Imperfection and community creation
The most productive and welcoming of communities are where members are allowed to make mistakes. If the creative tooling in the community doesn't allow for perfection, or at least allows for imperfection as a perfectly acceptable standard, you'll see a surplus of productivity thanks to that.
Dreams
In rewatching How Dreams Became a YouTube for Everything I realized a key ingredient in creative tooling for a productive community - the inability to achieve perfection. Akin to Zeno's paradox if you knowingly can't incrementally march towards perfection you won't try.
Dreams has coarse sculpting tools where the pain to get it to perfection is thoroughly outweighed by instead performing a "good enough" sketch. The Dreamverse they create is known to have a sketch like quality to it, allowing imperfections to exist without being seen as flaws.
Twitter limits the length of tweets to only a few hundred characters. Ideas and arguments must be compressed down to a single tweet or (as tweets are referenced individually rather than as a collection) coherently broken up between tweets.
Twitter is (mostly) understood to be an imperfect capture of intention and content with certain blanks needing to be filled or clarified along the way. Twitter is the long form format for a memetic version of Codenames.
Minecraft
The world of Minecraft doesn't allow you to agonize over the exact aesthetics of a door knob. You may sketch houses, castles, or cities, but you'll never be able to agonize over the infinitesimal granularity of a door knob. You're not punished for this either. As opposed to Dreams, which does give you enough resolution to painstakingly work towards perfection, Minecraft refuses to give you anything but large blocks of matter.
TikTok
If you've ever seen a TikTok video you know that the videos themselves need to be a seed of possibility, not an end state of perfection. Performers might have just rolled out of bed, the video effects may occasionally make their outline fade in and out like an old science fiction film, a creator will play as different characters by changing a single item of clothing, and typos abound in the subtitles appearing on screen. None of that is held against you. Imperfection is in fact a draw for many creators and their audiences.
The above was posted to Twitter and the article has been improved thanks to feedback from there. Thanks to John Carmack reminding me of the existence of Minecraft, the perfect example of imperfect tooling for perfect community creation.