Starting Your Own Community Driven Website?

ST asks: "I've had a couple of excellent ideas for community-driven websites (a la Slashdot), some excellent enough that I would really like to put money into and start up, but my abilities can only do so much. Where does one go to look for people to collaborate with technical (hosting, DB management), artistic, and web design help? What have your web site startups been like, have you any advice to offer? Any horror or success stories you would care to share will be welcomed!"

Comments

Lessons of slashdot

[El]

Well, obviously allowing anonymous posting is not a good idea, as it significantly lowers your signal to noise ratio. In fact, there should be some sort of cost associated with creating each online persona, to discourage people from creating throwaway accounts just for the purpose of harrasing others. Although why anybody considers it worth their time to troll is beyond me...

One of the main purposes of an online community is to establish your credibility over time with consistently insightful comments. Thus an archive where you can lookup up the complete history of a subject or online persona is necessary.

I think the best way to proceed is to just start a community, attract whoever you can, and then let the community itself guide (and hopefully help implement) any enhancements.