What is a balance of user interests in an online community?
Online communities are multi-sided platforms that require users with mutually complementary interests to function properly. A community functions properly when users’ interests are balanced. Before the balance is achieved naturally, you need to compensate for the lack of users of certain types.
Exactly what type of users to compensate depends on your community. The rule of thumb is to focus on compensating for users who create the opportunities to act for others. Usually these are the users who initiate discussions, start topics, post news etc. You need to stimulate the growth of the user base of this type manually, for example, by using paid advertising or sending personal invitations. While you have a lack of users of this type, you need to fill the gap by acting yourself.
When there are still very few users you might need to compensate not only for the selected type of users, but also take any other required actions to maintain the balance of interests, while giving the users the opportunity to act. It means that you need to act if someone has not received the attention from other users after some time.
The essence of compensation is to ensure that everyone who comes to your site gets what they are looking for.
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.