Community leaders deserve better: An open letter about community software

Success here will come down to implementation details. The incentive structure, funding sources, size, goals, moderation approach, and community management philosophy of these networks will determine their long term viability as both businesses and communities. Whether coming at it from the angle of social media, brand, or content creator, building... See more

The work of building a great community goes much farther beyond simply moderating a Slack group. A great community needs regular events and meetups. They need ways for leaders to step up and invent their own traditions, create their own events, and run their own sub-groups. Leading a community requires making it easy for members to become advocates... See more

While Peloton had no problem growing its community with best-in-class engagement and advocacy, it did experience pain points in managing its community. This came down to a lack of community-specific tools and limitations of existing platforms like Facebook. It was time-consuming and manual to draw important insights, and challenging to manage workf... See more

The potential to build community-curated knowledge networks remains largely untapped. There are reasons to be optimistic; the economic feasibility of paid communities, a renewed interest in curation, a slow move away from big social, and an improved understanding of platform incentives. All combined, this will lead to communities that are more sust... See more

Today’s existing tools will continue to be sufficient for some communities, and Discord and Slack’s robust bot APIs are capable of solving some community needs. But fundamentally, they are still based on chat, and chat simply isn’t the right core user experience for many other communities. Unique functionality and bespoke interfaces provide distinc... See more

Yet, despite how central community is to having a successful business, the tooling to support founders in creating communities is abysmal.