RE: The Future of Steem: Community Building is a Complicated Business!
A good community is a community whose core consists of good members. Good members create an emotional connection to the community and some of its users. By this, they recognize they interact with real people, not with just the screen in front of them.
The connection also means they do their best as they do with people they know and friends, and it means they care about the community because it is a part of their social and emotional environment.
This means, as well, good members have happy moments in the community, the moments they feel they exist to the full extend.
I think there are special people who are natural community core members. I can see it in my life -- some people I met in the early 2000s on the internet, keep walking near me online all these years. Platforms were born and died but these people have always posted something, shared stories and photos. Most of them have no ambitions to become great writers or influencers. They just have a need to share stories and they have a developed ability to see and feel real people behind the screen.
I think you are very right about there being "core" community members and builders. There are quite a few people from my "early days" whom I am still in touch with... and by now, we have gone through births, deaths, kids in school and more together. Even so, maybe we live 10000km apart.
In many ways, these people "make" a community. If they decide to put their energy behind a project, it gives their followers confidence that they have become part of something real. Perhaps their "secret" is that making connections is as important to them as the actual process of creating content.
Discussions are a good accelerator of community growth, a good connector.
Not many lively discussions on steemit.
So maybe I should try this genre too once later.
Perhaps their "secret" is that making connections is as important to them as the actual process of creating content.
An interesting idea.
I can continue with an assumption that some types of personalities are represented among those community-builders oftener than among others. Some types of people have basic or more advanced skills of writers, bloggers, journalists, but not everyone chooses one of these professions, not everyone actually needs this sort of job. These folk not only tend to write but also are better at constructing virtual personalities in their heads. And this is how they can create good connections to community members -- they can mentally see them behind letters and numbers. They express this vision with words (ideas, emotions, attitude) and that makes the community be something real, as you said.
I like 16 personalities' classification (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator) and I sometimes try to understand people (and myself) by means of it. Would be interesting to test people who are active on steemit and to see what types are present here. I guess, this one can be found on blogging platforms like steemit.com oftener than in real life.
Just a theory.