Redefining Communities in Web2 and Web3 Space|Community3.0

Similarities and differences between Web2 & Web3 communities

Community is not a new concept. It was always there, and we have its traces in history dating back to the early 21st century. Today, however, we are transitioning into Web3, which holds a different set of challenges but community building at its core remains the same.

Web2 and Web3 communities hold the same inherent values, but the synergy in Web3 Communities sets them apart. The community ecosystem is evolving and adapting to new approaches in building, managing, and leading a community of people.

Community 3.0 is a new voice of everything and anything around Web3 communities. In the second episode of the weekly Community 3.0 Twitter series, we dived into the similarities and differences between Web2 communities with respect to Web3 communities.

We were privileged to have a conversation with community builders who have built awesome communities in both Web2 and Web3 space.

Yash Sharma, Developer Relations at Figment
Suhas Motwani, Founder at The Product House
Raj Karia, Founder of Trust. xyz

In this session, we deep dived into

• How to transition from Web2 to Web3 community?
• What are the challenges and the hacks to grow a Web3 community?
• How is success defined for a Web2 community and a Web3 community?

Let us go ahead and find the answers to all these questions.

How to transition from Web2 to Web3 community?

If you are a Web2 community builder, then you need not worry. The communities in Web2 and Web3 have the same core fundamentals of community building; onboarding, engagement, and retention. The future will bear witness to more experiments around onboarding members.

The medium has drastically changed from Web2 to Web3. 🔄

Web2 used to be a lot in offline mode with community meetups, seminars, hands-on sessions, and events held in person. Though later it got a shift to virtual mode too.

In Web3, mostly everything revolved around the discord server. The server is a virtual community ground where people interact with each other. Web3 started in online fashion, but now it is slowly migrating and striking a balance between online and offline activities.

According to Yash, in Web2, the path is simple. A person may have five years of experience managing communities, three years in customer success programs, champions programs, and so on. It is normal for a Web2 professional, but in Web3, contribution matters.

How does contribution matter? 🤔

Many think why but in many ways, every small contribution you make matters. Let’s hear it in Raj Karia’s words. Consider a community xyz. You want to try and become a community manager in the xyz community and are interested in learning what the community manager does.

Then you can follow the steps below:

• Observe the community for a few weeks and find ways to contribute.
• Suppose the community organizes Twitter spaces, then ask the manager if you can go ahead and conduct it.
• Continue offering support to the community manager with management work.

Who knows, you may become the next community manager of xyz. 🥳

Yash says, “Observe, take action, build relationships. Just don’t be an idle member of that community.”
True that.

Active Members >>> Idle Members.

Start by understanding the basics of Web3 📖

The journey through the road less traveled is never easy. Yash mentioned while transitioning to Web3, Web2 folks should start slow and understand the basic Web3 concepts.

To join and contribute to any Web3 community, follow the framework put forth by Raj 👇

• Every Web2 professional should first identify their interest in the Web3 domain.
• Next, find communities related to the Web3 domain of interest.
• Join the communities and contribute to them.
• Strike a conversation with the community moderators and ask how you can contribute.
• Once you know what the community is doing, what you can do, and how you can contribute, then go forward with your contributions.

Don’t jump into the conversation on the first day of joining a new community. “If there is darkness ahead of you, stretch your hand and go as far as your hand takes you.” Observe and take it slow, start talking with people rather than figuring things out on your own.

Once you find your niche in the Web3 space, start by writing blogs, moderating the server, then helping others learn.

What are the challenges of building a Web3 community?

Web2 is a product first, but Web3 is a community first.

In Web2, the community focuses on developing the product and then building a community around it. But in Web3, the community comes first, and the product comes second. After brainstorming openly in the community and going through a couple of open discussions, whatever comes as output in the community is the product.

For instance, consider a community that is building a DeFi protocol. As a builder, you need to discuss the pain points, understand the problems faced by the community, and finally build the product.

There are many bumps in building a Web3 community.

Community Moderation 🧑‍💻

Community moderation in Web2 was centralized. So the responsibility of running the community rested in the hands of the community manager.

Whereas in Web3, the community manager, along with other community members having the knowledge and experience in Web3, play a part in running the entire community.

Community Moderation is the first bump in Web3 since Web3 has opened gates for thousands of people across the globe. But when people come with the mindset of contributing, that reduces the pain for the community manager. The community manager must train and take care of all the community members and build a strong relationship with them.

Community Onboarding and Incentivization 🎁

If you think onboarding community members is a piece of cake, think again. Most of the communities in Web3 are rewards driven by extrinsic motivation. Over 25% of the folks join a community for rewards, airdrops, and other perks.

In the bear market, these communities become a graveyard. When there is huge money everyone drops in, and when there is no money everyone leaves. It isn’t a definition of a community but just a group created by the people for people who saw an opportunity and then took a leave.

Very often, extrinsic motivation like rewards and perks leads people from different backgrounds to join a community.

As a community manager, one of the challenges is the onboarding process and ensuring that the incentives at stake don’t incur any loss in the future.

Building and nurturing relations 🫂

Finally, the third bump in building Web3 communities is nurturing relationships. According to Suhas, communities are staging sites. It is a place where everyone can get updates on a project and interact with each other. Community managers are onboarding thousands of members by the day or by the month. But the question is, how easy is it to get people to talk to one another?

Engagement and retention are two important pillars of community management. Large communities are good, but small communities play a significant part in the greater good. Eventually, communities grow, and a community manager must build the skill set in early-stage, tightly-knit communities.

With time communities mature, and managers need to cultivate a relationship scale.

As mentioned before, communities can become graveyards when incentives are prioritized. But the core of it should be building and nurturing relations within the community. Only then the members would genuinely want to stick around on the server and contribute to the community.

How is success defined for a Web2 community and a Web3 community? 💪

The success differs from one Web3 community to another.

Some key points that define success are:

• Retention of active contributors
• Engagement in the champions program
• Number of contributors actively contributing to the community
• The build-up of knowledge base over time
• Insightful conversations with the members and ideas flowing through them

According to Raj, for a community manager, his success would have made him jobless. If the community makes a community manager jobless by their contribution, that is how success should look.

As a community manager, one of the core goals is to take yourself out of the picture and have more community involvement. So if that is achieved, then it is a generalized success metric.

But in the end, someone has to facilitate all the community work. Someone has to take care of the garden, so a community manager is pivotal for every community.

Special mention to our partner OGClubDAO and to our sponsors for making this series happen.

Threado — the command center for community builders
QuillAudits — Leading Smart Contract Audit Firm. Committed to Blockchain security with our cutting-edge Web3 security solutions.
Trikon — Making blockchain gaming sustainable through our revolutionary proof-of-reward consensus mechanism for users & developers

Big shout-out to Rebecca & Prakruti for helping out in drafting this piece.