Some thoughts on community in 2024

Up to now, much of our thinking for the community section of the website has centered on creating a Hacker News-like experience where content drives the community. I think this is the wrong direction. This issue outlines why and an alternative vision of the community.

Why not the current direction?

Content, both our own and good content curated by us can still form an important part of our community, but:

There are already numerous places to share content about building startups / engineering topics generally. Why should people post it to ours and not another, more established channel?
The attraction of our content comes from our strong POV and curation. Outsourcing curation to the community undermines a strength we already have.
If it were successful, it would create a significant moderation challenge that would suck up a bunch of time. Abuse and self-promotion will happen and we'll have to manage that.
There's a significant risk our own content would be drowned out by community contributions and submissions to the point.
It doesn't create any kind of stickiness for our product.

An alternative vision – HogBook

I think the best way to create a thriving community on the website is to focus it around the product. This means:

Making it easy to request new features and vote on what the teams are working on
Making it easy to see what teams are working on and their progress
Creating a direct connection between all users and our engineers (not just the teams who pay for a dedicated Slack channel)
Creating a feedback loop where users request / vote on a feature then get notified when it's shipped
Creating a space where users can share feedback in public, rather than it being hidden in Zendesk / Slack channels.

To this end, I think the community homepage should be more like a Facebook / Twitter-style feed experience comprising:

Content we've published that's shared by the author (rather than content automatically appearing when it's published, the author would share it like they would on a social network).
Feature requests from users and proposals use that people can comment and vote on – much like they currently do via the Roadmap + GitHub.
Semi-regular dev diaries / updates from individual teams documenting their progress.
Dedicated team pages (effectively like Facebook groups but for our teams)

In this scenario, the sidebar would look something like this:

The team pages would include feature requests, roadmaps, dev diaries from the team, and content relevant to that product.
People could comment on specific posts, as they would
The community homepage would then combine all this into a single feed that combines the content from the team pages and content hubs.

Random notes:

Things like customer stories and comparisons etc. wouldn't appear here as they're largely marketing material not intended for the community.
This would exist somewhat separate to the Questions forum. TL;DR: feature requests and feedback would go in the team pages. Support questions / problems remain in questions.

PostHog / posthog.com