You want to build a successful online community. You've read the guides, watched the videos, and asked "how do I make this work?" so many times that your search history looks like a cry for help.
You're asking the wrong question.
"How do I build a great community?" is nearly impossible to answer when you're starting out. You're swimming in unknown unknowns. Stuff you don't know that you don't know. It's like asking "how do I cook a great meal?" when you're not entirely sure which one is the oven.
So flip it.
Ask yourself: what would I do if I wanted to destroy a community? Guaranteed failure. Scorched earth. A digital ghost town where tumbleweeds have tumbleweeds.
Suddenly the answers are obvious. You've been in those communities. You know exactly what killed them. You probably still have the Discord invite links sitting in your DMs like little gravestones.
Here are seven proven methods for turning any online community into a wasteland. Follow even one and you're well on your way.
1. Build It and Disappear (Then Come Back When You Need Something)
Set up your channels. Write the rules. Pick a color scheme you'll change four times. Now leave.
Don't post anything. Don't respond to anyone. Let conversations die unanswered like texts from that friend you keep meaning to get back to. Your members will feel like they've walked into a restaurant where the lights are on, the music is playing, and there's absolutely nobody in the kitchen.
For maximum damage, break your silence only when you need something. Haven't posted in three weeks? Perfect time to ask everyone to vote for you in a contest. Nothing says "I value you as humans" quite like vanishing for a month and resurfacing with a favor to ask.
Your members will catch on fast. Show up, ask, vanish. Show up, promote, vanish. It's the community builder equivalent of that friend who only texts when they need help moving. Eventually people stop answering.
This mistake is sneaky because it usually doesn't start on purpose. You get busy. Life happens. A week goes by, then two, then you realize you haven't opened your own server in a month. By then your most active members have already found somewhere else to be active. The fix isn't complicated: show up consistently, even if it's just for ten minutes. A community that sees its founder regularly will forgive a lot of other mistakes.
2. Keep Your Community a Beautiful Secret
You've built something great. Now tell absolutely no one.
Don't mention it on social media. Don't engage in spaces where your future members already hang out. Don't create anything that might accidentally lead someone to your door. Just sit in your perfectly decorated community and wait. Like a spider, except the web is invisible and you forgot to build it near any flies.
This is the "if you build it, they will come" strategy. Spoiler: they will not come. That worked in a Kevin Costner movie about a ghost baseball team, and that should tell you everything you need to know about its reliability as a growth plan.
Communities don't grow through telepathy. You could have the most welcoming, valuable, beautifully run community on the entire internet. Doesn't matter. You're throwing a party in a house with no address, on a street with no name, in a city that isn't on any map. The appetizers look fantastic though.
The real fix here is building bridges, not just rooms. Your community needs connections to the outside world. Post in subreddits where your people already hang out. Make content that shows up in search results. Give potential members a reason to discover you exist. The best communities don't just have great interiors. They have front doors that people can actually find.
3. Rule With an Iron Fist (Or No Fist at All)
Two paths here. Both lead to the same cemetery.
Option A: The Dictator. Every message is a potential violation. Thirty-seven rules. A warning system with more levels than a video game. Someone used the wrong emoji in the wrong channel? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
Watch what happens. People stop posting. Not because they have nothing to say, but because they've done the math. The risk of getting scolded for a minor infraction isn't worth the reward of... participating in your community. So they lurk. Then they leave. You're left moderating an empty room, which, to be fair, you're very good at.
Option B: The Absent Landlord. Moderate nothing. Spam? Character building. Trolls harassing people? They'll work it out. Conversations turning into screaming matches? That's just engagement, baby.
The damage here is sneaky. Your good members don't write farewell posts. They don't start drama on the way out. They just quietly stop showing up, one by one, like guests slipping out of a party where someone won't stop picking fights. You won't notice until the only people left are the ones who drove everyone else away.
Both options. Same ghost town. Different wallpaper.
Good moderation lives in the middle, and it's boring work. Clear rules, consistent enforcement, and a team that understands the difference between "this person is being annoying" and "this person is making others feel unsafe." Nobody writes blog posts about adequate moderation. But adequate moderation is what keeps the lights on.
4. Make Everything About You
Your community is your stage. Every post, every discussion, every interaction leads back to you. Someone shares their project? Cool, here's yours. Someone hits a milestone? Reminds you of when you hit a bigger one. Someone asks for advice? Here's a fifteen-minute story about your journey.
You're not running a community. You're running a one-person show with a captive audience that doesn't know it's captive yet. Key word: yet.
Your most engaged members, the ones who could build something incredible alongside you, will realize they're furniture. They came to participate. You handed them a seat in the audience. They'll find a community that actually has room for them.
The subtler version is just as deadly: competing with your own members. Someone shares amazing artwork and your immediate response is to share your better piece? You just taught everyone that the spotlight only points one direction.
You'll end up with spectators, not participants. And spectators leave when the show gets boring.
The antidote is genuinely simple: celebrate your members more than yourself. Share their wins. Ask about their projects. When someone posts something great, resist the urge to top it. Your community grows when other people feel like the main character, not when you remind everyone that you are.
5. Just Copy What the Big Communities Do
Find the biggest community in your space. Study everything they do. Now do the same thing, but worse.
Fewer members. Less momentum. Same format. You've opened a knockoff store next to the original, and your version has fluorescent lighting and a faint smell nobody can identify.
Why would anyone choose yours? The bigger community already has the history, the culture, the inside jokes, the critical mass of members that makes conversations actually happen. You're offering the same menu with a longer wait time and smaller portions.
The communities that actually work have something weird about them. Something specific. An angle nobody else takes. A perspective that makes someone go "oh, this is my kind of place." You don't out-big the big guys. You out-specific them. You find the thing that makes you you and lean into it until it becomes your superpower.
But finding that is hard. Copying is easy.
Easy and fatal.
Think of it this way: if your community shut down tomorrow, would anyone notice it was gone? If another community already does what you do but bigger, the honest answer might be no. That's not a failure. That's a signal to find what makes your corner of the internet different. Maybe it's your specific niche within the niche. Maybe it's how you treat newcomers. Maybe it's a format nobody else is trying. Whatever it is, own it.
6. Build an Onboarding Obstacle Course
New member shows up. Excited. Ready to connect. Here's what you've prepared for them:
Read fifteen rules. Accept three policies. Verify their email. Verify their phone number. Select roles from a dropdown menu that requires a scroll wheel. Navigate nineteen channels to find the one where they're allowed to speak. Write an introduction post with specific formatting requirements and at least three fun facts about themselves. Wait for a moderator to approve it. On a Tuesday. During business hours. Eastern time.
By the time they finish, the excitement that brought them through the door has been thoroughly and professionally murdered. They came to join a community. You made them fill out a tax return.
Some structure is fine. Nobody's saying throw open the gates and let chaos reign. We covered that in number three. But there's a canyon-sized gap between "welcome mat" and "TSA checkpoint."
If joining your community feels like clearing customs at an international airport, you've got the order backwards. Let people experience the value first. Then they'll happily learn the rules, because now they have a reason to care about them.
Ask yourself what someone's first five minutes in your community looks like. Can they immediately see conversations happening? Can they jump in without a twenty-step process? Or are they standing in a hallway reading policies while the party happens behind a locked door? First impressions aren't everything, but in online communities they're close.
7. Make Beginners Feel Stupid for Being Beginners
Someone new asks a basic question. Your community responds with "just Google it." Or "use the search function." Or, the nuclear option, pure silence paired with a single emoji react that somehow radiates contempt.
You just taught a human being that asking questions in your community is a risk. They won't ask another one. They'll either lurk in permanent silence or leave, and honestly, leaving is the healthier choice.
Every single expert in your community once asked a beginner question. Every one of them had a first day where they didn't know the culture, the lingo, or the unwritten rules. Communities that forget this calcify into insular clubs where the same twelve people talk to each other using references nobody else understands, then wonder why new members "never stick around."
The irony is beautiful: the communities most hostile to beginners are almost always the ones most desperate for growth. "Why won't anyone join?" they ask, while a newcomer in the corner slowly backs toward the exit.
The strongest communities build paths from beginner to expert. Today's confused newcomer asking "dumb" questions is next year's most helpful moderator. The person who gets patient answers today becomes the person giving patient answers tomorrow. That cycle is how communities grow themselves. Break the cycle and you're stuck recruiting forever because nobody stays long enough to put down roots.
So... Am I Doing Any of These?
None of this is complicated. You read these seven community-killing mistakes and recognized most of them immediately. You felt them. You might have cringed at one or two because you're doing them right now. (It's fine. Seriously. Recognizing the problem is the entire first step.)
"How do I build a great community?" is an overwhelming question with a thousand possible answers. But "am I accidentally doing any of these seven things?" is a question you can answer today, in five minutes, while you drink your coffee.
Go look at your community. Not with the question "is this good?" but with the question "what would someone who's trying to destroy this place do differently from what I'm currently doing?"
If the answer is "not much" on any of these points, you've found your next priority. And fixing one specific problem you can actually see beats reading a hundred vague tips about "building engagement."
Stop asking how to succeed. Start asking how you'd fail. The answers are more honest, and way more useful.
Building a community that doesn't suck? That's kind of our thing. Explore what's out there at griv.io.