In the Spotlight— Community Builder Amayami and the Birth of a “Social Community”
If you have read the initial CBB post, you already know that we believe strongly that people are the be-all and end-all of community. People build the community; people run the community; people are the community. It is because of this that I could not have asked for a better start to my blogging journey now that I have spoken with Amayami, one of the strong pillars of leadership behind the community ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT (Absolution-Minuet).
In the Spotlight is a series where we interview community builders and give you the lessons they’ve learned and great ideas that work for them. We can learn a lot from our peers and the hardships they have gone through, their methods of the day-to-day, and how they have solved problems that we may meet ourselves. Through the sharing of experiences and ideas — the good and the bad — we become better together.
Who Are They?
Amayami describes Absolution-Minuet as a “social community that focuses on gaming.”
Note: Stop! If you just thought, “Oh, a gaming server. This article won’t apply to me.” you will be doing yourself a disservice if you stop reading here. Most of what we discussed is not specific to any kind of community or Discord server. If your goal is to have a community — a social one — then you will want to read this.
Absolute-Minuet is a community first. It only after that that they are two Destiny 2 clans. I believe it is this “community-first” attitude that has led Absolution-Minuet to the place it is today.
Where is that? Absolution and Minuet are two Destiny 2 clans by those respective names. Destiny 2 limits in-game clans to 100 players each. It is with this in mind that you might be surprised to know that their Discord community is almost 1000 members strong after just 8 months. 1000 members while struggling against a cap of initially 100 (1 clan) and now 200 (2 clans). This also starting from just 2 members with no community leadership experience, 4 bots with no minds (they’re robots after all!), and 0 clans. I’ll be diving into their story in a bit, but first a little more about Amayami.
When not having fun and integrating into the community, Amayami is behind the scenes crunching numbers and spreadsheets to make sure that the community and clan members are active. It’s important to note that this isn’t a witch-hunt for inactivity like you may find in some Discord servers. Rather, Amayami is making sure that all members have a fair shot at the limited available spots in the clans. It’s imperative to the leadership that they make these decision fairly, which carries with it a different tone. Amayami is also at the head of the Discord community operations; and together with moderators, makes sure that the community is running smoothly.
Maintaining an ecosystem of fairness is just one of the struggles that Absolution-Minuet goes through daily, struggles that keep them learning fast. It is these lessons learned — some the easy way, others not — that we hope to share with you in this spotlight. While coming from a gaming community, most of what Amayami and I discussed are universally applicable ideas that all community builders and leaders in general should know.
Now that we have had a short introduction into Absolution-Minuet and Amayami, I’m going to try my best to summarize the 8 pages of notes that I got from our short one-and-a-half-hour conversation, so please bear with me.
Note: If you are a Destiny 2 player and at any point like what you see and want to jump into the community yourself, links to Absolution-Minuet’s Discord server and the100.io page are linked here and at the bottom of the article!
Backstory
I would like to start off with a short story that ends in a great lesson for all community builders. I want to focus on the story of a couple of friends with an interest who have found themselves without a community to share it with. Their beginning is one we have all heard and may have experienced ourselves: having met in a once large and thriving community, the energy there eventually faded leaving the two searching for another.
After some time wandering from community to community, the two would-have-been members noticed the same issues prevalent across them. These are problems that will eventually cause a community to collapse, fade out, or stagnate. These communities either:
- were cold or distant to new people;
- were warm and inviting but didn’t keep people long enough for there to be a community; or,
- had a strong core group of individuals that would engage for a brief time and log off for the day.
Seeing this, the two figured out they were searching for a place that had all of what these communities were lacking. They were searching for a community that is inviting and warm to all people, engaging and active, and nurturing of interactions between community members to create real, lasting friendships and bonds.
“When somebody is brand-new, it can be really intimidating to join into the community and to get to know everybody.” — Amayami of ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT
More time and searching passed in vain; and so, despite knowing that it is a large time commitment and leap of responsibilities, Amayami and Reife created their own community on Discord. Later joined by Xavier, these three are now the “Trollmasters” leading Absolution-Minuet. At the core of this community is the very things they themselves looked for. They took these ideals and became them.
“We wanted to be able to have people join, feel welcome, pull them in, and keep growing those connections.” — Amayami of ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT
The Interview: Major Takeaways
In my time speaking with Amayami, there were many great ideas discussed. I’ll start with what I believe to be the most important; however, these are all gems no matter the kind of community or where it exists.
“Community” Is a Group Effort
“I try to make the community something that I would want to be a part of, but also understand that the community is something that everyone that’s in it wants to be a part of.” — Amayami of ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT
…
Did you read that at least three times? I did. Here’s a fourth: “the community is something that everyone that’s in it wants to be a part of.”
As a community builder, this is your North Star; your guiding light; your modus operandi. A community is everyone: from admins and moderators, to individual community members without rank. Everyone is spending their time there and that makes everyone as equally as important in its health.
What happens when leadership thinks it has the right answer but doesn’t consult the community? The community is rightfully outraged when faced with certain information. What about when the community places all the responsibility of growing and keeping a healthy community on the leadership? The leadership may lack the feedback it needs to make educated decisions and individuals may overlook their responsibility of keeping the leadership informed of their wants and needs.
This is not something that just leadership needs to understand. Both leaders and community members should recognize the vital role the individual has. Both sides need to communicate what they want and need and why to each other because everyone is there for the same reason and wants the community to be successful. Communication of the “what’s” and the “why’s” is key. From something as radical as an expected amount of play time in a game to something as small as a member interrupting another when trying to teach someone. Leadership is there to make the final call, but no one can make a call if no one speaks, and the call may be inaccurate if people don’t speak what they mean.
Recognizing the Good Through the Bad
You may have learned this lesson the hard way if you have ever expressed to a group that expectations were not being met and then suddenly had people that you thought were fine coming to you distraught or angry.
“It’s really important to recognize or give recognition where due, especially when you have expectations.” — Amayami of ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT
It will often be the hard workers and superstars in your community and team — the ones you have no worry whatsoever of meeting expectations — that will be the most devastated and confused when you make a generalized statement about expectations not being met. Absolution-Minuet felt at least one side of this when they had made an announcement reminding members of the expectations communicated when becoming clan members. Of some of the events that followed were members that were clearly “in the clear” feeling that they were a target of this announcement. It was then that the importance of “I don’t just see the negative, I also see the positive,” as Amayami puts it, became clear as day.
A leader must keep both the good and bad in perspective, never allowing either one to dominate perspective. If no bad is seen, misfortune will strike from a blind spot. If no good is seen, fortune will slip away in the night. In keeping misfortune at bay, you must make sure to also acknowledge the fortune you have.
When addressing deficiencies or expectations to a group, make sure to always give those who are doing well the space to feel so. Otherwise, you’re only giving them one other space to be in and that may have unintended side-effects.
Welcome the Devil’s Advocate
“If we all thought exactly the same, had the same thoughts, we could be running in a direction and there’s nobody to course correct. There’s nobody to challenge us.” — Amayami of ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT
A recurring theme in my time talking with Amayami was that of knowing that no one person, or even group of individuals, has all the answers. Even when all the leadership of Absolution-Minuet agrees on a decision, someone such as a head moderator will step up and play Devil’s advocate. (That meaning that someone will purposefully oppose the decision and bring up arguments against it.) The benefits of this exercise include:
- Aligns decision-makers, making sure they all really agree.
- Improves the idea, refining it by chipping away at it like a fine marble sculpture.
- Prepares for those who “may not be made happy” by the decision.
Groupthink can feel empowering but can also lead towards the premature acceptance of an idea. It also makes it harder for smaller voices on the team to speak up against the idea. By creating a culture that allows for the cordial refutation of ideas, the team can reap the benefits of the Devil’s advocate and tap into a greater diversity of thought.
This extends out to the community at large. See every dissenting opinion or unhappy voice as an opportunity to get another perspective and improve upon what you have. Only by accepting that no idea is perfect, knowing that an idea can always be improved, and keeping in mind that “community is a group effort”, can a healthy feedback loop be established.
Reducing Negative Social Friction
Amayami and her team are role models that we can all learn from in this category. “Boots on the ground” is how I phrase their approach to things. Absolution-Minuet has a feedback form and it gets some mileage, but Amayami says that the best insights come from the members directly and taking notice of any negative interactions. It’s not a revolutionary concept, but the best ones most often aren’t. The otherwise small interactions between members and the underlying reasons of those interactions can help identify pain points in the community and reduce negative social friction.
“Social friction” is how closely people are interacting with each other. In a community, you want high, positive social friction because a lot of positive interactions between members makes the experience better. The negative side of this is the natural tendency for people to grate on each other in certain situations. Sometimes it’s completely circumstantial, such as a person jumping into a voice call and talking at the wrong moment when some others are playing a game with each other. These kinds of interactions, while small, can heat up the community in a bad way if they are allowed to continue to build.
Since they are an active part of the community, Amayami and her team were in a position to notice this happening as the community grew. They had noticed the specific case of casual conversation something interrupting important game callouts. This was souring relationships between many members. The Discord server already had plenty of voice channels, but there wasn’t strong culture or boundaries set up around them to prevent this kind of negative interaction from occurring. It was then that Absolution-Minuet produced a plan to solve this issue at its roots. They created 3 categories of voice channels: Social, Gaming, and Hybrid.
The idea is simple: “Social” is where non-game conversation takes priority. Game discussion takes a backseat here. “Gaming” is where game conversation and callouts take priority. The culture here is that if people are focusing on the game in these channels then those people have floor. Casual conversation may occur, but this will likely only occur after a group has finished their gaming session. “Hybrid” is no-holds barred, any conversation all the time with no priority.
By listening to the members of the community, Absolution-Minuet was able to find a problem in the system and devise a solution that solved it. They noticed a problem, talked with members to find out what concerns those members had, drilled down to get to the root of the issue, and solved it by accommodating each of the main demographics they saw. Now members can choose the right space for what they want from the community and be with like-minded community members at any point in time.
More Tips and Advice
When inquired if she had any specific hints and tips, Amayami had a few key things to share:
- Google Suite (G Suite) has been invaluable in setting up basic automation and tracking member activity over time.
— Google Docs as a great way to store meeting minutes and other important shared documents in an organized space.
— Google Sheets as a free way of storing data to be reviewed later.
— Google Forms to create feedback forms, applications, and surveys that can be combined with Discord webhooks to create automated alerts on new submissions. - New community builders should do the following before starting on the journey. Think about:
— What you would want from the community as a member of it?
— How you would want to be treated in that community from day 1?
— How to accomplish and reconcile this with your goals for the community and what you want to accomplish? - Communities focused on particular games should check out the100.io. Absolution-Minuet doesn’t do much outreach / marketing except for participation on this site and are pleased with the results. It very much requires community participation but is a growing resource for players to find communities for many games.
Some other ideas and resources came up in our conversation that are worth taking note of:
- If you do not already consider yourself one, having a wordsmith available to help phrase important announcements or address people in otherwise tense or less-than-fortunate situations can be an invaluable resource. Communication is hard, especially through text where there is no body language and tone of voice to help convey intent. These people can choose among the infinite ways to phrase things wording to convey intent in a beneficial manner. If you want to be better in this role, I recommend you read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. This book is not on how to manipulate people (which I had originally thought given the title). It is a guide on how to talk to people they want to be talked to, which will often not be how you want to be talked to. I summarize the main idea as, “Don’t treat others how you want to be treated, treat others how they want to be treated.” This is also known as the Platinum Rule.
- Depending on the goals of a community, there may be a need to have ‘warm-bodies’ in the early stages just for the sake of there being a constant flow of engagement. It’s a fact of life that a first impression is lasting and if that first impression is that a community is “dead” because it has a long lull of conversation, or is only active when a certain couple people are around, that doesn’t speak well for its longevity. In its early phases, Amayami and Reife understood that beggars can’t be choosers. Only after the community became self-engaging did they pivot to being more selective and tailoring the community to what they envisioned.
“Unfortunately, you could be the best two people to hang out with on the planet, but we can’t be around all the time.” — Amayami of ABSØLUTIØN-MIПUΞT
- Team meetings are important for many reasons, some you may not have thought of. Keeping the team aligned, making leadership available to the rest of the team, and communicating changes and decisions in the pipeline are some of the more well-known reasons. However, the occasional meeting also serves as a way of showing the team that you are present and that you care.
- While difficult to do at scale, Absolution-Minuet makes use of “orientations” to on-board new prospective members into the community. These orientations serve many purposes and are something I believe every similar community should do if they are serious about efficiently and effectively supporting a healthy community. These orientations are held at least once a day with new applicants and serve to:
— establish a human connection upfront;
— explain the community structure and culture;
— communicate expectations of the members in the community; and,
— give the member perspective that they can later use to decide if the community is a good fit for them or not.
By spending this time with members, often 20–30 minutes, the members are accelerated on either the paths of engaging with the community, or leaving because it’s not what they’re looking for. Amayami simply says that Absolution-Minuet wants to set these new members up with “their best foot forward”, showing a level of dedication to the individual that I’d be hard-pressed to say is common. - If you are a gaming clan or guild and have a limit on the amount of people you can have or want to have, an application will weed out many non-serious community members up front. Amayami expressed that there was a change in the type of person that showed interest in Absolution-Minuet after the clan introduced an application. Their application is mostly around getting to know the player as a person and why they’re interested in the clan, but even so it requires a minimum level of effort to complete that passers-by won’t engage in. This helps in keeping the efforts of the team directed on prospective members that won’t use of time and resources and then disappear after a day or two.
- To keep veteran players engaged and help new player get more out of the game, Absolution-Minuet set up a mentorship system within their community. With this, they incentivize players to teach others. Veteran players enjoy the satisfaction of watching their experience help inexperienced players get enjoyment out of the game. Inexperienced players have people to turn to help them learn about the game and its mechanics. This builds trust and loyalty among the community members, things that forge strong bonds and friendships. Additionally, they use Discord’s streaming feature in ad-hoc POV gaming sessions for coaching or demonstration of which anyone who’s interested can sit in on. Creating a similar system can be a fantastic way for gaming communities to keep engagement high and create long-lasting members.
Wrapping It Up
Congratulations! We have reached the end of the 8 pages notes. If you take anything away from this article, I hope that it is those first ideas of:
- Community is a group effort
- Recognizing the good through the bad
- Welcome the Devil’s advocate
If you are building or thinking of building a community, these will foster harmony and allow you to make better decisions for it. If you are a part of a community you want to see succeed and see it lacking these points, remember the first one and take responsibility as an individual in letting them know. It’s not a leader’s responsibility to give in to demands, but it is their responsibility to listen just as those heading Absolution-Minuet do.
Now that you have read this far, do you play Destiny 2 and are interested in learning more about Absolution-Minuet? Check them out their community on Discord. If you’re already itching to group up with them and join in on the fun, check out their the100.io page. If you’ve made it this far then you already know you’ll be well cared for!
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