Traces of Inspiration

SXSWi: Scaling Your Community

• March 12th, 2007
• Filed Under: Community, Matt Mullenweg, SXSW

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress

Scaling your community means being as useful for the last 100k users as you were for the first 100k.

• Start as simply as possible
• Simplest thing you can reasonably articulate
  • Don’t be evil.
    • Terrible thing to say
    • Subjective
    • Not measurable
    • Better to be disappointed than to be betrayed
  • Google “software principles”
• Everything that is currently free, will always be free
• We will never sell your email address
  • More trusting
  • They’ll use their gmail instead of their hotmail
• Don’t just promise, visualize
• Be your most passionate user
  • Dogster Ted
    • Apparently he hadn’t had a dog before
• Talk to people
  • Open source development is not about the license. It’s about the process.
  • Don’t ban someone, send them a private email. See what’s up.
  • Caterina responded to every new user
• Pre-moderation (matt expects disagreement)
• Let go.
  • Once you get past a few thousand users, your users know you better than you do
  • WordPress Ideas
  • Best Venn Diagram: Best times of my life and Times I’ve had Pants on
• Open Source
  • It’s about process, Involving people
  • Everyone owns the software
  • It’s like the shout feature on DodgeBall
• You cannot do it by yourself
  • Community begins to starve (moderation, improvements)
  • Delegation, motivation
• Personalization
  • People want to be unique
  • Customization
• Every user action (tag, click) is sacred
• Filter!
  • When you log in, it is a completely different interface than those not logged in
• Keep it fresh
  • Some personalization only shows you things you know
• Oh no, my Tivo thinks I’m gay.
  • You want to give people the willies
• Bootstrap with popular stuff
• Respect your users’ time
• Big questions that need to be addressed:
  • Some things have all the right ingredients, but never take off?
  • Have MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. peaked?
  • Why do some APIs and standard never take off? (RDF?)
  • Where’s the traffic?
  • Where’s the money?
• Best scaling social software ever?
  • Email
  • Any good social app evolves to resemble email
  • What’s killing it?
    • Spam
    • “If you’re not getting spam yet, you’re not interesting yet.”
• Bonus round:
  • Invest in infrastructure
    • Speed is a feature
    • YouTube never says “Buffering”
  • Be transparent
  • Have fun

Very entertaining chat, for sure.