I miss the days when there were vibrant communities of connection online. There was a time when the abundance of opportunities to create, connect, and engage a community of peers was dizzying.
Email newsletters, bulletin boards, then social media and tools like Slack and Discord have all helped facilitate connection. Yet, nearly all of these save for one (see below) have suffered. Looking back over my professional life online, it’s easy to forget how much things have changed. There was a time when online communities (a term I’ll use loosely to mean shared networks of professional life focused on specific topics, themes, domains of practice and knowledge) mattered much in my life. Now? not so much.
The Death
I remember when X (Twitter) was the place to meet people you didn’t know existed to speak about things you never knew about, in ways that expanded your knowledge and network capacity. Twitter opened up new worlds of professional connection and vibrant debate. I made great friends, colleagues, and enormous professional strides through the interactions on Twitter in its early days. However, as it’s popularity grew social media behaviours changed, it shifted toward more market-oriented programming (read: enshittification), and then was taken over by someone who was intent on promoting the worst of what had become of the platform, it functionally died. The best people left the platform or just stopped posting and engaging (me, included).
Bluesky has emerged as the leading replacement, but it’s a far cry from what Twitter was. I think people are too jaded to devote the kind of investment in creating Bluesky communities like they did with Twitter. I also think the potential speed and capacity to scale the worst behaviour on these platforms is too high to risk investment in something you fear could — very quickly — devolve into a cesspool of toxic self-promotion, crass commercialism, and hate speech. It’s good, but the user base is too small and not growing much to consider it a viable alternative for creating substantive community. That is, unless you’re willing to invest a LOT of energy into doing that, and even then, I’d say it’s a risky bet.
During the heart of the COVID pandemic when we all went online to seek community, so many vibrant community spaces emerged on platforms like Slack, Mighty Networks and Discord. Of those I joined, all of them have withered and most are functionally dead. By dead, I mean there is no discussion, no meaningful debate, and of the few posts that emerge, nearly all are self-promotion.
What about LinkedIn? This is a difficult one. It’s hard to see a day soon when it, too becomes functionally unusable. Some would argue it’s already there. Certainly, the professional groups on the platform are nearly all unusuable, partly because the platform was never really well designed for community connections; it’s about individual networks. I’ve never found any group channels that were reliably good sources for meeting people or learning new things, however, my main feed still offers some value. I learn about developments in my fields of practice and connect with some key people through the platform, but the signal-to-noise ratio continues to creep upward with every month. AI has accelerated this trend by allowing people to create visuals and posts that feel as generic as stock photos once were. The slop factor is growing every month.
Also, given that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, I find it impossible to believe that the quality will ever get better, rather it will likely become “more worse” like nearly everything in that company’s product ecosystem (don’t get me started…).
But this isn’t just about pining for better days or griping about software, but about what the death of these online communities might mean for networked organizations and professional life moving ahead.
The Life (?)
Of the different online communities I’ve mentioned, the lowly email newsletter (not in a derisive sense, but because of it’s low tech) is perhaps among the few pockets of professional vibrancy. Alas, email newsletters are also the least interactive, so the network effects are tied mostly to the author(s) as a hub-and-spoke rather than as a true mesh-like peer-to-peer. Platforms like Substack have sought to change this, by fusing together email newsletters with an online means to share notes, comments, and even audio and video. The advantage, is that people can congregate around ideas, not just a platform.
As a publisher of no less than three (!) different Substack properties, I know what kind of advantages this space brings. Yet, the fears over what’s happened to the other platforms loom over my engagement with Substack. The platform is funded by venture capital firms, including Andreeson Horowitz, who are all famous for amplifying tech platforms to mass-market levels and then bleed them for cash by making the platforms terrible. (After all, Andreeson Horowitz’s motto is that “software is eating the world“)
Remember when Facebook was usable? How about when Instagram or Pinterest allowed you to enjoy real pictures (not AI slop, or non-stop videos)? I can go on, but you get the idea. This is part of what venture capital does — build things up, then extract the value from the company which means that the commodification of features gets amplified, killing the user experience.
This isn’t an issue just of Substack, but rather trust. Trust is that person to audience connection that makes newsletters attractive. It’s also the foundation for a community.
I’m not equating a newsletter audience to a community, but I am suggesting that the kind of informational and professional networking that can come through something like a newsletter can be a start. A community requires a shared language and set of values and ideas; newsletters can help with that.
Where this idea can be expanded upon is when those newsletters and vehicles like it are an embedded part of another community. Consider professional associations as one example. Using the weekly/regular newsletter as a means to reflect back values, knowledge, and a stance that is representative of the community.
But what next? I’m not sure. If you’re reading this — thank you — because blogs once were part of the professional network landscape. Now, they are more often scraped by AI without attribution, ignoring the weird (and wonderful) textures of what independent writing offers.
The role of networks is something I’m looking at more intently, because keeping them, founding them, and nurturing them is the way to survive through a world of increasing complexity and challenges to trust. How is this playing out for you?