Whose Business is Community?

Laure X Cast - Founder at Fractal
Oct 11, 2022

​Upcoming events:

  • ​Tomorrow! Community Building Workshop with Founderkind. Wednesday October 12 12pm PT. This small workshop will help you to start thinking about how to create more connection in your community and how to begin community building for founders. Find out more about Founderkind. Free virtual event.

  • ​The Integrity Institute Presents: Trust & Safety in Community. Thursday, October 20. 11am PT. The Integrity Institute is a non-profit collective of practitioners of platform integrity with a mission to protect and improve the social internet. This amazing workshop features Evan Hamilton (former community head at Reddit, now Director of Community at HubSpot), Cassie Marketos (former architect of community at Kickstarter, now an advisor to Integrity Institute) and Pixie Cigar (former Alibaba, now Director of Online Communities at Teach for All) and I’ll be moderating. It’s open to all community managers and moderators. Free virtual event.

  • ​Foundation for Social Connection Action Forum 2022. Today - Thursday, October 13. I spoke at this event in 2020 and it’s a great resource for thinking about connection research & practice. Free virtual event.

  • ​The Community Technology Summit, live in Boston October 24th. Hosted by Community Roundtable. $199, free for members.

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​What happens when community is an industry?

​Recently I dropped in on the CMX Summit, a two day hybrid conference for people working in community. The people who run these events, and almost everyone who attends them, are some of the best people on earth. They’re drawn to work that allows them to bring people together and support their goals. They put their energy into making great experiences for others.

​The past few years have really been the beginning of the “community industry.” Many tools have emerged to support the business of community, many books have been published, and there’s been all kinds of buzz about the value of community for brands and businesses.

​But is this a good thing?

​It’s a conversation that can be hard to have because of course, who doesn’t want community? And what’s more, most people putting in the work to build community in the past did it unpaid, while this trend has meant people were hired and paid to do this valuable work.

​I am pretty obsessed with the potential community has to affect the future. If we don’t get this right, we’re heading into a pretty dark direction of extreme individualism and fracture. Communities offer us the chance to be known, cared about. To be contributors, not just consumers.

​But something strikes me as weird about the industry of community.

​When you hear about the benefits of community in the context of business, there’s always a tension between the objectives of business and marketing leadership, which are often short term, metrical, and measured in sales or other actions that drive business goals, and the reality of community, which is messy, long-term, and made up of humans with their own goals.

​This leads to strategies that can be almost a bait-and-switch scenario for members of a community, where they are promised connection and belonging, but end up being part of an audience that is being corralled into some kind of brand-serving behaviour.

​Now, lots of folks in the community industry are specifically teaching that the more “marketing-style” approaches to community aren’t not appropriate or effective when it comes to building community. There are truly amazing people who understand the intrinsic nature of community has to do with bringing people into interconnection and relationship, to recognise the point of community is many-to-many, not just absorbing messages from above. They are clear that this kind of approach takes time, starts slow, and is tricky to do well.

​But that simply isn’t compatible with many business strategies, especially in tech, which due to a (until very recently overabundant) reliance on venture investment, as well as a bias towards experimentation, has been ‘experimenting’ with community more and more.

​Perhaps because we’ve become used to social media and its metaphors, it’s possible to forget or at least gloss over that community actually affects people (at least if it’s done well)! It’s not just a “private place to reach your audience,” though that was literally what a VC cited as its benefit during the conference.

​What is the value of doing good?

​The dilemma we are in, in what some of my friends call “late-stage capitalism,” is that for most communities outside of the industry (which is hundreds or thousands of times larger in scope that the number of companies who pay someone to be a ‘community manager’) most are run by people who do not get paid at all for their work.

​It’s a real catch-22, because communities are work. There are definitely principles that can help communities distribute this work so it’s not burnout-inducing, but there’s also a corallary challenge that community members tend to distrust organizers who want to be compensated for work. If we want people to come together in ways that support healthy belonging (frequent positive interaction with people you care about and sense that you are seen and cared for), it’s going to require people who have the right skills and instincts to support that.

​It’s part of a bigger paradox in our culture today. For some reason, when people want to spend their time doing things that support and benefit others, they generally have to pay a ‘good intentions tax’ from the perspective of income and status. We actively devalue work like teaching, health services, community building, and other work integral to a functioning society.

​There’s an idea that some of this work is “less skilled” than more high-paying jobs require, but that doesn’t seem like the whole story. Still, it’s something that can be challenging in community, where work is involved but we also want the motives for doing the work to exist outside of economic incentives. We also can see that “free” can come with other kinds of motives that might end up being more problematic in the end.

​There’s definitely something interesting about our general sense that doing good should be its own reward. Or perhaps, as a friend of mine put it, we get paid more for doing things that are ethically compromising. In a corporatist consumer culture, doing good might actually act against the interests of those making money. The businesses who make the most money are often those who exploit resources as well as our human weaknesses - because when our actual needs are met, our need to consume and be distracted or numbed is reduced.

​As we learn how to automate the hell out of everything, we’re either going to realize that this work is important and valuable, or we’re going to be sitting at desks with a headset on, having our limbic systems stimulated for the benefit of the few people who own the technology. OK, maybe that’s a bit dystopian but the last 20 years have illustrated that the more we allow unchecked incentives to profit trump other, unprofitable human needs like a planet to live on, we benefit from at least considering the possible downstream effects of our decisions.

​Reads & Resources: