A cellular theory of communities | thesephist.com

I’ve been seeing lots of community-focused companies, founders, and initiatives try to build a community exactly the wrong way, by putting everyone in the same forum, and adding members to it over time, expecting the community’s value to scale linearly.

Small, close, tight-knit connections are fundamental to intimacy,, and we can’t scale small groups in the sense of stretching them out to fit more people inside. To stretch out a small group and add more people to it senselessly is like trying to grow a cell by just stretching it out. The once small, intimate community will lose all the things that... See more

Instead, good communities like this are decentralized networks of many micro-communities, where there are a few superconnectors that form the fast, efficient “backbone” interconnect of the larger community.

I think this kind of linear thinking about scaling communities that I just highlighted misses a critical insight, that growing communities behave less like an infinitely scalable software product and more like a multicellular, living organism. If the community doesn’t grow in the right places, in the right ways, it’s easy for the community to colla... See more

I think the right way to build a large community is to build a well-connected, collaborative body of many small, intimate micro-communities, the way small cells glob together with quick interconnects to form larger bodies.

A cell needs to stay small to survive. So instead, organisms grow larger by making more, smaller cells, and connecting them together efficiently so they continue to communicate and share resources quickly.

To scale a community, build lots of special, one-of-a-kind places for a few people at a time, and then work with the most active members to build fast interconnects between them.