Editing Why Closed Online Communities Die Over Time (section)

=== 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:

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