Community leaders deserve better: An open letter about community software

Everywhere we go these days, there is talk about community - the developer SaaS tool, the soap brand, and virtually every product I interact with now prominently bears a Community link on their homepage. Personally, I don’t need more Slack groups or things to which I belong. What I want is deeper relationships with specific people where I can be mo... See more

We have seen companies leverage a variety of solutions including Facebook Groups, WhatsApp, and Slack to enable community connection, but eventually they fall short due to lack of integration with the rest of the product experience and, in some cases, the incentives of the platforms don’t align with community itself.

I’ve been seeing lots of community-focused companies, founders, and initiatives try to build a community exactly the wrong way, by putting everyone in the same forum, and adding members to it over time, expecting the community’s value to scale linearly.