Long Story

The topic that we’re going to talk about today is how to build a community that is sustainable and inspires great content. It’s something that any community creator should think about before they build a community. Put when down to think, explain before doing the community, there must be many blind places.

Since the change, I have been telling myself that it doesn’t matter if I slow down a little bit, but I must think as clearly as possible. But at the same time, thinking clearly doesn’t mean thinking “everything” so you don’t make mistakes. It means setting goals clearly so you’re motivated to try even if they’re difficult. Yesterday, I watched the 2019 Oscar Best Film Green Book, and there was a line in it that touched me: The world if full of lonely people waiting to make The first move. The world is full of lonely people waiting to make The first move.

This sentence touched me very much, and also made me think about two questions.

  • Am I alone? Have I been waiting too long to take the first step?
  • What about users in a community? Are users waiting to take the first step?

Recently community products and operations and I have been talking about a fundamental thing about the community, which is how to effectively set the rules for a better content environment in Nuggets, which basically means more good original technical content. Take it apart and you get:

  • How to “guide” users to produce good content? (Note that “good” means “good” by the Nuggets.)
  • How do you “reward” people for producing good content?
  • How do you “punish” people for not producing good content?

People talked about it a lot, and it turned out that it was a big set of issues, fundamental values that directly connected to the community, and it was complicated. This is why the best state to do products is “intuition”, because the intuition is actually “through”, give the simplest solution. This is also why “avenue to simple”, think clear avenue is difficult, but think clear do very smooth and concise.

Come on, let’s explore community.

Three categories of Internet communities

Speaking of community, most Internet users are social media users, so there is a bias between community and social. Someone gave a good explanation:

Social = focus on content because of the people

Community = People for content

The most important thing about a community is content. Without content, a community has no flesh and soul. But why post in one community when you can post on many products? Is it really just because of the so-called “traffic”? It’s not. What users are always looking for in the community is cultural identity, is to find a group of like-minded people.

It has been a century since I first touched the Internet in the third grade, but MY fascination with community has never stopped, and I have always been eager to create a good community. Before I go into the details below, I want to make it clear that the community can be both the whole of a product and part of a product. It’s not that this concept is incompatible, but there are a lot of great products out there that take advantage of community features to make their products more active and fun.

My understanding of the community is limited, but I hope to give you some rough thinking through the following elaboration. First, I have divided the community into three categories. Of course, it’s also possible that a product will span multiple categories, such as starting as an interest forum and then moving to a content platform.

Interest in the BBS

1979 Usenet / 1992 CFido / 1995 Linux Kernel Mailing List / 1999 Hi! PDA / 2002 NGA Player community / 2004 CSDN / 2005 Shuimu community / 2007 Hacker News

This is what the earliest forums looked like, when the first people to understand the Internet in the pre-millennium began to build channels of communication and discussion online using a variety of tools. News Group derived from Usenet, Mailing List derived from emails, and getting to know interesting people in Terminal like FidoNet.

At this time, the forum is gathered by interest, the content is scattered in each independent pool, do not interact with each other. And the people gathered in a forum often have the same hobbies, ideas, knowledge, values, have a lot of similarities. All kinds of people play their roles on the Internet, chatting and sharing content in the forum. In this day and age, content is distributed over the Internet’s telecommunication channel is a luxury, like a newly built road, any car running on it is handsome, not necessarily a Mercedes. Unity of value and purpose is the only reason everyone comes to the same forum, because there is nowhere else to go.

With the advent of the 21st century, even the bursting of the dotcom bubble could not prevent the Internet from entering the public eye. Meanwhile, the most insightful developers are still looking for platforms, and the spread of software is getting faster because of the development of the Internet, such as Discuz! Open source forum software like phpBB, MyBB (with a little PHP thanks here) is everywhere, and the need for tools like CRM has spawned countless vertical forums. Like sports to make a, like games to make a, like music to make a, even a certain person’s fans will build a fan station.

Unlike the wild wild early days, content began to grow, users began to grow, and the rules of the community became self-governing (simple rules) from the minority to a somewhat managed relationship. For example, moderators, levels, virtual coins and so on, became the common guidelines of the forum. On the one hand, from big moderators to small moderators, the quality of the forum is maintained and differences are resolved. At the same time, in order to seek higher rights, users will also make active actions such as building, sharing pirated resources, and punching in daily.

At this point, no one is talking about “active users,” they’re talking about “posts” and “simultaneous online,” two metrics that represent forum activity. Moreover, often the purpose of a forum is to serve a specific group of people, a technical expert to build a forum for everyone, so there is no “growth”, “operation” concept, is often built for themselves and their friends around.

In addition, this era basically does not have too much of the realization method, the forum master to the later period will do taobao customer distribution, receive some advertisements and games into. But what users often want is honor and the right to consume content (pirated software, videos, music, etc.) on the forums.

I still remember when I was in college, there were many “political” events during the transition of the students’ union and the forum. This is the chaos from autonomy to semi-rule by man and semi-rule by law.

Content platform

1999 Tianya / 2003 Blogger / 2003 4chan / 2003 Post bar / 2005 Reddit / 2005 Dumban / 2006 Youtube/ 2007 Pornhub / 2008 GitHub / 2009 Bilibili / 2011 Zhihu / 2012 Medium / 2012 wechat Public Platform / 2016 Steemit

Still, with the development of the Internet, Internet surfing has become popular, a large amount of online information has appeared, and search engines have become popular, which makes people feel that “content is not enough”. Remember that the goal of 360 was to do community search, you can imagine the market share of the content in the “community”. Network unicom mode, from dial-up to broadband rapid development, BBS era to pass a picture needs to consume virtual currency era is coming to an end, people are eager for faster, more, better content.

At the same time, traffic is being evenly distributed, the monopolies of portals and forums are being broken up by open Internet search (ironically, since the open Internet is gone again today), content needs to be aggregated, and efficiency needs to be improved. In 1999 RSS came along and made it possible to actively push content outside of categorization lists, searches, mailboxes, and discussion boards.

Content platforms are starting to emerge, not to serve a specific group of people, but to serve as many people as possible to consume content. Whether it’s a platform with a variety of forums, or a platform with one channel per person, the goal of a content platform is to integrate as much information as possible for as many people to consume and produce. Each content platform, on the other hand, tends to address an aggregate of needs, such as content media (blogs, videos, posts). And the products that hold the flow entrance, all hope to receive more content, thus serve more users.

The road has changed from narrow channels to wide channels of information, and people’s demand to consume content through a specific node has become to catch fish in a flowing river. Therefore, the communication power and influence of the content platform far exceeds the interest forum. What people pursue is no longer just points and honors, but influence, a voice that gives content and society a voice.

We can see that even after 2010, there are still new content platforms (such as Zhihu, Medium, wechat public platform, Steemit), but they all have the same purpose and compete in the same way. Some companies with new traffic (e.g., wechat) start building their content ecology, some find a gap in the market (e.g., Zhihu, Medium), and some build on a concept (e.g., Steemit). However, content platforms are all about losing and winning, there is no in-between. Cannot become a content monopolist, will eventually be replaced.

The social network

2003 Facebook / 2005 Twitter / 2009 Weibo / 2010 Instagram / 2012 Moments / 2016 Douyin

I don’t really want to associate “social networking” with community, because the purpose and the appeal are different. Firstly, in a social network, a user’s account is the core of the content delivery node. To put it bluntly, every user is influencing how the content is circulated. This is not the stage of big river catch fish engage in SEO, this is the stage of their own aqueduct, you can live inverted water storage, can raise their own fish, OK. At this time, the traffic is more concentrated, and the traffic spread out by the open Internet is aggregated into the social network, and then distributed to everyone with follow/like.

At this time, the relationship between community, content platform and social network is also more blurred, a mature social network can not only cultivate content platform, but also create a small community of fans. For example, weibo has both the channels for publishing articles and videos, and even aggregates music, films and television information. Under the super words, it is also the fan community of various stars. The product is so complex.

And for products such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu and Jike, IT is difficult for me to explain them through simple forums, content platforms and social networks. The only constant is that users are hungry for content, hungry for approval, hungry for reward.

Finally, the opportunity of Internet money circulation appeared, no longer water fishing, but directly in the water with gold sand.

Three elements of community

Review so many communities, the purpose is to clarify the core context, because changes in technology (network speed, terminal, media forms) changed the way traffic distribution (active node, social networking, search engines, push) and then change the user’s demands (value identity, traffic, the number of subscription, the number of fans, income).

A good community needs three elements that are clear and unambiguous:

  1. Positioning: Who is the user and what content do you want to see in the community
  2. Culture: What kind of content and users does the community advocate
  3. Rules: How does the community motivate and punish users

positioning

The positioning of the community is the most important, it represents the size of the community and the number of new users. If the community is not clearly identified, it is most likely a fake demand and no one needs to come at all. And the location of a community determines the life and death of the community, for example, it is almost impossible to create a PHP community at this time, because PHP users already have their place to talk about, and there are few new users.

culture

The culture of the community really attracts users, and if the culture is not recognized and respected by users, the community is not vibrant, and people are just consuming content and not engaging enough. In this respect, social networks have many advantages, because liking a person means liking this person’s values, and of course, it is easy for fans to turn black.

The rules

It is the rules of the community that shape the culture, but they don’t have to be hundreds or thousands of responsible rules. They can be simple and clear for users to enforce. Moreover, the purpose of rules is to strengthen support for content and users that the community promotes, and therefore should ultimately be culturally aligned.

  • Quantitative numerical
  • How do you increase it, how do you decrease it
  • Different permissions for different values

I like Hacker News’s rule (not that it applies to all communities), which uses the Karma value to indicate the weight of a user’s content, and Karma is the number of likes and clicks that a user posts. Different Karma values give you different permissions on your content, and you have different (slightly different) features when using Hacker News. Hacker News is hungry for good new content and ideas, so there is no way to beat the rate at which Karma increases. New users can only get Karma if they continue to contribute long and valuable comments, and then slowly increase their Karma by making their posts visible to other users. But there’s a problem, too, because Karma is complicated with new user growth, which leaves most users spending rather than Posting.

Three levels of user representation

Given the three elements of a community, how do you keep the community sustainable and motivating good content? Here, we can say that content contained in a content community is divided into three levels:

  1. Knowledge: knowledge that transmits information and helps others to learn and understand
  2. An opinion or judgment about a matter, an argument based on facts
  3. Emotions: Create empathy, emotional connection, feedback, and even conflict

In a forum, in a community, the content is divided into three levels. Generally, it is very difficult to separate completely. And I think the pyramid of users in a community is:

  • Power user: Based on facts, express opinions
  • Core users: organize information, output knowledge, feedback ideas
  • Ordinary users: express emotions, learn knowledge, follow opinions
  • Superficial users: consumer sentiment, consumer knowledge

Focus on power users and core users

Community If you want to build a community that can sustainably incentivise quality content, you have to focus on power users and core users. Ordinary users will come because of the demand for content, and will even be converted into core users of output content. In the process of consuming content, shallow users will start to participate in community reviews, read in depth, and track down power users. And the power user, not only the person with the highest authority in the community, but also should have a direct way to participate in the construction of the community.

In other words, the health of a community’s content ecology is defined by the percentage of its power users, its core users, who are active. If there are no power users in a community, then the cultural density of the community is very low, like a normal showcase for goods, no soul, and no stickiness.

At the same time, how to prevent shallow users from destroying the community culture needs to be strictly controlled by rules, that is, shallow users start to use the community habitually from pure consumption. It’s important to make sure that its behavior doesn’t destroy the community itself, but at the same time, it’s important to make it clear to users how to be core users and power users, and what kind of value they have, so that they are more willing to use the community.

Recommended Proportion of Users

Finally I give a suggested proportion (2/8 theory) :

  • Power user:0.64%
  • Core users:3.2%
  • Common users:16%
  • Shallow users:80%

This means that out of 100 users, close to four are producing valuable content and participating in the discussion of ideas. And out of every 10,000 users, 64 are leaders, not just spreading information, but spreading their thoughts and opinions over and above the content.

Oh, you may find that the above 4 categories are not summed up 100%, the rest are official operations, administrators, some strange accounts and other issues 😜Copy the code

Bilibili – example

Here is an example of Bilibili, which has the following categories under its user system:

  • Identity: Common user, Up primary, authentication user, authentication authority
  • Honors: Leaderboards, MEDALS, Membership levels (experience points), Coins (community virtual currency)
  • Wealth: Charge (shell, used to motivate Up master), B coin (cash purchase)
  • Pay: Big membership (lots of perks)

Bilibili membership levels and privileges

Bilibili gets different levels of requirements

Bilibili’s way of gaining experience

There are a lot of benefits. Who are the power users and the core users for Nuggets, what kind of permissions should we give them, how do the average users grow into the core users and the power users, and what are their demands. Hopefully, one day, our core users will be able to manage our content, and our power users will even be able to participate directly in building our tagging system. Everyone who shares and learns on the Nuggets can eventually have a good program life!

As communities evolve, so does a game audience evolve, so does a team evolve, so does an organization evolve.