Broken Edges
Discussion Forums
From 2006 to 2011, we had the discussion forums here. They became popular instantly because I fed traffic to the forums from my blog. We’d normally see between 500 and 1000 new posts per day, and we eventually passed 1M messages posted and more than 50K registered members. We did a lot of things right that made this work well for several years. Here were some of the broken edges with the forums:
Lots of work to manage the community (at least a dozen moderators were needed)
A sense of entitlement from some members, for whom the community became their personal online hangout
Some good action alignment in the beginning which gradually devolved into mostly discussion (low accountability)
Frequent attacks by spammers, including some hired to spam personal growth forums
Hacking attacks due to forum software vulnerabilities
A bigger load on the server and the need for more expensive hardware
Workshops
From 2009 to the present, I’ve been doing three-day workshops in Las Vegas (16 of them so far). These have been great for community building since people who meet at these events often bond closely and stay in touch for years afterwards. There are some broken edges though:
People have to travel, so those who don’t go to workshops are left out of the community aspect
Workshops are only available infrequently
Events are relatively short (just a few days)
No formal community retention after the workshops (although there has been some informal retenti...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Steve Pavlina Tags: Abundance Creating Reality Relationships Source Type: blogs
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