What I learned helping others grow their Digg communities - 100 interactions later.

Earlier in the week I had some spare time and I offered to meaningfully engage with 100 communities. 

Unexpectedly I learnt a lot about methods for ‘good’ community growth, uncovered a bunch of people engaging in interesting ways, and saw a few who just do it different. 

HOW TO GROW

If you're aiming to grow a big community, here’s 3 ways I saw some of them scaling, and some people on Digg I believe you can learn from:

1. Add value to Cross-over Communities

   This isn’t cross-posting, it’s engaging in communities with complimentary topics. It starts with valuable contribution, progresses to curiosity, and ends in membership.
   
   Most people on here instantly recognise users like @forest, @justin, etc when they contribute to a community post because they're OG's and they have a Digg team badge. But I’ve noticed the same pattern of user recognition beginning to extend to newer profiles with no badge at all.
   

   And it seems that if you add regular value to a cross-over community, people develop recognition of your profile, that drives curiosity, eventually a profile click, and at that point you've increased the odds of a similar-interest person that actively engages joining your community.

   For example:

   • @austen runs /formula1 (~1,000 members) but adds value to /technology and even /metaphisics.

   • @strix does the same, running a small but growing /retrofuturism and constantly pops up with value in /gaming and /design.

2. Highlight Good Posts

   When people post value to your community don’t ignore it! The best community founders feel present, they recognise the post and even try to help the contributor create better posts next time with insights as to what engages that community. You will naturally become knowledgeable about engagement in your space and people appreciate that knowledge.
   

   @midi002 is awesome at this over at /digglist (~800 members), constantly commenting on contributor posts with insightful and personalised information. I saw people like @thejustin come back there regularly each post finding ways to make Spongebob more and more engaging within that community - I try to do the same!

3. Create Utility and New Platform Insights.

   This one’s a partial shoutout for building something really neat that has underpinning of community engagement: @3HPM made Digg Tinder, which is not only hilarious it's useful as a tool for community discovery.
   
   But what I found interesting was that the tool kept on giving, the data from it led to deeper community topics on community membership patterns, and people circled back to the communities it was posted to, one post with 145 comments. 3hpm if you make your own community around 'Digg Extensions' count me in!

JUST STARTING OUT?

If you only have a small community or you're just setting one up, here's 2 key changes I wish I'd made earlier when establishing 💰/money and 👟/sidehustle (now ~115 members each).

1. Override Your Community Stereotype

   For 👟/sidehustle I had to fight against an unknown stereotype that doesn't exist in my IRL circles. Some people on Digg associated the word to being an under-paid Uber driver or finding a quick buck.

   
   I had to change the surrounding language in my about section and the visual branding in the hero to immediately steer the narrative towards the terminology that I talk about a side hustle in, which is to ‘build or do something to be proud of’.
   A small change resulted in a huge difference in conversation/engagement.
   
   Tip: For your own community I’d suggest asking unfamiliar people what content they think sits behind your name and slug title - you might be shocked to hear what they think.

2. Start Moderating Early

   In 💰/money I was not moderating enough at the beginning. I foolishly thought "any contribution is better than no contribution".
   
   But that was wrong, I started to see a couple of spam posts, then copycat behaviour led to an influx, quickly the community was at risk of getting out of hand with good posts buried and getting lost.

   I addressed it, but growth halted because of it, so if you're seeing something similar I'd suggest building cadence around it now.
   

Anyway, this took longer to write out than expected so I’ll stop here. Hope it’s helpful!

And lemme know... What interesting patterns have you seen towards good community growth?