Thread by @stewfortier

I want to cry every time I check the online communities I joined this time last year.

Most of them are now barren wastelands.

Some thoughts on why online communities fail... 🧶

First, picture the scene:

You joined a poppin' Slack or Discord a while back.

It was LIT when you joined, but now it's... not lit.

Worse, it's a total ghost town...

A person without a profile photo floats around talking to themselves.

The latest post in the #wins channel is 7 months old – and it has two pitiful thumbs-up reactions.

The leader of the community is nowhere to be found.

Even Slackbot doesn’t want to be there, glowing a reluctant green in a sea of grey offline statuses.

"Save me," he seems to whisper...

The community has succumbed to Digital Darwinism.

Most of these communities started off with tons of potential, though...

They had a well-intentioned, enthusiastic leader.

The waitlist was overflowing with early believers.

But amidst the hype, the leader and members never really figured out *the most important thing.*

Why should people keep coming back to this community?

In other words:

WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE?

A purpose is the primary value that members get by participating in the community.

It's specific, not fuzzy.

AA’s purpose = get you sober.

CrossFit’s purpose = make you fit.

TED’s purpose = amplify important ideas.

But most communities never define their purpose... they only pick a category.

"We're a community of designers"

Designers are a category.

A purpose is the super-specific reason a community gathers.

Designers could:

• Mentor each other
• Help each other find work
• Invent new typography together
• Give feedback on each other’s work
• Lobby Congress to replace the English alphabet with Wingdings

If you try to do many things, you never get great at one important thing.

Members starting asking why they're there.

Momentum fizzles.

The community dies off and is absorbed back into the broader Internet.

But imagine that same community with a clear purpose.

A member makes a request: "let's launch a book club!!"

If the community exists to help designers get higher-paid work, you'll know to pick books about design careers.

Your core utility isn't diluted, it's amplified.

Side note: check out @priyaparker's book The Art of Gathering if you're into this stuff. It's brilliant.

“Here is the great paradox of gathering: There are so many good reasons for coming together that often we don’t know precisely why we are doing so.”
-@priyaparker

Onwards..

The purpose becomes the organizing principle for how the community is run.

It sets clear expectations for how members interact, which makes those interactions self-sustaining.

It fends off random, disorganized, scattered interactions that dilute value.

It also makes it way easier to onboard new members.

Instead of being dropped into a bunch of random conversations, new members quickly know how to add value & connect with other people.

So yeah, I think tons of the now-dead communities I joined last year never really squared on their purpose.

And so they died.

Which makes me sad.

/ Fin.

P.s. thank you to my fellow @FosterCoWriting-ites @dan2hunt and @alicellemee for their insight and help writing early drafts of this.