We are all community builders now
Community was all the rage for 2020, but it’s a trend. It’s likely over time the trend will die down, at least that is what I feel. That’s not because community will exist less, be less important, or be less valuable, but more because community will become more embedded in our lives.
We may end up not calling it a community, but community will exist as a natural part of who we are and what we build.
We will start to seek and look for natural ways to gather, in ways that feel right and not pushy.
We will shift away from the need to ‘always be marketing’ and ‘always be growing’ to always be having delivering value and working with our people. Of course, delivering real value comes from understanding, appreciating, and conversing with your people.
We will trend towards being more authentic. I hope the 2020’s can shed light on being real. Truly authentic. Not any of that fake stuff. And this can and will often be achieved through community (that isn’t necessarily called community).
Community is about people, conversations and connections
People and conversations are at the heart of any community. This is what people often don’t see, or all too easily forget.
Of course, you also need that thing to bring people together. A vision. A purpose. A thing that people get excited over.
You can have community where people and conversations exist. You don’t need a specific community tool to make this happen. A website, an email list, or a Twitter following with a community mindset may be all that is needed to get going.
The pressure of maintaining and running a community within a platform is big. It’s a never-ending wheel of content and maintenance. Most people just aren’t up for the job, or if they are they need the time to stack up the time and skills to get there.
Sure it could be amazing to own a building to gather people, but you can also achieve similar results in open parks.
It’s also important to remember that it's not necessarily what you want as a founder that counts. It’s what your people want too. People might say they want a special and expensive place to connect, but the reality is often different. This is a classic Mom Test situation.
Community fatigue is a real thing
When every newsletter starts calling themselves a community.
When every product is encouraging you to join their community.
When every book starts a community around it.
When every course goes in with a community angle.
Then community fatigue will set in. People will tire. Not necessarily because they don’t want or value the community, but more because everyone is talking about it. The blame is then put on community.
In reality, people should be thinking about how to bake community in without feeling obliged to calling it community. They should give access to conversations. Provide value. Help and lift people up. Build and design their products with their people in mind.
This is all community building. You just don’t need to call it that. I suppose you would call it a ‘community first’ approach to product building.
We are all community builders now, but maybe you just don't know it.
Absolutely true, Rosie! This amazing post reassures me in my decision to focus on enabling the birth of what I call instant communities for websites. The people who are viewing the same web page at the same moment are part of an instant community. And any webpage becomes like a virtual place where people meet. This is what we are doing with now4real.com.
Instant communities are spontaneous and extemporary -- and, to copy your own words, perhaps truly authentic. Chat messages exchanged within instant communities are ephemeral, like the conversations in the physical world. Visitors come back to the same page over and over again to meet a different instant community every time, even without fresh content.
"community" isn't close to mainstream yet... so, we actually need more.
... then the fatigue will be something altogether different!
... but i believe the world will be a better place.
Again a great post. I love it! Thanks for that.
Community became a buzzword indeed. We put some modern ideas on the word, but the concept is way more profound than that. We could not survive, as a specie, without the sense of community. Many historians think that religion (in old Babylon) was the first set of ideas which bound us together, sharing the same values and beliefs, to face the hostile world. I'm pretty sure they didn't have any platform at that time 😁.
There will be a fatigue of the community trend for sure, like there will be a fatigue for newsletters, for Saas, for Indie Hacking, and so on. But there will always be communities, because we need them. We need to be together. As you say, however we call them.
We're all community builders now, we've always been, and we'll always be.
I hope so much! Authenticity is what make communities thrive and sustain. It can bring so much more than money.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
This is so true! Thank you for consistently providing a healthy example of how to engage in and manage a community.
Hi Rosie - thanks for the thoughtful post. I want to make sure I understand your point. Note - I'm coming from a place of genuine curiosity and truth-finding - not snarkiness :-).
If I had to boil it down, it sounds like you're saying: "Community is good (and customers benefit from it), but if we call it that, customers will get annoyed. Therefore, keep building it but let's call it something else or just not talk about it."
Is that a fair summary, or am I missing something?
Yes, I would say so.
It doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't call it community sometimes, but if everyone is calling it that, then it gets a bit 'meh'.
Sometimes we can just gather and do good things without investing huge time, energy and money into a massive community project.
[I wanted to edit my post accidently deleted it]
I think this solves the social overload we get especially in packed urban areas, because of the concept called "The Monkeysphere". Here's an interesting read about it: https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
That is certainly a more efficient way, more pleasing way for humans to communicate.
I do think people "squeezing" every bit of juice out of this word, as it becomes rooted in this cultural identity. Over time this can change the meaning of words and language itself, and how it is perceived. "Back in my days, we didn't call it like that!" and such, haha :)
But times change, and so will we, as it becomes embedded in our society as you said. Should you make yourself comfortable, because community-hell is coming and hope it won't come for you? Time will tell.
Good luck to us all.
That was an interesting read, especially since I disagree with most of it.
Freud was saying as well that it was impossible to love the whole world, because the world is impersonal; it's not in the monkey sphere, to reference the article.
But I believe as well that you can change that. Maybe I'm an exception, but when the world is going badly, when I hear about war or misery, it affects me. Not as much as if one of my close relative would die of course, but enough for me to feel deeply sad, worried, with an urge to help these people I don't even know.
I think it really depends how much you want to care. It's easy nowadays to just put your head into the sand and not think about it, and to be honest it might be the best solution to cope will all of that. But I don't believe that it's as simple as described in the article.
Thanks for that!
Cool. But I think the point isn't about whether we "should" care, or try more. It's about the physical limits of our processing power. Imagine having a conversation with someone. And a group of two. And a group of 10. And imagine every one is talking about their own thing. Even if only one person speaks each time, there's a physical limit before there are "packet drops", because your buffers just get filled more and more trying to please everyone and referencing what they said.
It is similar to how most people tweeting just scream into the void. You get swallowed by whoever is "louder", and I think communities fix this issue. In a sense you can delegate "the sum" of a community to other communities.
I see, it makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
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