Community

To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings.

Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them. Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations.

Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.

It will make all of us happier.

Don’t work in community. Seriously. I never meant to become a community manager. Most of us didn’t. We fell into it sideways, like walking through the wrong door at a party and suddenly finding ourselves responsible for babysitting someone’s forgotten & drunk cousin.The job is a messy tapestry of contradictions. You'll build fences designed to be... See more

There are always going to be people who believe they don’t really need to depend on others, or want others to depend on them. And capitalism has produced more and more ways we can use money, rather than relationships, to solve our problems. It’s easier and easier to employ a courier, a therapist, a zero-hours contracted task-doer, rather than ask a... See more