Online Communities — Part 1: What is a community and what’s wrong with what we are using today.
“It used to be that people were born as part of a community, and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals, and have to find their community.” — Bill Bishop
Introduction
One of the most discussed topics on the internet today is online communities. You must have a community for your brand, your company, your product, etc. Online communities are based on good ol’ communities, but they are quite different.
For the past few years I’ve been living and researching online communities and social media. I lived in Beijing, China for three years which gave me diverse social media experience. While there, I helped build a local community network in Beijing using WeChat, Which now has over 100 different groups and over 10,000 users. More about that later.
This is the first part in a series about online communities, in this part I would like to try and define community, online community, and a quick look a the tools we have today. In the following parts, we will look into the keys to a successful community, where it fails, where it succeeds, some suggestions to what we need to build it better, and even some philosophy. I cannot promise answers to all of the questions that we will ask, but I hope to at least get us thinking.
Let us start with the question — What is a Community?
What is a Community?
Before you continue down, try to define community in your head through some of the ones you belong to.
Do you play a certain sport? Are you a fan of a certain sports team? What are some of the activities you take part in? What about faith?
-
-
-
-
-
Did any of these come up?
Location. Maybe where you live, your neighborhood or city. What about shared interests, shared values, or commonalities? check how close you were with google:
These definitions nail the traditional meaning of community — people who share common interests, attitudes, and goals, and are based in the same location. However, none of these touch on the subject of online communities.
For the past 20 years the internet has enabled us to connect with people from all over the world over shared interests and commonalities, from 4chan to Harley Owners Group and a subreddits like /r/DesiredPath with 130k subscribers “Dedicated to the paths that humans prefer, rather than the paths that humans create.” The internet has lowered the priority of location as a factor to establish communities and it has made it much easier to find people with common interests.
What about online communities?
I’ll pick this off from Fabian Pfortmüller’s excellent medium article.
“The definition of community is outdated, and the term community is cheaply overused and abused for marketing purposes.”
His conclusion :
Fabian’s definition is a step in the right direction, but perhaps it is much simpler than that.
“The word come from French — communité. it may have come to suggest a “body of people who live in the same place,” but, initially, it meant something much simpler and much more powerful: “joint ownership.”
Think of the communities and definitions you came up with earlier. You, together with other people co-own and make up that community. Big or small you feel that your voice is heard, that you can affect others in the community and even make decisions and, in return, you receive back orders of magnitude more value than what you put in. Similar to the middle school analogy with the pencils — you can break one easily, but it’s impossible to break a group of pencils.
This is why there are thousands of mom support groups, Wikipedia exists to the benefit of everyone, and a whole apartment block in Sofia, Bulgaria that together planned and installed rooftop solar panels.
The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively. — Yuval Noah Harari
The importance and potential of online communities is on everyone’s radar. Even Facebook changed it’s Mission “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” It is definitely not to keep you inside for as long as possible using algorithms that exploit human behavior so you can see more ads. — ahem, sorry, got a little carried away.
There are countless places where you can build your online community — Facebook groups, Reddit, Tumblr, StackExchange, and even instant messengers. But if the purpose of a community is joint ownership, that if I contribute to the community I will have a voice and ownership within it. How can a community exist on any of these platforms? For example I contribute to a certain community on Reddit. But Reddit owns the platform, if for some reason that community breaks a certain rule, which has been made at Reddit’s discretion, the entire community can be snapped away instantly. Tumblrs pornography ban is a great example of thousands of people who recently learned that their community and place of refuge is being shut down.
More importantly, the guys who opened the group are de-facto dictators. While this is not problematic in small communities, once grown and value-generating the potential for personal gain of such admins rises and the community is at the mercy of the ones who started it. This is what 30,000 people in the Israeli Bitcoin community group have recently learned or 25,000 members in west London. whose community group got sold. it became such a problem that Facebook has banned the selling of groups. Problem solved!
There are also people who contribute to an online community and in return get monetized, where the admin(s) exploit the content and value created by its members for personal gain and profit. Why don’t they move and create a new community? Well, easier said than done, network effects play a huge role to the point where most times it’s impossible to migrate a community.
It’s not all bad though — I’ve had the chance to speak to hundreds of online community managers and many of them put the community above all else. A few mentioned they receive dozens of offers a month, from posting “sponsored” content all the way to selling the group. As explained by one (roughly translating) ‘if the line is crossed where I benefit from the community it ceases to be a community and becomes about me.’ Consequently and to my observation thus far, the leaders who see this and rise above self profit and are transparent with the communities about such things, run the most successful communities.
There is also the platform itself. Whether it’s Reddit, Facebook, or a similar platform — they give you the sandbox to build a “community”. As long as you play by their rules and don’t do anything they deem forbidden. In addition, you must also forfeit your data and privacy even when not on Facebook. I’m not the first and definitely not that last who will say this, but when you are using these platforms you are not the user, you are the product.
To conclude
The tools we have today to build online “communities” can only help us build interest groups. These groups can and have accomplished a lot, but these are not real communities, they are not jointly owned by their users, and in order to scale they are dependent on the integrity of a leader or a small group of leaders.
Furthermore, it’s not only the tools provided by the platforms, it’s the nature of the platforms themselves. From a business model that is dependent on manipulating you, to the autocratic decision making of what is allowed and what is not, where they can’t even decide. I’m not advocating for censorship-less content because that can descend very quickly, I’m saying that I don’t trust Zucc, Alexis Ohanian, or myself for that matter.
Online communities should be a place where the more you contribute to the community the more power you have within it. Sounds complicated? You bet.
In part 2, I talk about key ingredients for the creation of communities, weak points, and a few fantastic examples of communities, how those are run, and the power and benefits they can generate for their members.
If you like the nonsense that I write, give me a few (50!) claps and follow me!
I’m designing and building a different type of social media, guided by values of security & privacy, where users are not the product, social validation is gained for collaboration, and the users own the platform.
Thinking too big? Probably. You can help me by clapping and following me. Want to hear more? help? collaborate? Feel free to reach out.
@theeylon on twitter, Instagram & telegram.
