Ha, discovery is a side of communities I've explicitly avoided because it's such a hard problem. What I've been able to find is directory sites for communities that are often tied to a specific tech. E.g. Slofile for Slack groups, and another site I forget now for discovering Discord communities.
I wonder if this idea of doubling down on the personalised touch & network graph extends for discovery as well? In my mind that's the only real way to bypass it. Otherwise you become tied to the platforms. And just because Slack and Discord aren't Facebook, it doesn't mean one is much safer in the end in terms of control and not getting arbitrarily banned.
I run a tech meetup/community myself: PHP South Africa. I've had discussions with many other meetup hosts about Meetup.com being such a horrible platform, but they all give me the same answer in return: "yes it sucks, but it's where everyone is, so yeah I'll shell out the $120 a year just to post events."
If people do succeed without these discovery mechanisms and go purely off of the tactics we've discussed, that's also not necessarily a scalable/automatable approach, like you say. So building SaaS for that might be tricky. Perhaps there's tools/features that can be added to ease that work, at least?
Ha, discovery is a side of communities I've explicitly avoided because it's such a hard problem. What I've been able to find is directory sites for communities that are often tied to a specific tech. E.g. Slofile for Slack groups, and another site I forget now for discovering Discord communities.
I wonder if this idea of doubling down on the personalised touch & network graph extends for discovery as well? In my mind that's the only real way to bypass it. Otherwise you become tied to the platforms. And just because Slack and Discord aren't Facebook, it doesn't mean one is much safer in the end in terms of control and not getting arbitrarily banned.
I run a tech meetup/community myself: PHP South Africa. I've had discussions with many other meetup hosts about Meetup.com being such a horrible platform, but they all give me the same answer in return: "yes it sucks, but it's where everyone is, so yeah I'll shell out the $120 a year just to post events."
If people do succeed without these discovery mechanisms and go purely off of the tactics we've discussed, that's also not necessarily a scalable/automatable approach, like you say. So building SaaS for that might be tricky. Perhaps there's tools/features that can be added to ease that work, at least?