should not.  

2. To return to the heart of the OP, I think another way of asking the question is if you are proud of your community members? 

There are some communities out there that allow deviant, unprofessional, or immature behavior.  They allow or even encourage that kind of behavior (hello 8chan!).  

This is where community standards and social expectations come in, where I don't think forums have advanced our toolkit. When you're in public and do something dumb, people will give you weird looks or walk away.  We don't have the same tools to manifest social shaming, which is powerful in keeping large groups of people in collective behavior. 

[Dilip]

I think the difference is how influential they are on your community. Keeping an immature mod for whatever reason sounds unreasonable to me. Some do that to keep the forum going, as mentioned above, and some do it because drama is a good discussion booster. By the time they realise the mistake, it will be too late.

[Kane]

14 hours ago, JoelR said:

Everyone is invited to join!

All are welcome! 

I know I'm guilty of using these phrases myself, but in many cases, no, we're not actually interested in certain people joining. 

I agree. We always want people who are actually interested in our niche but sadly, we cannot always have the right people. Even if you have 20-30 percent people who are the right people, you can have quality content and engaging discussion. We do not want our users to post content that does not meet our quality expectations but sadly we end up accepting everything (except spam, of course) because finding the right people is a difficult task.

[Maria]

It is not always possible to bring the right people in your community. If you are too choosy about who joins your community, you might not be able to build an active community. Instead of looking for the right people what you need to focus on is bringing people who follow rules in your community and genuinely interact in your community