Communities

We discussed the coming explosion of independent publishers in a large number of niches that combine content, community and commerce.

Steading a community is different from having a large number of followers. The former venture capitalist Li Jin describes the hallmarks of a true community:

I believe the following need to be present: high intentionality, P2P interactions, & UGC content.

1) Intentionality: Members seek out the community as a destination, not just as part of a broader platform’s feed

2) P2P interactions: Strong engagement and ties between members

3) UGC content: Members contribute content vs. just engaging w/ what’s broadcasted to them

Just like a publisher’s content can be across a site, Instagram, Twitter, newsletter, a YouTube channel, the corresponding communities can exist in a variety of places. 

The journalist Jon Russel, currently of The Ken, runs his own group on Telegram that, as of this writing, has over five hundred and seventy members. 

The writer Jacob Lund Fisker‘s Early Retirement Extreme community runs as a bulletin board. 

Azeem Azhar runs both his newsletter and his community on Substack using Substack’s discussion threads feature named, well, Community. Here is an example paid newsletter issue with its community.

Many others run private Slack groups. 

Interesting to me is that these communities are almost all off the public web and in the dark forests of the Internet, not indexable by Google and other search engines. As Li Jin describes above, truly vibrant communities may form because of a common interest in the publisher’s content, but it is their discussion that adds the most value. Their not being open to the internet if what engenders their openness.