How do online communities grow?
Tl;dr: The growth of communities is cyclical and is based on dividing a community into several sub-communities.
Any community grows by making users stay on the platform, i.e. converting visitors into casual users and then casual users into regular users. To make users stay in a community, a community manager needs to run initiatives to create connections between users, develop users’ sense of belonging to the group and engage active users in indirect ways to contribute to the community.
As you work on growing the community, at some point it will reach a plateau of the number of active users and the value they create on the platform. No matter how many new people you add to the community, some other folks will naturally leave the group. This plateau is an indicator that the community became “too big”.
The reason for this is that it is difficult for a person to maintain close connections with a large group of people. Large communities negatively impact users’ sense of belonging. In order for a community to continue to grow after it has reached a plateau, the community manager needs to split it into several smaller more specialized sub-communities. After this all sub-communities can continue growing until each of them reach their own plateaus. The cycle of splitting should be repeated again and again with each sub-community that has reached its critical size.
A sub-community is a group of users who interact in an environment isolated from the larger community where specialized rules are in effect. The rules themselves are determined by the sub-community users as well as the environment the users interact in. For a sub-community to function properly, it should have its own place for meta-discussions and the ability to implement the needed changes.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.