https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NNeFB17JXoQ
Welcome back. And today I want to do a quick video on community, especially online community, and talk about sort of what’s happened to me with online communities, what makes them work, how I think they can be better, etc. So when we’re dealing with online communities, my experience has been extensive. I spent a lot of time online, talked to people from all around the world. It’s one of the good things about the internet, right? It’s not all bad stuff. And very early on, the thing first community that I was in work were things like Common Goal. Everybody was online because they were socially awkward. And so they wanted to get better at being part of society, at interacting with other people. And that really helped. But the thing that really held the group together were meetings, in-person meetings. We did once a month at a mall, and we would get together and we would see each other face to face. And we’d get more involved with things we had in common. People would break out into groups. There were the gamers, right? There were the people who were into, say, philosophical things, right? There were people doing political discussions. And there was some mixing between those groups. But people would be together, they’d help each other, they’d get rides to and from the event once a month, right? Things like that. And that really helped to bring an online group into something that was more relevant to everyday life. Because once you meet somebody in person, you have a different type of connection with them. You might say it’s more intimate, right? And you get to know them better once you sit down with them at a mall, for a meal. Usually both. A lot of us would go out after the quote, event, which I think was scheduled for only an hour or two. And then we’d have food together. And that’s always a good way to bind a community together, is to eat together. And I think a lot of online communities are missing that. If you believe this postmodern ethos about communities or about things in general, you can just carve them up any which way and understand them outside of a context or by themselves. Or maybe try to understand something apart from the rest of the things it’s connected to. But that turns out not to work very well. Which is not to say it doesn’t ever work or doesn’t have its utility, but it doesn’t work very well. And especially with community, because community seems to have a number of parts, right? Common aim, right? A container with rules, right? A system of adjudicating those rules, of understanding, well, when you break this rule, this is going to happen, right? A system for redemption, right? And that’s less possible online in some cases. And there was a lot of stuff going on in the early days with communities where all the early platforms from the older bulletin board systems to the newer sort of Yahoo chat systems and things like that, they all had a nickname. So you could ignore somebody very easily. And that was always what I encouraged rather than mob retribution, which is what some people always like to do. But having the ability to just ignore people gave the community a way to make up rules and say, well, if you ignore them, that’s fine. And then you would talk over them if it was a voice thing or you’d be not responding to their questions, if it was a text sort of system, or if it was a hybrid system, that would happen. And that was okay. It wasn’t ideal. It didn’t work perfectly, but it worked pretty well. And having common mechanisms and common ideas for what justice, right, as an ideal looked like was very important to keep the community container intact. So you need the container. You need something to keep it intact, that idea of justice. You need the aim outside of the container. Like all of this stuff is required to have a good community experience, to form a real community. You can’t just put a group of people together with what looks like a common aim, like, oh, we all bought furniture and now we’re a community. That may seem like a silly example, but it’s not. This is something marketers are using right now to try and get you to buy more stuff. And it certainly doesn’t work for me. I don’t think it works for most people. Not that there isn’t something to it. Like if you buy an expensive new office chair from somebody, they may send you coupons or notifications for sales for whatever, and they may say you’re part of their community now because you bought one product from them once. And yeah, that’s going to have some effect, right? But that’s an influence. It’s not control. And I’m not part of their community because I’m only ever going to buy one office chair from them and the odds I’ll buy anything else from them are not very good. So that’s an actual experience, by the way, that I’m still going through. And so you can see a way in which we try to force community. We try to just tell people, oh, you’re part of our community, right? But really I’m not. I don’t know those people. I just bought one chair from them. It wasn’t … The instructions weren’t particularly good, although the quality of the chair is quite good. So it’s not as easy as just saying community and therefore. That’s not how that works. You really need threads that connect you together. You need a way to orient within the community. That’s part of what the container’s for, right? The container implies a hierarchy. You need a hierarchy in a community. You can’t really do without it or you don’t have a healthy community that’s binding because the ability to bind is wrapped up in the ability to be part of a hierarchy, the ability to specialize, right? There’s a scientific theory of specialization that comes into play here too. It’s part of evolutionary theories. That’s important. You have to know how you fit into the community, what you’re offering and what you’re getting out of it. And that can’t be the same for everybody or you don’t actually have a community. So if everybody’s the same, they’re purchasers of office equipment, that’s not enough to bind you. I mean, are you buying a desk? Are you buying a chair? What are you contributing? Nothing, right? Really money, but that doesn’t make a good community. It may help bolster a community, right? You may be contributing to a community by giving it money, but if that’s your only contribution, you’re not part of the community, right? Because the community is really about interacting with the other people around you, having that common aim or set of aims, right? Having a system for justice, right? And having a place where you have a status, right? Low status is still better than no status. And I think people miss that when they’re trying to talk about and think about community. There’s nothing wrong with the qualities of leadership and authority. They’re not manifest necessarily one person, right? It can be manifested in many people or many parts of leadership or authority can be manifest. You always had that concept, especially online, where you’ve got that guy who sets the town, right? And then you’ve got a woman who holds things together and sort of moves the conversation, we’ll say, away from aggression and towards reconciliation and empathy is a good way to put it, or sympathy is probably a better word. The den mother archetype, right? It’s a very real thing in a community and a good healthy community has a den mother, right? I mean, these things require a commitment of time, energy and attention, of course, right? But it’s important. And the way we understand what we’re giving to a community is wrapped up in trade offs. And I have a video about trade offs. And that’s important to understanding sacrifices, understanding the role of trade off and the decisions that you’ve made, which give you the sacrifice. That’s the thing you’re giving up to the community. And all of these factors are in there. So you have to have a container, you have to have a common name, you have to have a system of justice, you have to have a hierarchy, right? And you have to have a way for people to contribute, not only within that hierarchy, but also outside of it. Most good communities are built of volunteer effort in one or two areas that are important to that community. So not just running the technology, we’ll say, or running the listserv or running the mailing list, physical mailing lists included, right? But also putting in the effort to make sure that there are topics available, that people are informed of what’s going on, right? And interacted with in a way that they can. There’s all this behind the scenes work that goes into managing even a small community that doesn’t get appreciated, right? Whether it’s, you know, blatant just administrative work on online platforms, someone’s going to do that work, computers can’t do it very well usually at all. And somebody has to put their care as a person into the other persons in the community. And that’s what makes a good community in my experience. And the things that break communities with fair regularity is weak leadership. When the people running the thing, or who are in charge of the justice, roughly speaking, the adjudication of the container, aren’t firm and quick in their actions, because rot sits in very quickly in these things. It’s very easy to corrupt a container or a whole community, right? And sour people’s experience, that happens very quickly, right? Happens with sexual scandals in organizations, happens with money in organizations, right? Where somebody sees an opportunity and sort of exhausts that opportunity. Maybe personal gain over the wellness of the community. These things corrupt communities. Not having a proper set of authoritative skills, right? So it’s one thing to have an authority who can ban you or, you know, kick you out or silence you, you know, to the group or whatever. It’s another thing to have somebody who maybe doesn’t have that level of control, but instead has the ability to set an example, right? An example in conversation or an example as a function of how they manifest in the space, right? What their interaction with the container is, how they point out the boundaries, right? And maybe they act as sort of a father figure, right? Or brother figure, right? To help them help shape the way of the interactions. And that’s something that can happen from below, right? It’s not a granted authority from the top, we’ll say. And it helps to have those sorts of things. Like I said, the den mother, right? Who comes in and quiet things down, right? Or adjudicates sort of disputes before they rise up to the occasion of a blow up, for example, calms things down. These are all aspects of authority and leadership that we don’t take into account when we think about communities, but I think they’re all important. And when you’re developing communities or when you’re trying to develop a community, a lot of it is just showing up. So like I said, we had a monthly meeting. Every meeting we get together, every month rather, we get together and meet. And it was reliable. There were certain people who were always there. You can count on at least seeing them, even if you didn’t like them, well, at least they’re there to talk to, right? This regularity is very important. And having somebody there regularly, and I’ve talked to many people about this over the years, having somebody there regularly is super important to keep the community. You have to be there even when other people don’t show up. And we had two plus years of meditation on the Discord server. And between Manuel and myself, somebody, one of us was always there, right? Pretty much. And other people have picked up the slack in the past and the few instances where we’ve missed, but it’s very important to have somebody there. And man, there’s been a lot of times when it was just us or just one of us, that’s happened. But the fact that we’re always there, no matter what, to the best of our ability, is the thing that keeps that community alive in many senses. This regularity, this reliability on a person being there and reliability on what’s going to be talked about and maybe what can never be talked about in that space, in that community, this type of reliability is very important to building a good, healthy community. And I just wanted to point that out. These are sort of some lessons. I did a talk on Clubhouse recently where I talked about a bunch of this stuff and realized, hey, I could do a video on this as well. So here it is. And I really appreciate and enjoy. I’ve got 300 subscribers now. It’s very exciting. It’s sort of a milestone. And YouTube gives you these little trophy surprises for such things. So I really appreciate that everyone’s engaged in the little YouTube commentary and space here. And maybe it’s part of other communities or maybe it’ll grow into a community of its own. That would be wonderful. But it’s wonderful when anybody engages. And I really appreciate that people are willing to give me their time and attention.