Building a community still means giving up control
I wrote “to grow an open source project, give up control” with open source projects in mind (duh), but it applies to other communities as well. I thought of this topic again yesterday when I read about Reddit’s new policy that takes more control away from volunteer moderators. Reddit’s leadership is not willing to embrace the consequences of giving up control.
I understand the business motivations. Reddit is a publicly-traded company that relies on selling data and eyeballs in order to make money. They’ve yet to turn a profit, so they need to protect their revenue streams. Letting Internet randos arbitrarily choose to shut off — or at least severely restrict — the flow of data and eyeballs is a significant business risk.
But I also understand the concerns of the moderators. Reddit user bellisaurius said the change “removes moderators from any position of central responsibility and demotes us all to janitors.” Reddit, once a relatively ungoverned space, has centralized power over the last year or so. This takes power away from the moderators. But this presents a long term risk. The reason that Reddit has data and eyeballs to sell is because the users are there. The users stick around, in no small part, because the moderators keep each subreddit a place where people want to be. Drive away or disengage the moderators, and the community’s infrastructure collapses.
It reminds me of how Twitter started as a platform that the community innovated on. Then Twitter slowly decided to take control, icing out the third-party app developers that made it a place people wanted to be. It managed to hold on pretty well, at least until new ownership arrived, but it lost the vibrancy over time. No doubt there are many other examples, and countless more yet to come.
It’s far too common of a pattern: a company fosters a community, lets it grow into something special, and then squeezes it when it’s time to extract value. The “community” is no longer a community, it’s a free labor pool. It should come as no surprise when people are less interested in that proposition.
The grow-and-squeeze model works for extracting short-term value. But what if we took a long-term approach? Create more value in the community than you extract. This leads to sustainable growth.
This post’s featured photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
