How to build a Discord community TL;DR: Be responsive, have a bold raison d’etre, make sure people have low and high effort things to do, impact the real world with as many artifacts as possible and share the impact with external partners.
A lot of the leading applied research in ML these days is happening on Discord so a common question I get asked is “Hey Mark, which Discord group should I join?”. That’s an easy enough question to answer these days just subscribe to https://buttondown.email/ainews but then I always make sure to remind people: “You should probably create your own Discord community” and I feel like people don’t quite like it when I say this because well how do you create a discord community from scratch?
I’ve created 3 communities so far and each one has grown larger more quickly than the last so hopefully some of these lessons apply to you as well.
Robot Overlords: Took about a year to reach 450 people NeurIPS LLM Efficiency Competition: Took about 6 months to reach 1,300 people. Learn m