erictwillis

It's the positive nature of the community. Hacker News can be very toxic, for instance. There are extremely smart people there, but sometimes the attitudes don't make for a very positive, open community. The thing that separates PH the community is that everyone on PH is usually very good-spirited. I think it starts with Ryan Hoover. People will give constructive feedback, but it's done in a respectful manner. I've generally had good experiences on reddit but there are some toxic channels here as well. So you need to be very careful about how you interact in various subreddits.

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There is a lot of overlap, but I think there are some traits that are especially important for building communities. I won't touch on them all, but I will give some examples.

Community managers are constantly in touch with people in an individual-level or group setting... constantly communicating ideas or replying to people in the community. It's something that's required to do for hours daily. So it's important to have very strong communicate skills. You need to be able to communicate complex ideas in simple way but also in a way that is "clear" to a wide range of people that may participate in your community. That can sometimes be very tricky. You also think it's important to show consistent empathy. Being consistent, fair, and kind are major qualities that one needs to do well at building community. You'll be dealing with the extreme nature of personality-types and it's important to bury your ego and just always try to give people what that ultimately need from you.

Hello,

Well, I think that no matter how often you communicate with someone in Slack, it does not replace other forms of more "intimate" communication. We've been testing an app called Blab. It's essentially a well-made type of google hangouts. Think of a Meerkat-type app (but where 4 people that talk simultaneously) but it leverages Slack. I love it and it's been great to talk (and see people) that I've been chatting with in Slack for months. I feel like I know them much better. I don't know if that's "unexpected" knowledge as that should be a bit obvious but the difference it has had in building community has been striking.

Haha. Pledge and share in your social networks!

I think the consistent pattern is that successful people become very comfortable with failure in that they've recognized from experience that everything is not going to work. However, one failure might just get them closer to their ultimate success. It's an ideological mindset. When someone asked Thomas Edison about "failing" so many times before inventing the light bulb, he replied "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.". It's a subtle but powerful difference in perspective.