What are the potential benefits of starting an online forum or community?

Community Management
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What are the potential benefits of starting an online forum or community?

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I personally see two potential benefits: the byproduct of having a community and the relatively low cost of solving some problems.

  1. Typically, communities are launched to solve some specific problems. As a result, the main benefit to the general public is the solution itself. Like think of Wikipedia. The benefits for human beings of having it is a free encyclopedia that is available to everyone over the internet.

  2. If we look at the question from the perspective of the owners of a community, the main benefit is financial efficiency of running the community. Now think of Reddit. It would have cost the managing company an astronomical amount of money to create all this content that has been generated by users.