Greetings Fine Felines and Hoomans of Steemlandia!

We felt like taking a break from the cat content today, and turn our attention towards something else that is probably important to all of us here on Steemit — it certainly is to me, having been here for six years and change — which is community building and maintenance.

Most of us who have grown up in the Age of the Internet perhaps are (or have have been) part of various communities on the web, at one time or another. We might not think of them as "communities" exactly but they are nonetheless communities.

These include things like Facebook, YouTube; way back when there were news groups, message boards and forums for any number of niche interests; maybe there were hobby groups or we might have started our community journey right here on Steemit.

One of the almost invariable things about communities is that a very large proportion of any community's membership — however enthusiastic they might have been at the beginning — tend to gradually lose interest at some point and move on to doing something else.

One of the interesting attributes of this "fading" of interest is that it tends to happen far more with a quiet whimper than it does with a scandal or a bang. And sometimes it's very small things that make people stop participating. When I look back across my 20+ years of being active in communities I realized that there have been more than a few occasions on which all it took for me to stop going back somewhere was something like a two week vacation or being sick for 10 days.

Not much, is it?

Granted, I think it's part of everybody's life that our interests do change over time. This might be particularly important to keep in mind when you're considering inactive membership within communities that are centered around a particular interest or topic that you need to learn about, and it is likely that once you've learned what you needed to know you have no greater interest in participating.

It's like going to school: Once you've learned what you need, you don't stay in school!

Of course, Steemit is a little different from that in that it is a community for content creators and bloggers and people who like to keep journals... whereas these can be a passing fancy, they are less likely to be so.

My own journey with communities started many years ago when I was a member of a number of different niche psychology forums. At one time or another I also became both admin and moderator in some of these which gave me an inside view of what the community's driving forces face and have to talk about.

One of the things we often found ourselves wondering about was why certain — at one time very prominent — community members all of a sudden just seemed to quietly fade away without announcement or explanation. It didn't seem that they left because they were upset about anything... they just suddenly became inactive.

Back then we had to get e-mail addresses in order to verify memberships, which made it easier to contact people after the fact and do a quick survey as to why they were no longer participating. The most common responses we would get was either that the member felt that they had learned everything they needed to learn, or that they had simply moved on and were now pursuing different interests.

So what does this have to do with Steemit? And why is it even important?

Well, when we look at the greater question of why people seem to lose interest and why they leave a community one of the things we need to keep in mind is that some of this is a perfectly natural thing — by extension, it also means that they haven't left because we are doing anything wrong!

Of course, in an ideal world the way to grow a community is to basically make sure that you add two new members every time you lose one old member. And that's not easily done unless you have a very dynamic, entertaining or otherwise compelling situation.

Now, I say that Steemit is a special beast in this particular context and perhaps that aspect is less relevant because I can't help but think that the primary underlying motivation for participation here amounts to more financial reasoning than it does to having a sense of belonging and having found your tribe, but I don't think we can say that's 100% accurate.

A lot of folks do come here for personal expression and for connection with other community members.

Another thing we must keep in mind is that in today's web everything develops extremely quickly, and at any given time people have hundreds of choices they can make as to how to spend their time, but our days remain just 24 hours long. This means we either have less time to give to each community we participate in, or we have to give a few of them a complete miss along the way.

All in all, drawing on these past 20 years or so, the single most important reason why people tend to lose interest in communities is that their chosen venue starts to feel stagnant. Feeling stagnant can be the result of many different things... including — but not necessarily limited to — the fact that maintaining a thriving community tends to be a lot more work than most community founders initially thought it was going to be.

People get bored very easily! Founders get bored and feel overworked; users get bored if there's not enough activity and novelty.

As I mentioned up top it's easy enough to create what we might consider initial excitement about a community which is a period during which everybody is highly fired up and highly engaged. But that tends to be something that only happens during the beginning phases of a community.

Keeping a community membership engaged in the long run requires a constant stream of innovation, announcements, contests, updates, and anything else community leaders can dream up that makes members feel like they are belonging to a dynamic and "happening" place.

If we're all being perfectly honest, Steemit hasn't changed a whole lot since the beginning.

Certainly there have been a number of hardforks along the way which have included various tweaks and upgrades, but at the same time the look and feel of the place remains virtually unchanged. As such, it seems like the current initiative by @the-gorilla to update the primary interface of Steemit is going to be essential to bringing new life to this space.

Steemit needs to look like it's a 2024 web site, not a 2004 web site.

Whether the update materially ends up changing the way Steemit community members interact with the site or not, it will send a message to the world outside — which also happens to be the world from which we're trying to get new members — that things are happening here. A complete new interface overhaul is a pretty big deal, and newsworthy!

I just hope someone is lined up to engage with the crypto media when the time comes!

That last part matters because it is one way we have to reach inactive community members... when a community you used to be interested in suddenly is "in the news," people become curious and come back.

I suppose I had better stop here, because this has gotten very long! But I have been feeling the need to put some thoughts in writing, so here it is!

Thanks for stopping by the blog! We shall now return to cat related content!

=^..^=

This is @curatorcat's 510th original top level post
Active since March 2018 and still going!
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2024.07.08