Why Closed Online Communities Die Over Time

Why Closed Online Communities Die Over Time

The pros and cons of running a community that doesn’t let everyone in

Community engagement is constantly constrained by the force of gravity.

Gravity being disinterest, impartiality, decreasing involvement. All communities, online and offline, face churn. Your local church group, a subreddit about hamsters — doesn’t matter what kind of community. People get occupied with other things going on in their lives, they cease to care about the community they’re a part of, or the community no longer provides enough value for them to show up or contribute. Like a business, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. Healthy communities have a growth rate equal to or greater than their rate of churn (the people who leave). Pretty simple math.

Of course, communities face a lot of quality issues, particularly online communities, given the pseudo-annoymity of the Internet and the ease at which people can find and join different groups online. There’s bullying, trolling, harassment, and the like. You have people who join communities only to lurk (this is most people), people who join communities for the wrong reasons, and people who only bring down the quality of interactions of other community members around them.

People don’t want quality issues. They want to enjoy, learn from, or gain something from interactions with others. They want to meet their peers and talk about topics that interest them. As a result, most people seek to curate their communities by only letting certain people in to ensure quality: a closed community.

An example of an online community based on Facebook

For a time, this works pretty well as your initial community members get that dose of dopamine from being in a new environment and a feeling of high-status that comes from exclusivity. They participate, they talk, they share content with each other, some relationships form. Engagement is high, and there’s good energy in the environment. Some people even take charge and help organize and engage people in the community.

Then, the decay sets in. Some people stop talking as much as they used to. Fewer people post. People stop even checking the feed, forum, or board. Eventually, the community dies, an empty shell of a once-bustling virtual town.

Normally, new members joining the community are able to replace the ones that churn. But in a closed community, that’s much more difficult. The super closed ones that let basically no one in will die faster. The semi-permeable communities that have some restrictions on who’s allowed to join will die slower.

That’s not to say that open communities are the best at retaining members and growing. If the community doesn’t provide value, then no one will come, whether it’s open or not. It’s like a restaurant — just because it’s open, doesn’t mean people will come to eat. It still has to have good food, good service, and/or a good environment. That same principle applies to closed communities — if their value proposition (what people get out of being in the community) is good, that will lower the churn rate and keep people engaged. That value prop in online communities can be a constant stream of content (ex. never-ending feed of cat videos), virtual events (ex. speaker sessions with important or cool people), or the discussions (ex. people having other people to talk with about important social issues).

That’s why it’s important to actively manage a closed community. You can’t just let a closed community sit by itself and expect it to sustain itself and/or grow on its own. One of the core principles in the 9 Timeless Principles for Building Community by Amy Jo Kim, a renowned social game designer and community architect, is that there needs to be cyclical events — programming that keeps the community engaged and consistently looking for more content/activities. Certainly, communities can create their own content and activities, but there definitely needs to be some action that sparks that feedback loop. More often than not, that feedback loop needs to be pushed along at times, like oiling a rusting wheel. Do it consistently enough, and you’ll have a bustling community.

I’ve been a part of plenty of communities, good ones and bad ones.

Discord community example

I won’t name the specific group, but there was once an online community on Discord I was a part of that only allowed certain people in. There wasn’t an interview process or anything like that, but it vetted people through a form we had to submit about ourselves and why we would be a good fit for the community and our social media profiles. Once people joined the community, it was great for a time. We introduced ourselves, we talked about cool topics, and there was even some speaker sessions and little live events that got people interested. There weren’t that many of them, but the few we had were pretty fun. The Discord also had an added benefit of connecting people online who already lived in the same set of cities (ex. San Francisco, Boston, etc), so those specific people had the added benefit of being able to meet up in person.

But, over time, people stopped posting. There were fewer and fewer conversations. The creators stopped hosting the discussions and speaker events. Eventually, the community died. It still exists today — just another empty shell.

Here’s why it died:

1. The rate of new people joining was too low for the churn rate.
2. The community was niche.
3. There wasn’t enough active management.

Slack community example

As a counterexample, I’m going to talk about an online community that did well for a time. In 2016, I was interning in the Bay Area while I was in college. I didn’t know many people at all there, but I definitely wanted to make new friends — that was a big part of why I wanted to be out there in the first place. So, I joined some Facebook groups made up of summer interns in the Bay Area. While it was cool to see so many other people that were in my position, there wasn’t really a good way to interact with people and have quality conversations with others on Facebook’s platform. People would post stuff like “Who wants to play tennis over the summer?” and then like 500 people would reply to it, and absolutely nothing would happen. The Facebook Messenger groups were even worse — a literal inundation of notifications with no real direction.

So, I, alongside some other random people I now forget how I met, started a Slack group for Bay Area summer interns. We invited a few people that we knew, and encouraged them to do the same. Over time, more and more people joined, WAY more than I had ever anticipated. We grew from 5 members to 20 to 100 to 400 to 1000 to well over 2000 at its height. A ton of people joined really quickly, so much that we had to quickly reinventing new ways of managing it all. The creators of the community suddenly became admins, we had to get volunteers to moderate the community, we had to create and enforce behavior policies (ex. don’t spam, no harassment allowed, etc), and so much more. We also created tons of channels for people to join so they could talk about some specific interest or shared characteristic (ex. #nightlife, #food, #sports, #womenterns). People even created their own channels and subgroups outside of the ones we made. It was a surreal experience. There were SO MANY messages exchanged over public channels, private channels, and in direct messages between members.

There was a specific subgroup that I managed in this community that I took on as my pet project. It was called #non-technical, a group of interns in the Bay Area that weren’t “technical” (didn’t code or didn’t have software engineering internships). I wanted to meet people like me who were non-technical.

So, I organized a series of dinners that happened roughly every other week that summer. I would research a bunch of interesting restaurants, throw up the options in a poll, and then pick the most popular voted option and make the reservation, setting the date and place for the event. Then, people would show up, and we’d talk. Simple stuff, but those dinners made that subgroup more active than the vast majority of other subgroups. We talked more, exchanged more messages, and more people became friends (we even had one romantic relationship form out of this subgroup, which was pretty cool).

Clearly, the Slack group I had created was much more engaging than the Facebook groups I had been part of for the same purpose. But why?

Firstly, the tech platform itself was much better suited for facilitating conversations and discussions and creating subgroups. That alone was a big driving factor of success — because people could easily self-organize into different groups while staying on the same platform, they could form stronger bonds with each other while still staying tied to the community. The moderation was also weak in the Facebook group. There were constant reposts that drove down quality of the content, people trolled or harassed people in the comments of posts, and there was constant spam. In contrast, we moderated the Slack community pretty well, creating a safe space for people to have conversations and confidently check the feed knowing that there would usually be relevant content for them. Lastly, we had consistent programming and little rituals like our #introductions channel where new people introduced themselves, where they worked, and what they wanted to get out of the Slack. This created culture and gave people even more reason to keep coming back to the platform.

Eventually, I had to stop managing the Slack, as I was done with my internship for the summer and had to return to college. The community faded away without active management, but, on the bright side, it returned next summer with just as much gusto. A new Slack group formed, and that tradition continued onwards, eventually becoming an organization called intern.community.

Here’s why that community succeeded:

1. The community was niche, but it was a big enough niche.
2. Our vetting wasn’t that tough.
3. There was active management.

So, if you’re going to start and run a closed community that you plan on growing and keeping active, then follow these guidelines:

1. If you’re going to vet people to join the community, you have to make sure that your growth rate is higher than your churn rate.
2. Make sure the community has something to do, a shared experience that people can bond over and/or talk about.
3. Either spend effort in marketing your community to get new members, or build growth loops into membership.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to online communities and designing good, active ones than what I was able to describe in this article. Future topics will likely cover subjects like incentive structures for commitment, community roles and moderators, and how to keep engagement high in an online community. So, if you’re interested in learning more, check out my profile, read what’s available, and follow me to keep an eye out for future articles in this series.