" There isn't, and there has never been, a large (hundreds of millions of active users) online community that wasn't run by a for-profit entity."
What?
Sure there have been.
Somethingawful?
4chan?
Wikipedia?
Usenet?
etc
They each commanded a significant portion of the attention of the community on the internet at the time.
If you don't limit it to hundreds of millions, i belong to mid-sized successful communities (woodworking, electrical, DIY, etc) that are maybe 100k-1 million users, doing fine, have been doing fine for decades, and don't have for-profit entities behind them.
In fact, almost all meaningful communities i have belonged to online were not run by for-profit entities. Some later got taken over by for-profit entities, but then failed ;)
"does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it."
This is not at all related to the for-profit piece. The difficulty is in becoming popular, which seems to be, maybe mostly luck? Because unlike what you say, everyone is doing it.
Is there any evidence at all that the for-profit was a pre-req to being popular?
In a world where reddit was not for-profit from the start, i don't think it would have changed anything.
It was a place that most Digg users were willing to go to. That was dumb luck. If Digg had not been so stupid, Reddit would not be popular, for-profit or not.
What?
Sure there have been. Somethingawful? 4chan? Wikipedia? Usenet? etc
They each commanded a significant portion of the attention of the community on the internet at the time.
If you don't limit it to hundreds of millions, i belong to mid-sized successful communities (woodworking, electrical, DIY, etc) that are maybe 100k-1 million users, doing fine, have been doing fine for decades, and don't have for-profit entities behind them.
In fact, almost all meaningful communities i have belonged to online were not run by for-profit entities. Some later got taken over by for-profit entities, but then failed ;)
"does seem to lie in hosting and running such a community, and in attracting users. If that wasn't so immensely difficult and expensive, everyone would be doing it."
This is not at all related to the for-profit piece. The difficulty is in becoming popular, which seems to be, maybe mostly luck? Because unlike what you say, everyone is doing it. Is there any evidence at all that the for-profit was a pre-req to being popular?
In a world where reddit was not for-profit from the start, i don't think it would have changed anything.
It was a place that most Digg users were willing to go to. That was dumb luck. If Digg had not been so stupid, Reddit would not be popular, for-profit or not.