Responding to Alan Levine: On “Building” Community I Got Bubkis

I totally get what you’re feeling. I’ve been online since the 1980s ‘building community’ the whole time. What do I have for my efforts? A response rate to my posts that averages around ‘zero’. I had one successful community once – the 2200 people who joined that first MOOC. Never really replicated that success. My most recent MOOCs had far fewer people in them.

The old definition of community is based on proximity
– it would be based on neighbourhoods or regions
– so online, ‘building community’ usually means pulling everybody into the same place
– this almost never works – it’s like getting people to pick up stakes and move to a new city

You can ‘create community’ this way if you can capture people where they already are. That’s why professors are so successful at building community – they have a built-in captive community consisting of students at their institution (I always envied Jim Groom this advantage of his). Similarly if you have people using a given product (like Reclaim, or Microsoft, or D2L, whatever). And similarly if you can carve out a ‘community’ on a popular platform like LinkedIn or Reddit.

A lot of the institutional mandates that say ‘build community’ contain the built-in expectation that you’re going to recreate LinkedIn or Reddit in the image of the institution. The promise of these community-building tools is that if you have Just the Right Tool (read: Discord, Matrix, Zulip, whatever) people will flock to your new community. None of this is going to happen. Unless you have something else over and above the community (let’s call it a ‘community object’) that creates a built-in audience, you’re not going to create a community from scratch.

You have to have something really compelling to build a community this way, which is why they depend so much on marketing and optimize for engagement with rage-bait and such. If you don’t have access to mass marketing (and unless you have something over and above your ‘community’ to draw people to) efforts to ‘build community’ this way will be unsuccessful. 

I gave up on this long ago. I just could bring myself to self-promote in a way that would get a whole bunch of people to cluster around me (or any of my products or services).

The new definition (according to me) definition of community is based on similarity
– birds of a feather (in theory) flock together
– people are in different places, so they never see each other, even though they have similar interests
– so online, ‘building community’ means connecting people to each other when they have similar interests

It’s like building a peer-to-peer network (on top of existing technology). The connection is, people get to know each other. They probably never comment on your own site and maybe never even email you. But they find each other and something flows out of that.

There’s no centre to such a community. No proximity. Peer-to-peer connections require that the two peers have some tool in common, but it doesn’t matter which tool. They can connect on LinkedIn, Mastodon, by email, whatever. 

There’s virtually no recognition for building this sort of community (people mostly believe, not altogether in error, that they built it themselves). If you ask, they might say “I saw it on so-and-so’s website first”. But maybe not.

The real measure (if it can be measured at all) is the propagation of the ideas, not the concentration of (a mass of) people. The ‘community builder’ spots ideas and passes them along to people who might be interested in those ideas. Not in the sense of ‘ideas worth spreading’ – that’s a mass-media approach – but in the sense of ‘ideas-worth-forwarding’. I see person A wrote something cool about X, I send a post of the form ‘A said X’ to person B, the result is a connection ‘A-B’ and the propagation of Y from A to B.

Sure, I’ll add value to these ideas as they pass by. I want them to arrive at B in a different form than they were sent from A, combined with other ideas, other people, and contributions from my own perspective. So A and B have something to talk about (even it’s only to complain that I have completely misrepresented X).

So if there’s a purpose (beyond cataloguing for posterity) my own reactions to what I see of the world as it passes by, it’s to build the community in this way. It’s not the path to fame and fortune, but such paths almost never make the community better. This does.

At least, that’s how I’m seeing it today, after decades of failure to do it any other way.