In the past weeks, I’ve been reviewing the nature of communities, how we can overcome some challenges when building them (like inclusion) and the trends that are accelerating the ‘community’ phenomenon.
For this final approach to the basics of community and community-building, I want to focus on six key elements that healthy communities have.
And the best way to dive into the topic is remembering what Ryan Hoover said once1:
It’s not me connecting, it’s other people connecting with others. A healthy community feels like there’s activity and engagement.
You don’t want people to go where it feels like it’s a ghost town
In the interview, he said he haven’t defined the pillars of a healthy community, but he gave us enough insights to distil them:
Growing members - even when communities diversify into niche groups, they are always scaling
Engaging environment (cool & fun place) - in words of Ryan: “it’s other people connecting with others [what makes a community] feel vibrant, but also personable and a place where others can connect and build real relationships”
Permanent activity - People want to do things and want to avoid and the communities (as environments) should ensure they can do that. This is a key responsibility of the community-builders and later the moderators. Key activities shape the community ethos.
Feeling of togetherness - people are aligned in values, activities and goals and each time the alignment is achieved the bonding grows
Feeling personal - I wrote about this in “Community is personal”: “Communities rely on the identity of their members to create value and rely on the interests of their members to create bonding (…) The identity and interests of the members mould the community: the community is in the mode of its people”
A good summary of this was made by Lais de Oliveira:
People want more than a product. They want belonging. Community means growing relationships, not transactions.
Being said this, let’s focus on the 6 elements of healthy communities.
Network effects
The power of Network Effects is that each new member adds more value to the whole network. This compound growth of value is an amazing scalability engine.
The bigger is the network, the denser are the connections between nodes and as the density grows the reliability of the networks grows as well.
Just note that there are at least 15 different types of Network Effects according to NƒX 🤯
Emulation of Real-world interactions
In healthy communities, the interaction of the members is not feigned. It is peer-to-peer in its nature and it creates growth in trust among the members and the feeling of acknowledgement and belonging2.
Safety context: I protect you
As a species, we evolved as social animals because it helped us survive. But as we discussed in past essays we can only create social bonding with people with the same values and goals. We create communities because we can walk together towards a common good.
We need to feel safe inside a community. We know each member will look after me and I will do the same because only in the group we can protect from agents that may disrupt our attainment of goods.
This is why as communities grow, moderators and other fauna are critical for its success.
Myths that drives meaning
Communication inside a community is not about describing realities, but crafting myths that help us find meaning as members.
These myths help all the members have a common language to: (a) share beliefs; (b) value the same things; (c) trigger behaviours
As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out, our stories helped us to create abstract information about our surroundings and then helped us to be more efficient in protecting our groups and thriving as a community.
If we needed to address each specific threat we wouldn’t be able to pass on the information we’ve learnt as a group and we wouldn’t be able to create culture.
Healthy communities have myths. Have stories that convey information in a way that creates culture, id est, that promotes some behaviours and punish others.
Membership is value-driven
People join a community because they want to earn something. They engage because they want to earn something. Healthy communities have a clear value proposition for their members.
It’s interesting how the best community builders understand the motivations behind their membership and craft the community in a way they can receive that value after investing something into the community.
A unique social currency3
Finally, the investment I talk about in the prior bullet point creates an “inside economy” of each community.
This economy runs on unique tokens that show the value added by each member (what is valued in Twitter is very different from what is valued in YouTube; what is valued in an academic community is very different from what is valued in an OnlyFans account).
To earn these tokens the members must demonstrate their investment with proof of work. That proof of work then translates into value for the community as a whole, and the cycle of value add-value received grows and strengthens.
With this, I finish the essay. I believe now we have a tad clearer understanding of what are communities, how they are developed and which elements make them healthy.
Even more, I think that with a closer look we could even identify and/or create performance indicators for our communities based on these 6 elements. But that is work for another time.
Now I want to end this 3-part series of essays (the second series of my blog-newsletter) with a hint of what I will try to address next few weeks:
First, I will try to develop the idea of why community is about letting life flourish, instead of crafting an elaborate alter-self… and how to protect yourself from consultants rip-offs in the new community-led economy.
Later, I may try to address some topics of the community economy like the subscription models, creators-based businesses and what is missing in the ecosystem.
See you then…
This 6th element is inspired by this essay by Eugene Wei: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service