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Comment by santoshalper | Hacker News Reader

A community isn't a product. It is not at all clear from the inside or the outside whether a community is going to gel and take off within a year.

Communities =/= products. An entirely different kind of thinking and patience is required to grow a community as opposed to build a product.

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Peter Reinhardt has a great talk about that. You need to understand the feedback that you receive and sometimes is better kill fast your ideas to move on. If it is a product or a community doesn't matter, if your growth is flat you still didn´t hit the market that you need so you could eventually successful monetize your company.

People that really love what you do will "spread the word" and bring new people.

What would you say Reddit's product is then? It certainly isn't content or the platform...

I'd say their community is their primary _asset_. All products are (ought to be?) built around an advantageous asset, whether it is exclusive data or a novel workflow or special insight.

But you design, engineer, build, and test a product, not a community. Though we do try.

Hmm that's a pretty ephemeral "asset"... and it's an asset that is directly tied to your ability to pull funding. Even if you technically don't directly mold the community, it doesn't do you any favors to try and think of something else as your "product" just because you're uncomfortable with the definition.

I never said anything about what their product is. I said their users aren't a "product", they are an "asset".

Value doesn't come only in the form of software. Only software devs believe that.

I definitely didn't claim that value only came in the form of software... in fact I think I claimed the opposite of that in saying that reddit calling their platform their product was useless and unhelpful. They have one thing that is attractive to users, advertisers, investors, and creators. That thing is their community. Pretending anything else is what they should try and capitalize on is silly.

Actually it is the platform.

Reddit investors and advertisers are not spending money on Reddit because of its platform.

That has nothing to do with what a "product" is.

What? So your advice is to knowingly ignore what actually makes your site money and just call some random other feature "the product"? How would Reddit admins/CEOs ever make decisions using that advice?

If you didn't understand what he meant by the distinction between community and product, you should have asked to clarify, instead of just assuming (completely incorrectly) what he meant and arguing based on your own interpretation.

Building up a community and building a product are completely different things. You can have the perfect product yet never get any community. You can get a great community without even a product.

I don't dispute any of those points, but I think it's still silly to talk about anything in terms of "product" that isn't their community. Reddit the software could come and go, it's essentially irrelevant to the workings of the site (barring radical changes). Whatever you call the community of users that's still the thing you have to try and cultivate, the thing you are presenting to investors, the thing that increases your revenue.

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