The old model for content sprung from geographic communities; the new model for content is to be the organizing principle for virtual communities.
The rise of community-curated knowledge networks
The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…
Permissioned Data Shapes: Community-Moderated Content - Nick's Blog
A community can own spaces the way a person does: a club's members post to each other under a dedicated community DID, with a feed space for content, a moderation space for notes, a labels space for filtering, and a single app view as the only window into any of it.
Thoughts on Communities | unDraw Blog
Even with the best intentions and people eager to join, most attempts to create communities fail and will continue to do so.
The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences
As brands look to hold onto the internet of the past, the term “community” will become a loaded word.
Community by Design
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
Modeling communities on permissioned data - Daniel's Leaflets
Arguing against "universal spaces" and raising a couple questions that come up as a result.
The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane - Read Online
Read The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane online. Explore content strategy’s roots, and quickly learn not only how it’s done, but how you can do it well.
Where Does Community Live?
ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.
What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules? (Published 2018)
Life online can offer us a sense of belonging in any number of virtual villages. But the power to control those spaces isn’t very communal at all.
Online communities and social communities: a primer
What are online communities and for what goals can they be used? A primer with plenty of community marketing and management tips.
When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage
If a company can transition from simply delivering a product to building a community, they can unlock extraordinary competitive advantages and create a superior business model. In fact, strong communities help support the ideal business model. Specifically: • Enthusiastic members help acquire new members, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a tight viral loop. • Members of a community are loath to abandon it, resulting in increased member retention and therefore improved lifetime value. • Members of a community support other members in that community, resulting in high gross margins due to a lower cost of service. The result of this are very real network effects: as engagement grows, the community gets smarter, faster to respond, more globally available, and generates more value.
A model for nesting connected groups with communities of practice
In the new edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice, I share insights into community size and interactions. I've been using this theory with clients to create nested layers that include communities of practice that serve as a model for their organisation.
The evolution of expert communities
A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.
The Big Reverse of the Web
We are at the beginning of a massive re-architecture of the web where we go from "pull" to "push". Eventually, content will find us.
ModGov - Governance for online communities
A simple, flexible framework that helps online communities create shared rules, elect representative moderators, and ensure stability.
