Building these types of environments isn’t easy. Unlike an app, your members can’t be programmed to consistently deliver valuable experiences for one another. That’s why it’s critical to thoughtfully design your community’s social architecture to maximize the value that gets exchanged between members.

Forums generally provide easy ways to organize content by topic, author, date, and more, which makes it simple to search for previous conversations. This makes it possible to have structured conversations, such as Q&As, and it also greatly increases the reusability of previous posts and conversation threads, turning the forum into a repository ... See more