Comment by bombcar
3 years ago
It always ends up being a doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.
If you don't post on those groups or create them, they get created anyway, and now they exist and you have no direct influence on them; and that can easily result in a community misunderstanding and split.
And if you do create them, you've encouraged walled gardening and there will STILL be stuff not duplicated.
Splits can always happen, and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough, and it is also a good thing that these splits are even easier if you're not using platforms.
Doesn't mean you have to support the people that chose to go elsewhere and tolerate those that are advertising platforms.
> and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough
Splits are happening in small-ish communities too. People don't know why, but they have to have Discord, facebook, reddit, etc. And if you join all of them -- which you often do in case they are similar but not exactly the same ("Why are you asking this? The answer was posted to the facebook group! Oh, but we are in Reddit, never mind, here's a link to fb") -- you'll see some of the same people in all of them. The one caveat is that the "owner" of the community (say, the game devs if this is about a game) are likely to be more active in only one of the platforms; Murphy's Law dictates it likely won't be in the one you prefer.
Which really raises the question, if (almost) the same bunch of people is posting in Discord/fb/reddit/whatever, do we really need all those platforms? What purpose do they serve?
But indeed it's doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. You have no control. You can be sure someone will create that goddamn Discord.
Yeah, the best you can do (as the "leader" or dev or whatever) is pick ONE and stick with it religiously. And "reddit" is probably the best of the worst available, at least it can be linked from elsewhere.
But for large groups of the world (who are not 'gamers' or 'computer literate' or whatever) Facebook wins because everyone has Facebook.
6 replies →