Community / UGC site audit

Reddit-class platforms — users create content, moderators curate, network effects compound. The 7-factor framework applies — calibrated for trust & safety overhead + moderation economics + post-reply-repeat loops.

What changes for community / UGC

• Acquisition: niche-specific community marketing. Reddit + Hacker News + Discord-to-platform funnel. SEO matters but secondary to network seeding.
• Activation: first POST is the activation event (not first login). Target ≥10% of signups post within first week. Lurker-to-poster conversion is the long-term lever.
• Engagement: post → reply → return-to-read-replies loop is the core mechanic. PV/session 5-15 typical (compared to 2-3 for SaaS) because the feed format compounds engagement.
• Retention: D7 ≥40% if the community has real network density. Below 25% indicates the network hasn't hit critical mass for the user's topic. Per-vertical density > total density.
• Advocacy: word-of-mouth via embedded sharing (reddit-style permalinks). k-factor target ≥0.5. Top contributors evangelize organically.
• Monetization: ad-revenue per impression dominates. Premium tier (ad-free + features) adds 2-5% paid conversion typically. Math floor: ad pRPM × sessions × PV/session must clear moderator costs (which scale non-linearly with DAU).
• Performance: feed-load latency <500ms. Real-time updates critical — stale comments destroy engagement.

Common community growth-friction patterns

1. Trust & safety underbuilt

Shipping a UGC site without robust report + remove + ban + appeal infrastructure = guaranteed regret within 6 months. Spam, harassment, illegal content arrive at scale. Build moderation tooling FIRST, content surface SECOND.

2. Moderator economics ignored

Volunteer moderators don't scale past ~10K DAU. Paid moderation eats 5-15% of revenue at scale. AI-assisted moderation (automatically queue + suggest action) is the leverage that solo-founder communities need.

3. Network density measured wrong

Total users matters less than “active users per topic.” A community with 100K users distributed across 1000 topics = 100 per topic = not enough density to feel alive in any thread. Concentrate; don't broaden.

4. Engagement loops broken on mobile

Mobile users are 70%+ of traffic. If posting from mobile is friction (long forms, slow load, no draft-save), you lose the lurker-to-poster conversion at the funnel bottleneck.

Run your community audit

60-second 7-factor wizard. For community sites, also track posts-per-day and replies-per-post — those are the canonical engagement KPIs.

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Related

• Audit for publishers (editorial-controlled content)
• Audit for marketplaces (two-sided platform)
• Advocacy deep-dive — network effects + viral coefficient
• Dark-patterns AUG rejects — engagement tricks that destroy long-term retention