Slack vs. Forums: How to Choose

Your company’s Slack, your Twitter timeline, your community Discord — these are great sources of ideas, inspiration, and research questions. But they are also an endless well of distraction, forever exerting a gravitational pull on your deep thinking. A thinking tool should help you take advantage of the information firehose, without drowning out y... 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

A more sensible way to think about where conversations need to be broken up, that’s not topic, is format. In a physical space, the analogy might be—if half of my guests are drinking wine from expensive stemware and half of my guests are playing Twister, I might send the Twister players into another room so they don’t elbow-knock a glass of Chablis.... See more

Other platforms like Facebook Groups, Twitter, or Discord, might feel faster, more lively, more engaging, and may work really well for small- to mid-sized communities. But they often break down once the community gets too big and the pace of conversation gets too fast, or when too many different communities spring up all around the same topic. The ... See more