Don't automatically pander to power . Power users, while awesome, are not always the archetype of the member, and the more you appease them, the less inclusive a community gets, inherently. Most power users are awesome, but they are already having an outsized impact, you need to cater to all users. We have some internal metrics about activity and we deliberately measure on logarithmic scales for individual contributions, so that we remember that these folks are not everyone.
Wow, really good point here. Never thought about this.
Am glad to hear that ya'll are keeping these things in mind early on and helping these values shape what you're building.
This is something I've thought about often when working for companies. At which point does culture get defined by leadership of an organization? As you pointed out in point one, it is often easy to overlook certain values in defining a culture in order to build and scale. But it is something you can't let go unchecked for too long.
The scaling part is definitely the really hard part. Our community is still pretty small. But in any case, it's the early focus that will define the whole community. I think Stack Overflow cares a lot about being more welcoming, but has a big hill to climb in that sense. Hacker News doesn't seem to have any interest in changing and that's also a reflection of the folks behind it, IMO.
Reddit is a complicated beast. It's kind of up to the individual moderators to define the experience and expectations. The company would have a hard time changing things significantly if it were their biggest concern in the world (and it kind of is). Because Reddit has so many dark corners, relatively tame communities like /r/programming seem not worth worrying about.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Wow, really good point here. Never thought about this.
Am glad to hear that ya'll are keeping these things in mind early on and helping these values shape what you're building.
This is something I've thought about often when working for companies. At which point does culture get defined by leadership of an organization? As you pointed out in point one, it is often easy to overlook certain values in defining a culture in order to build and scale. But it is something you can't let go unchecked for too long.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts Ben!
The scaling part is definitely the really hard part. Our community is still pretty small. But in any case, it's the early focus that will define the whole community. I think Stack Overflow cares a lot about being more welcoming, but has a big hill to climb in that sense. Hacker News doesn't seem to have any interest in changing and that's also a reflection of the folks behind it, IMO.
Reddit is a complicated beast. It's kind of up to the individual moderators to define the experience and expectations. The company would have a hard time changing things significantly if it were their biggest concern in the world (and it kind of is). Because Reddit has so many dark corners, relatively tame communities like /r/programming seem not worth worrying about.