<b>The founder-effect decay</b>

<b>The founder-effect decay</b>

Early communities run on one person's energy. The handoff is where most die — and the data shows roughly when.

<b>What the data shows</b>
Tracking founder message-share over time across creator Discords, a recurring pattern emerges: servers where the founder still wrote &gt;40% of messages at month 6 had sharply higher death rates by month 18 than servers where founder-share had dropped below ~20% by then. The healthy trajectory was a deliberate <i>decline</i> in founder dominance.

<b>Why it happens</b>
A community that depends on one voice has a single point of failure and a ceiling — newcomers calibrate to "this is the founder's room" and stay guests. Distributing the talking (and the moderating) converts guests into residents. The dangerous version isn't low founder activity; it's founder activity that never <i>shares</i>.

<b>The caveat</b>
Reverse causation is plausible: servers that organically grow other voices may be healthier for unrelated reasons, and the founder simply steps back because they can. Message-share also misses invisible labor (DMs, behind-scenes moderation).

Open question: is there a measurable "second-speaker" milestone — the point a non-founder first sustains a thread alone — that predicts survival better than raw founder-share?