Does software matter for a community? If so, to what extent? Can I have a good community on a plain simple platform?
In the past, I was working on a Knowledge Network network that consisted of twelve Q&A communities. Our main website hashcode.ru, a Q&A community for software developers, at some point did not grow as expected and my team and I tried to find an answer to the question “why”. HashCode was an analogue of Stack Overflow, but in a different language niche. When thinking about innovations, we usually relied on what the folks at Stack Overflow were doing. Since we had fewer resources at our disposal than Stack Overflow, we were able to implement only the most important features. One of our hypotheses about growth was that if we had more resources to invest in software, we would win the hearts of all Russian-speaking developers. Luckily, I was able to find out how true this hypothesis was.
In 2015 HashCode became part of the Stack Overflow family. How much do you think community engagement has increased since migrating to the new platform? The correct answer is not one bit. Neither the Stack Overflow brand nor the much more technologically advanced platform have made a significant contribution to the desire of people to ask and answer questions on our site.
Here are some thoughts on why it went that way.
The value users get from a community is not directly related to the software
By definition, an online community is a group of people united by a common goal or interest, interacting with each other in the same environment. Often people gather in groups to solve a problem that worries them all and that is difficult to solve alone or find some other people who are passionate about something that they themselves are passionate about too.
The value that people get from participating in an online community usually lies outside the physical world. These are a sense of belonging, feeling of unity, the pleasure of being able to share ideas with the same minded people who appreciate it, and many others. To grow a community, you need to maximize that value. Software itself plays a secondary role.
To understand the idea more deeply, imagine that you have a regular bicycle, but you don’t like riding it because you don’t like riding a bicycle per se. Will you start to love cycling if you are given a new top-of-the-line carbon bike? Probably not.
There are many communities that run on the same software platform. Some of them are successful, others are not. Good software will not make a community successful, but it definitely can make a manager’s job a lot easier and the experience of the users a lot better.
The primary goal of software is to enable users manage groups efficiently
Any group of people requires organization and coordination, otherwise it will quickly turn into chaos. The larger the group, the more resources it requires to organize. In general, we can say that organization and coordination of a group come down to the exchange of information between the users. This is precisely one of the main tasks social software serves. The second purpose of social software is to provide tools to effectively achieve the mission of the group. All in all, social software is about efficient groups.
The fact that HashCode moved to a new platform and renamed to “Stack Overflow in Russian” did not give the community new users. The active growth of the community began at the moment when we started holding contests, webcasts, launched a series of articles about how the new engine works and how to use it effectively, etc. Definitely, the Stack Exchange platform has opened up new opportunities for community building activities. At the same time, without a clear community mission, interesting goals and social initiatives united by a single story, all this software is just a collection of zeros and ones gathering dust on a hard drive.
Software is like clothing. Clothes in themselves are not good or bad, but may or may not be appropriate for the current weather. To choose or develop the right software, it is important to clearly understand what kind of community you want to develop and what you want to achieve with it in the end.