Moderation also plays a big part in shaping a community’s voice. Large communities like Reddit or Hacker News possess an array of moderation tools, from flagging a post to lower its place in the rankings, to banning users altogether.
All In Moderation
So it’s up to you to highlight the type of content you want to see more of, and downplay (or outright remove) items that don’t match your vision, and generally speaking you shouldn’t be too shy about laying down the law. As much as we’d like them to be, online communities are not democracies: not every voice is equal, and not everybody deserves to be part of them.
Kelly Sutton, Designer News
These issues usually become more salient as your community grows, but it pays to be mindful of them from the start.
As long as you stay polite and do your best to be transparent with your decisions, the majority of members will appreciate your efforts to steer the ship.
Pieter Levels, #Nomads
Exclusive Communities
Another common strategy is to simply restrict access to your community in some way.
Given most startups’ obsession with growth at all cost, one might reasonably wonder why you’d ever want to restrict sign-ups to your community. But it turns out there are a lot of good reasons to do so.
After all, it’s the oldest trick in the book: limit supply to drive up demand. If it works for diamonds, maybe it can work for you?
Exclusivity alone probably won’t be enough to make your community successful, but exclusivity combined with actual value can work wonders though.
Dribbble has always been an invite-only site, and its invites are so sought-after that people hold contests to win them and have even set up entire parallel communities dedicated to getting invited.
Quality Control
There’s also cases where restricting access is necessary just to maintain a reasonable level of quality. Some communities tend to attract vocal minorities, and things can quickly get out of hand.
So in many cases, it might be easier to close down access and approve suitable users individually, than open up the floodgates and hunt down offenders.
Justin Kan, The Drop
Setting An Example
Exclusivity has other advantages, especially in the first months of your community. Newer users tend to model their behavior after current members, so by filtering sign-ups you can make sure your initial batch of users sets the right tone for your community.
Kelly Sutton, Designer News
So unless your audience is very narrow to begin with, limiting registrations is worth considering. Hopefully, the sign-ups you forfeit in the beginning will be offset by increased attention down the road thanks to your community’s higher quality.
Homework
- If your community is already exclusive, set up a contest to win some invites.
- If it isn’t, close registration down for a few days to see how people react.