Community Paradoxes
After 8 years working with b2b communities, I've seen 3 "paradoxes" that every community runs into. The first is the "Cold Start, Noise" paradox. The second is the "Network Effect, Reverse Network Effect". And finally there's "Monetization, Social Currency".
I've seen variations of these concepts discussed across research, but haven't seen them put together before.
Cold Start, Noise
The idea of a cold start was popularized by Reddit. The founders would pretend to be a bunch of different people in the forum, just to spark discussions. The issue is, once you solve the cold start problem, you immediately need to think about the noise problem - how to curate the content in a meaningful way.
Network Effect, Reverse Network Effect
Instead of focusing on content, this paradox relates to the people within a community. The more people in a community, the more value it holds. Although at some point, the bar for "who should be in this community" lowers, at which point the value of the network actually decreases. Every community has a sweet spot. One reason I started my last company Intros AI (Acquired by Bevy) was to help communities avoid reverse network effects, to keep high-value connection as their community scales.
Monetization, Social Currency
The more vetted the content and people are, the higher the social capital is associated with that group (ie. it's seen as higher "status" to be an active member). The issue is, community builders are incentivized to grow the community - more budget, funding etc. So there's this tension where on one side, members want a more trusted, intimate space. On the other, community organizers want scale.
By calling out some of the core scaling issues, my hope is that those building communities realize that every community faces these issues. There's ways of orchestrating a community to counter these issues, including creating cohorts, segments, and more personalized experiences.
If you have any approaches to solving some of these community dynamics, reach out!
