I started Village because I couldn't find a place online with reasonable, civil discussion about my city, Toronto.

On Reddit, r/toronto could be a bit harsh and was pretty heavy with downvoting. Local blogs had comments sections that were mean and insulting.

Village is an experiment. It's a place that- while honest about the challenges my city faces- tries to celebrate and share what's awesome about Toronto too. It's a place for reasonable and civil discussion. It's a place to discover awesome and interesting things in Toronto.

I custom wrote the software for Village but I feel like the software for creating a social news website is pretty trivial at this point. If you want, it only takes 5 minutes to set one up using Telescope. The hard part is cultivating a community.

But in the same way that you can’t design a users experience (because it implies a sense of control over what a user will experience), you also can’t design a community. Instead, you can only hope to cultivate a community.

That's what I'm hoping to do with Village :)

PS - If you're interested, you can read more about my thoughts on how to cultivate community here: http://www.itsonvillage.com/design-tips