But what if they’re basically the same darn thing?

I shall make my argument.

1. Terroir is everything.

Same grape, different dirt, completely different wine. A Pinot Noir from Burgundy and one from Willamette Valley, Oregon are technically siblings, but they would not recognize each other at a family reunion. Like not even slightly.

Community works the same way. Same platform, same playbook, different company, completely different result. Your forum gives the flavors and aromas of your customers, your product, and whatever strange culture your founders left in the soil. Which is why that “proven community framework” from somebody’s conference talk tasted so damn funky when you poured it at your company. It was grown somewhere else.

2. It takes years… and nobody wants to hear that.

New vines don’t produce anything worth bottling for three or four years. Leadership, meanwhile, would like a thriving community by Q2 after you launched mid-Q1.

Imagine walking into a vineyard in January and asking for a Grand Cru by that spring. The winemaker would laugh (or chase) you out of the tasting room. Community managers also get the same question - albeit for super users and wildly impressive engagement - but we don’t usually get to laugh or chase you away.

3. Most of the work happens where nobody’s looking.

Pruning. Waiting. Checking the weather obsessively. Scrubbing tanks. Guests see the tasting room, the pretty labels, the guy explaining the oaky notes. Nobody books a tour of the part where someone hoses out a fermentation vat (unless you’re a wine nerd like me).

That’s our report queue. That’s our tagging cleanup and our onboarding flow and the eleven Slack threads it took to get a badge approved. Unglamorous, essential, invisible.

4. Not every bottle is a special occasion.

Some interactions are a $150 Barolo you’ve been saving for an anniversary. Most of them are the Tuesday night bottle of $8.99 Beaujolais you grabbed on the way home from Trader Joe’s.

The quick “thanks, that fixed it” reply is Tuesday wine. It doesn’t need a case study. It counts anyway, and it’s most of what keeps the lights on.

5. Everyone’s an expert after one class.

Take a single wine course and suddenly you’re swirling at dinner and announcing that the Sancerre is “a bit closed on the nose; definitely tasting the limestone from the soil.”

Launch a single community and suddenly you have very strong opinions about Discourse vs. Gainsight.

Ironically I’m more humble these days about wine (after a few certifications proving I know nothing) and community (after nearly 20 years of still always learning).

6. One corked bottle ruins the whole night.

Cork taint makes wine smell like wet cardboard and a damp basement. Really delightful stuff. But it’s usually one bottle out of the case… and yet the whole table walks away thinking less of the winery.

One toxic thread does the same thing. One unchecked member, one ugly exchange left standing too long, and the whole community gets a reputation. Your moderation policy is your quality control. Treat it that way.

7. Good ones age, bad ones turn to vinegar.

Wine with structure (tannin, acid, balance) gets more interesting with time. Wine built on fruit and hype tastes great for six months and then goes flat, or worse.

Communities with structure age well too: clear norms, real ownership, a few members who’d keep the lights on if you went on vacation. Communities built on a launch-day sugar rush don’t make it to their second birthday.

Pour me another glass, will ya?

Now, despite being a community manager - I’m also very much an introvert who sometimes has no social energy left by dinner and finds myself retreating into the abyss (or my fancy plated chicken). I know I need to do better - and lucky for me I have people skills and community manager skills.

Finally there was an over extended lull in the conversation, and I said “Some of us were debating this earlier. When does a muffin stop being a muffin and start being a cupcake?”

My boss gave one of his quizzical looks (fortunately at the question; not me - phew) and my boss’ boss blurted out “frosting, of course”. And then the table was at it. “No, it’s the size!”, “No, sugar content!”, “I think it’s the icing!” - back and forth, back and forth. Finally every opinion had been shared and we had fairly reached a settlement of frosting with the definitive example being the muffins shared with lunch earlier that had been tiny and NOT frosted.

“Ok, next question!” someone piped up.

So, I asked another one (“Is a hot dog a sandwich?”). Then another (“What is the difference between a ship and a boat?”). By the third question, people were asking for the next one before the last argument had even wrapped up.

That’s when my boss leaned back and said, “Waiittt... did you just go all community manager on us? Is this what you do to get strangers to talk to each other?”

Busted. Kind of. Yes.

I love these questions for their own sake (I will die on the frosting hill, for the record). But I wasn’t only making conversation. I was observing. Well, “observing” makes me sound like I had a clipboard under the table. Noticing. Let’s go with noticing.

Who jumps in first? Who waits to see where the room lands before committing? Who disagrees loudly and laughs while they do it, and who gets a little tight around the eyes? Who appoints themselves judge and starts inventing a scoring rubric for baked goods? Who keeps the thing going by turning to the person who hasn’t said anything yet?

Ten minutes of muffin discourse told me more about how that group handles disagreement than a quarter’s worth of meetings would have. In a meeting, disagreement costs something. Someone’s project, someone’s budget, someone’s credibility. At dinner, nobody’s reputation rides on cupcake taxonomy, so people show you how they argue when the stakes are zero. And how a group argues at zero is a pretty good preview of how it’ll argue when the stakes go up.

The other thing: people stopped being titles. Hierarchy absolutely did not count when discussing if hot dogs should absolutely be classified as tacos.

The nonsense is where a group learns it’s safe to disagree with each other.

Community folks have been running this exact play for years, usually without giving ourselves much credit for it.

Every community I’ve worked on has had some version of the off-topic space. The #random channel. The Friday “what are you drinking” thread. The pet photos (so many pet photos). And sooner or later, every one of them has had a stakeholder ask (hopefully politely) what that space is for. It’s for this. It’s where members learn each other’s tone, figure out who’s joking, and build up enough goodwill that a sharp reply in a support thread later lands as blunt instead of hostile.

Disagreement needs reps, too. A community whose first public argument is about a pricing change or a deprecated feature is going in cold, with no shared memory of having disagreed and come out fine. Ask the ridiculous question in the forum. Let people pick sides. Let it get a little loud. You’re giving them a track record.

Somebody has to go first, and in most rooms that’s you. Asking about muffins at a work lunch carries a small but nonzero risk of being the weird one at the table. I’ll take it. Absorbing that bit of social risk so everyone else doesn’t have to is a huge part of the job, and it’s the part that never makes it into the job description.

And pay attention to what the nonsense shows you. The person at a table who keeps pulling the quiet guy into the debate? Future welcomer. The one who invented the scoring rubric is going to draft your community guidelines whether you ask them to or not. The low-stakes moments are where your moderators, connectors, and peacekeepers introduce themselves, usually without realizing they’re auditioning.

So yeah… when does a muffin become a cupcake?

Except for the parking lot and pedestrian ways.

I just don’t know what they were thinking there. The mulch in one section quickly got wore down to bare ground as shoppers cut a corner on foot. And another section with aesthetically pleasing grass got trampled as shoppers took the shortest path to cross the road.

And they kept on fixing it for awhile. Until one day they didn’t… and they haven’t tried since. But they also haven’t embraced it yet either.

So what in the world does Whole Foods and trampled grass have to do with community?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, because most of us built our communities like that plaza. Gorgeous on the site plan, with a front door (the sign-up form), tidy sidewalks (the onboarding flow), and a member count that tells us how many people came in the way we designed. Joined is a fact. Active is a percentage. Everybody else is a rounding error we’d rather not bring up in the QBR.

Now go stand in that parking lot for ten minutes. Nobody is using the sidewalk. Landscape people call those worn strips desire paths: routes nobody planned, nobody voted on, and nobody put on a roadmap, cut by people who just wanted to get to the store. They’re also the most accurate site map of the place you’ll ever find.

And of course, your community has a lawn like this. A security analyst googles an error message, lands on a forum thread, copies the fix, and leaves. A coworker screenshots a Slack answer and forwards it to a team of six. A stranger reads your template library logged out and forks a workflow into their own setup. An AI assistant answers a question using threads your regulars wrote three years ago. That’s four people and zero accounts, and every one of them used the community this week in a meaningful way.

Are they members? Well, maybe not exactly, that word comes with keyring baggage. Instead, I propose we call them ambient members: people who live inside the community’s usefulness and never touch the front door. Each visit wears the grass a little thinner wherever they darn well please.

Which brings me back to those developers, who I have a strange amount of sympathy for. They did what most of us do at first: patched. Fresh mulch, new sod. Then they stopped patching and stopped designing, and the plaza has been stuck in the middle ever since. Half-noticing is its own kind of decision.

The path already exists. The work is paving it.

Start with a grass survey. Look at search queries that land on community pages, docs with strange traffic, support tickets that quote a thread, prospects who mention an answer they found “somewhere online” on a sales call. None of it shows up in a member count, and the denominator problem I keep yelling about applies here too: a member count surveys the sidewalks.

Then pave the darn thing. Paving means the answer at the end of the path stands on its own. No login wall. No “join to see replies.” No accepted solution buried on page three of a debate. A stranger arriving cold has four minutes and zero context, so give them the fix, the version it applies to, and a date. Edit the old answers. Pin the good ones. Walk the path as a stranger sometime, too, because the ugliest thread along that route is the one they’ll carry away with them. Your regulars are the groundskeepers here, by the way, and they’d probably like to know their trimming reaches people they’ll never meet.

Leave a bench at the end. Something small, like a “this helped” button or a low-key “ask here” link that costs nothing and nags nobody. Some of these folks will sit down after the third visit, once they have something to say. Plenty never will, and they got everything they came for, which is what a path is for.

Then show whoever funds you the diagonal. Engagement gets budget, so infrastructure gets described as engagement to get funded. Path traffic gives you an honest way to explain what the docs, templates, and answers are for. Bring a photo of the dead grass and ask what a sidewalk along it would cost.

And needless to say, I’ll certainly be cutting across that mulch and grass my next shopping trip, strictly for research.

But then… the world (Spain to be precise) absolutely laughed at my plans by throwing a tropical storm and a very bad accommodation our way. I distinctly remember being on a one-lane dirt road with a steep drop off, in the middle of nowhere, with a tree blocking the path, pouring rain - realizing my plans were pretty freaking useless - while trying to help my husband do a 16-point turn without falling off the mountain.

And so began “let’s just wing it”.

All of that feels wildly relevant right now as I write this post from a hotel in Okinawa, Japan. This trip came together wildly last minute - so much so that my Japanese language knowledge is limited to about five words, we have no reservations outside of hotels, and I’ve got no idea what I’m doing this afternoon. But we’re having a great time. Like way better than if I had planned it.

The harsh reality is that my original style of travel had me throwing on some serious blinders because I was so focused on the structure, the plan, the outcome. I didn’t even get to notice the sparkly little edges of unplanned delight (such as the best ramen I’ve ever had discovered at a total hole in the wall at the end of random street).

So what does all of this have to do with community?

Much like an earlier post about Control Truly *Is* for Amateurs, communities sometimes need a freaking moment to breathe, be unruly, and be chaotically creative. And this is even more true when it comes to community events - both digital and IRL.

So what actually makes a great one? In my humble ramen-fueled opinion, it’s three things. Three shockingly easy things.

The first is deliberate white space to encourage interaction. As someone who has attended far too many events and been involved in planning events, every minute is treated like prime real estate with each second being heavily orchestrated to “provide value”.

But IMO, the best events treat time like an open field instead. The agenda is designed to encourage collision, interaction, and engagement. And no, your “coffee break” ain’t it. We’re talking using your precious minutes to get people to actually talk.

The second is permission to go off-script. White space by itself doesn’t do much if nobody’s told it’s theirs to use. Leave an open floor with no signal that wandering is safe, and people will default to the most passive version of themselves, standing with the one person they already know, waiting for instructions. Give attendees purpose to ask questions, let their brain wander, and challenge each other.

And the third: be a host who facilitates and improvises, not conducts. A conductor keeps a room moving through a fixed score, exactly on tempo; any deviation counts as a failure. A host shows up with a solid plan and a willingness to abandon big chunks of it, because the plan was just infrastructure. The audience is the goal.

With all that being said, one of my favorite community events of the year is coming up soon and if you want to see all of the best tips and tricks in action done by the absolute community event pros (Zach, Ruthie, and David) - it’s the place to be. Check it out here!

Despite knowing that there is a human just like me on the other end of the many products and tools that I use that is being measured on things like awareness, acquisition, CTAs, return rate, bounce rate, and all that… I am that customer.

And being that customer, I try to remember myself and my own behavior when I’m the builder. I don’t want to be annoyed by real-time notifications. I don’t want to be bombarded by daily digests. And you will not trigger my sense of FOMO or anxiety with that dreaded ‘red dot’ and number.

Clearly somewhere along the way, we decided that pull - the little behavioral thing that makes someone come back on their own - was something you just need to install, toggle on, and tune.

That’s it. Clearly.

Y’all know I love my architectural analogies on here, so let’s put in this way: you built a doorbell dressed up as a strategy.

Doorbells demand something the moment they ring. They don’t give a darn about what you were doing or how much you don’t want to people right now. Notification driven design runs on that same freaking logic: manufactured urgency engineered so that the recipient feels obligated to look and for the worst of them - acknowledge… even if nothing in their actual behavior in the prior moment required it.

Sigh.

Now in comparison: what if you built a porch light as a community strategy.

Porch lights do absolutely nothing most of the time. No ringing, no demanding. It’s just there, switched on, unbothered, and requiring absolutely nothing. But the moment the path is just a bit too dark or you can’t find your keys? It’s exactly what you want, when you need it.

I’m convinced porch lights are a better strategy for communities.

What if your content stopped being a push channel and started being a findable one?

What if your communication cadence stopped being about frequency and started being about reliability?

The part about this that is most unnerving is knowing how much of our own behavior has to change: the itch to manufacture urgency, to send one more nudge, to reopen a thread that’s naturally cooling because the dashboard looks better with the number ticking up.

And what you report upward has to shift with it. Time since last visit tells you a whole lot of nothing about whether the doorbell like thing is working. Whether the answer was there, correct, and findable the exact moment somebody needed it? That tells you almost everything.

Of course, none of this means never send a notification. Sometimes a doorbell like urgency is exactly right thing in the moment - such as a security alert which absolutely should interrupt someone’s evening or the ability to turn on extra alerts for specific triggers. But what it does mean is noticing which one your whole system has been built to depend on like it’s very existence depends on it.

The porch light doesn’t check its analytics at midnight to see who noticed it was on. It just stays lit, for the one person who needed it to be.

Gratefully, my HBIC behavior was wildly appreciated and the bride let everyone know I was a guest who setting the bar real damn high. (Happy to help, girl. Congrats!)

And all I want to do now is sleep.

Did the Type A behavior wipe me out? Not really.

Did the introvert masquerading as extrovert do me in? A little.

So what ultimately has me wanting to cap this off like right here and take a nap?

Empathy.

Probably my strongest skillset as both a human and a community manager. And arguably the one I’d actually like to turn off 99.8% of the time.

I very rarely write or see a community manager job description out there that doesn’t have “empathy” listed somewhere in the necessary skillset. I usually sandwich it somewhere between “strong communicator” and “comfortable with ambiguity” which probably makes most people think I ran out of things to write and I’m just going with some variation of word salad.

But, I stand behind those three things - especially empathy. I actually just wish I could find the job description appropriate level words for the depth of empathy.

“You can read between lines so unwritten and so hidden that people think you can read minds.”

“You can deeply channel the anger, frustration, joy, and excitement of others as if it’s your own experience.”

“You can tell when someone needs a break, intervention, or distraction before they even know.”

So needless to say, yeah - your nerd gal over here is tired after feeling all the feels of everyone else and doing a whole lot about it.

The problem with the whole job description bit is that when I write “must be empathetic” - I actually haven’t met a human yet that didn’t have empathy. We all have it. Some of us are just more in tune with it. Some of us listen to it more. Some of us can blissfully ignore it and run at a sustainable level (alas, that is not me).

My hypothesis is that us community managers just have the empathy setting set to 11 (at least) at all freaking times. And I suspect, people with empathy settings at 10+ are drawn to specific types of careers, with community being one of those.

If you do this type of work, you know what I’m talking about. We see color in messages that look ordinary to everyone else, we can read the undertones of a GIF like nobody’s business, and we always always always know the temperature of a room, meeting, event, etc. well before everyone else. We can feel the frustration of a pissed off user, the elation of a colleague, and are constantly riding an emotional roller coaster - while usually ignoring our own emotions. Nifty.

And I’m not saying all this to make it sound like special kind of suffering, martyrdom, or super power. I just think it’s interesting because we don’t normally talk about empathy like a tangible thing. We don’t quantify like it we would resolved support tickets, assigned customer accounts, etc.

But my career and this weekend are living proof for me that empathy is tangible, empathy in quantity is exhausting, and sustained high levels of empathy can cause burnout.

And now you’re going “Ok, great. Jillian is going to drop some immense wisdom here?”

Nope.

I’ll be very honest here and say I don’t know what to do with this empathy-at-11 setting long term, but I’m not sure I’d change it either. I’m a servant leader and my love language is acts of service. I’m exhausted, but knowing that I was able to do so much subtle (and not so subtle) good this weekend to ensure my friend had a great wedding - I’ll take the exhaustion.

So… that’s me. Now time to go touch some grass, not make eye contact with anyone, and try to avoid emotions - mine or anyone else’s.

Me: “What exactly am I looking at and what are you actually averaging?”

I’m such a kill joy.

Averages are the strangest of metrics in my opinion because they’re often quite opinionated. And opinions are decisions.

Someone somewhere chose which population to blend together before the math ever happened - and that choice right there is doing a ton more work than the resulting number ever will.

To really illustrate how ridiculous just saying an average is:

Over 99% of all humans have more than the average number of human legs (2).

The average temperature in the United States in March is 41.5F.

Imagine just leaving those there. No explanation. No deeper context.

I mean - sure, yeah both averages are very real and very accurate. But the numbers are actually kind of useless. Do we design the majority of pants and bicycles for less than 2 legs? Do we need a heavy jacket for Phoenix, Arizona?

With what I’ve given you above, it’s a big ol’ shrug.

And needless to say, communities are no different. Blending Alaska and Arizona’s late winter weather is the same as doing an average across your entire community. The averaged number tells you the temperature of a place or time that doesn’t exist.

Take the metric “average posts per member.” Sounds like a health metric. But it’s actually two very different populations all mashed into one. It’s new members still finding their footing - but also the small maintenance crew who’ve been here since the beginning and post constantly because the place would go quiet without them. But average those together gets a number that doesn’t describe either group. And maybe it looks fine. But in reality, it’s describing absolutely nobody.

Same with “average time to resolution” on a support community. Blend the veteran members who know exactly where to look for answers with the brand new members who don’t even know what to search for yet. Get a resolution time that flatters the community’s onboarding while it’s actually terrible or makes the community’s speed look like absolute garbage while it’s actually fine - all of course depending on which cohort happens to be larger that month. You can’t tell which. That’s the whole problem. The average doesn’t know which cohort it’s hiding.

So what do you actually do differently?

First, before you average anything, name the darn unit. Not the metric… the population underneath it. If you can’t say out loud what group of members this number is describing, you’re not ready to average it yet. You’re just doing fancy math and hoping it counts as insight.

Second, segment before you aggregate - not after! Cohort by tenure at minimum: week one, month one, month six, year one plus. A single “engagement score” split into those four buckets will tell you more in five minutes than the blended number told you in a year. Why? Now you’re looking at four small, coherent temperatures instead of one big meaningless one.

Third, treat any metric someone hands you pre-averaged with some serious suspicion. Ask what’s inside it. If the answer is “everybody,” ask again.

Of course, none of this is really about statistics. It’s all about admitting that “the community” isn’t one big population. It’s cohorts, arriving at different times, learning at different speeds, needing different things from the same room. Averaging across all of that and you won’t find the center of anything. You’ve just found the spot exactly between two places, neither of which anyone actually lives.

Oh and that long awaited explanation: Some humans have 1 or no legs, which therefore lowers the average below 2, despite the majority of humans having all their allocated legs.

Mostly just feeling the leftover side effects of anesthesia (which I’ll have you know I somehow just spelled that right without spellcheck… whhhhaaat!?)

Anyways. So this week is different. As you all probably know at this point, I’ve been busy standing up a new community. We’re about 3 weeks into the soft launch at this point and it’s that awkward point where you’re nervously kind of staring at your early hypotheses and wondering “Are these things going to hold?”

So instead of some grand article telling you exactly what to do, I’m just going to give you the messy run down of what my brain decides to ponder at 4am.

BET ONE: Belonging isn’t the job anymore, at least not for this kind of community.

As recent as Wednesday of last week, I had a peer suggest I set membership as an objective for the next few months. How about….

Needless to say, “building for belonging” is great for a lot of communities. But the community I’m building is a knowledge and support community, not a social one, and I fervently believe membership as an objective has no home here. Knowledge transfer is going to be my bread and butter. Transactional, in-and-out, solved-my-problem-and-left behavior is going to be my world and my strategy, metrics, effort, and reporting are all going to reflect that… for good or bad.

BET TWO: The traffic that actually matters to me in this era hasn’t started counting yet.

If you asked me 5 years ago about metrics, you’d have heard me tell you all about how page views, unique visitors, and the like were pretty darn important. And they were. But then our AI overlords showed up and I’m betting on new metrics now.

Direct traffic just ain’t what it was.

I don’t think this community’s page views, unique visitors, or impressions become objectively meaningful until the content starts showing up inside LLM-generated answers, not just usual search results. And if that’s true, then the launch campaign, the engagement push, the whole freaking arc of “get people here, get them excited” is mostly serving hype (for me TBH; I like any excuse for cake) and peripheral awareness right now. And that means, none of that will be the primary growth driver. Heck, it might not even be a growth driver at all in the way we’ve traditionally meant it.

So instead of pouring effort into the perfect launch, I’m spending more of my time on what I’m calling concurrence efforts. This is the stuff like making sure the content is structured, cited, and cross-referenced in a way that gives it a shot at being pulled into generated answers across domains. And that’s kind of a funky thing. 5 years ago I was doing customer marketing stuff to launch. Now? AI massaging. Cool cool.

BET THREE: Localization isn’t worth the investment anymore.

Someone out there is clutching their pearls and gasping at ^^ statement, but I said what I said. For a long time, localization was the thing for advanced communities with platforms and vendors going so far as to offer in-platform localization and other vendors charging exorbitant sums to translate knowledge bases.

But translation tools are good now. Like legit good, not conference-demo good. As long as I stay aware of cultural context and keep the content itself relatively neutral and adaptable rather than idiom-heavy or region-specific, I don’t think dedicated localization work is where my limited brain juice should go.

Note: I’m not saying culture doesn’t matter. It’s saying the effort has moved. I’m spending effort on making content translate cleanly instead of translating it myself.

What ties these together, if anything…

Mostly just that I’m questioning long inherited defaults. Belonging, traffic, and localization all made sense as priorities in the communities most of us cut our teeth on. But I’m not one bit convinced they automatically transfer to a knowledge and support community operating in a landscape where AI is starting to mediate discovery. So I’m making different bets. And hey, I could be wrong.

But that’s sort of the point of writing this one down now instead of waiting until I’ve got it all figured out. You get to watch me find out in real time.

If you’re running your own version of any of these bets, I want to hear about it. Reply and tell me where you’ve landed, and where you think I’ve got it backwards.

But don’t think that means we walk out the door everyday with things for every single weather type. Over the years, we all learn how to read the upcoming weather in other ways - take a little bit of what the meteorologist think, a few looks at the sky, observe what the leaves and birds are doing, and all that weird stuff.

So why am I starting off a nerd post with a chat about weather? It’s not small talk. It’s because I actually think it’s a great approach to community climate too. As I’m getting ready in the morning, I’m not looking at the humidity for just sh*ts and giggles. It’s a little metric that gives me big insight into what to expect.

Community metrics work exactly the same way - if you’ll let them.

But somewhere along the way of building communities, dealing with the analysis paralysis of looking at community dashboards, and trying to report on our observations - we seem to have stopped viewing engagement metrics as weather instruments and started treating them as the weather itself. A spike in comments doesn’t mean your community is thriving any more than a pressure drop means a hurricane has already made landfall. But it does means something is happening that you haven’t fully diagnosed yet.

The metrics we measure are almost always proxies. Treating them as endpoints is where community strategy goes wrong.

This distinction sounds pretty freaking obvious in the abstract. But it gets much harder to hold onto in a quarterly business review, where a stakeholder wants a number that goes up and to the right. And unfortunately for us community professionals, “Well, technically this is a leading indicator of an underlying condition we haven’t fully characterized” does not fit on a slide or satisfy the stakeholder.

Sigh.

So we simplify. Engagement becomes health. Post volume becomes vibrancy. Reply counts become belonging. None of these substitutions are unreasonable on their face (a community with zero activity is obviously not thriving), but the substitution itself is where the trouble starts. Once a proxy gets treated as the target, people start managing the proxy instead of the thing it was supposed to represent.

You have most certainly seen this play out - if not literally been the one played. A community manager under pressure to show engagement growth starts running more prompts, more polls, more “what’s everyone up to this week” threads. The numbers move. Leadership is happy. But nothing about the underlying health of the community has changed! You didn’t create more trust, more expertise-sharing, or more durable relationships between members. You created more weather readings. You made the barometer twitch without doing anything about the actual system generating the pressure.

And we’ve talked about this in other articles: some of what we can measure barely correlates with what we actually care about, and some of what we care about most can’t be measured at all.

More sigh.

Think about what actually predicts whether a community survives a rough year and what doesn’t. It’s almost certainly not last month’s post count. It’s almost certainly members trust each other enough to disagree in public without the whole thread turning into a psychological hazard. It’s whether institutional knowledge lives in more than one or two people’s heads. It’s whether someone would notice, and say something, if a longtime contributor went quiet for a month.

And of course - none of that shows up cleanly in a dashboard. All of it is more predictive of long-term health than anything your analytics platform will hand you on a Monday morning.

So what do you do with metrics that are proxies at best? You don’t throw them out with the barometer. A pressure drop is still useful information, even though it isn’t the storm. The move is to change what you’re asking the number to do for you.

A few shifts to consider:

1. Stop asking “is this number good or bad” and start asking “what underlying condition would produce a number like this.” A quiet month isn’t automatically bad news. It might be a maturity signal instead of a decline signal, and the only way to tell the difference is to look past the reading itself.

2. Pair every quantitative metric with a qualitative check before you report on it. If comment volume is up, go read the comments. Find out if you’re watching real exchange or a spike in low-effort reactions. The number alone won’t tell you which one you’ve got.

3. Get explicit with stakeholders about what a given metric can and can’t tell you, before they build a narrative around it themselves. It is far easier to set that expectation up front than to walk it back after someone’s already put “engagement is up 40%” in a board deck.

4. Build at least one measurement into your practice that captures something durable, even if it’s slower and harder to report on quarterly. Trust, knowledge distribution, and continuity of relationships move on a different clock than engagement metrics do, and they deserve their own instruments.

And if all else fails, do what us weird northern New Englanders do: walk outside, look at the sky, listen to the birds, and just run with what you see. Chances are it’s not far off from the right number.

Every community manager out there has some version of the sentence of “our members are incredibly knowledgeable; experts in fact”. And yeah, we totally mean it as a flex. Deep expertise reads as a success metric, proof that we built something serious enough to attract serious people.

Nobody - not even me - puts the second half of that sentence in the deck: the deeper the expertise, the quieter the room gets.

Not empty. Quieter. There’s a difference and it takes awhile to be able to see it and spot the difference. An empty community has nobody home. A quiet expert community has plenty of people home, most of them just sitting very still, waiting for a question that is interesting enough to answer.

Picture a dinner party where everyone at the table has spent twenty years in the same field. Nobody’s going to ask what a term means. Nobody’s going to float a half-formed potentially stupid idea. You don’t workshop your thinking out loud in front of people who could correct you in their sleep, you wait until you’ve got something polished enough to survive the table. Multiply that dinner party by a few thousand members and you’ve got most expert-heavy communities I’ve ever worked on.

The more expert a community gets, the higher the invisible bar for speaking rises. And the fewer people feel qualified to clear it… often including your actual experts.

That’s the paradox on its own. And then Dunning-Kruger is what makes it interesting. Quick refresher, since it gets name-dropped a lot more than it gets explained: it’s the idea that the people who know the least about something are often the most confident talking about it, because they don’t yet know enough to see the size of the gap. The people who actually know the subject cold tend to go the other way, they’ve seen enough of the gap to stay a little humble about it. In a community, that effect doesn’t distribute evenly. It splits people into two very different kinds of quiet, and if you’re not looking for both, you’ll only catch one.

On one end, you’ve got people early on the curve who don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. In a beginner-friendly space, this group posts constantly (confidently, sometimes wrongly, and without much fear of being wrong). But drop them into a genuinely expert community and something shifts. The room’s competence is visible enough that even the overconfident start to sense they’re out of their depth. Some still post anyway, loudly, and they’re the barrier newer members point to when they say the space feels intimidating. But a lot of them just go quiet too, for the first time in their posting lives.

On the other end, you’ve got the people who’ve actually earned the expertise, the ones who could answer almost anything in the community without blinking. And this is the group nobody talks about enough: they stop volunteering it. Not because they don’t care. Because when you actually know a subject that well, you know exactly how much nuance gets lost every time you simplify it for a public post, and most experts would rather say nothing than say something they’ll have to caveat five times in the replies. So they lurk too. Just for the opposite reason.

But what does that mean in practice?

Your most expert community can look, from the outside, identical to your least expert one. Low posting volume. Long gaps between threads. A handful of loud, confident voices that don’t necessarily represent the smartest people in the room.

Great. Wonderful. What should we do? What should I do?

If you’re managing one of these spaces, a few things try.

First, stop reading silence as disengagement and start asking which kind of quiet you’re looking at. A beginner-friendly community that’s gone quiet has a different problem than an expert one, and they need different fixes.

Second, build deliberate low-stakes entry points, not for beginners, but for your experts. Give the people who know the most a low-effort way to say a small true thing (a quick take, a “here’s what I’d flag,” a reaction to someone else’s post) without having to produce a fully-defended thesis every time they show up.

Third, be honest that your loudest members might not be your most expert ones, and stop letting volume stand in for authority when you’re deciding who to spotlight, feature, or hand the mic to. (Gives a mean side eye to super user programs…)

And fourth, remember that expertise doesn’t scale confidence. It scales caution. The more someone actually knows, the more they understand what they don’t, and the harder they think before hitting post.

So what do you think? Is your community quiet or empty?

But this isn’t some sort of false modesty or admission of failure. Instead it’s my strategy. Somewhere around my second community build I figured out that the launch decks everyone loves, you know the ones with the fully mapped member journey and the six month content calendar and the engagement tiers with cute on-brand little badge names are mostly theater. Impressive theater, nonetheless. Great for a slide. But still, theater.

The second real members show up, I can guarantee with alarming certainty they’re going to do something with your community you didn’t plan for. Not because you’re bad at your job, but because you are structurally one person (or one small team) guessing at the behavior of a crowd you haven’t met yet in its entirety. If your deck already has an answer for everything, your guess has limited their reality before they’ve even walked in the door.

So, 60/40. Sixty percent locked: the purpose, the guardrails, the non-negotiables, the stuff people can actually lean on. Forty percent left deliriously squishy on purpose, so the community gets a vote in what it becomes.

Speaking from a lot of experience, the 40% never stops feeling like a professional liability. We - the community professionals - are supposed to have the answers; that’s kind of the whole job description. Except the version of me with all the answers never gets asked the question that actually mattered, because nobody in my conference room thought to ask it. Only my members would’ve thought to ask it and there is generally no overlap between those two groups.

The best community strategies are the ones still capable of being surprised.

The 60% is real structure though, not a suggestion. I’ve made the mistake of thinking “we’ll figure it out” was a plan instead of a shrug, and vague is not the same thing as flexible. Your purpose, your moderation floor, your core value exchange - lock those in. People build trust on that part. The squishy part only works because it’s squishy inside something solid, not squishy all the way down to the studs.

Your stakeholders will read your unfinished 40% as a gap every single freaking time, no matter how you frame it. Defending the parts you left undone on purpose, to someone who needs a finished slide for their own boss by Thursday, is its own quiet skill. “We’re leaving room to learn” sounds suspiciously like “we don’t know yet” if you’re not the one who built the thing.

My favorite part though: when a member starts using the community in some way you never planned for… that’s a gift, not scope creep. They’re doing your strategic thinking for you, unpaid, in real time, and all you have to do is notice instead of herding them back to the roadmap.

The ratio moves too, and it should. Month one’s 40% is not month twelve’s 40%. Good chaos eventually teaches you what deserves to become permanent, and the structure grows to match what you’ve actually learned instead of what you guessed at back in the conference room.

The hardest part of all this was never the math though. Not really. It’s sitting across from someone who wants certainty and telling them, straight faced, that a big ol’ chunk of the plan doesn’t exist yet on purpose. And that doesn’t feel like confidence unfortunately. It feels like showing up slightly underdressed to your own launch.

The communities I’ve watched fail the hardest weren’t the ones that left room for surprise. They were the ones so fully mapped on day one that no member ever got to leave a fingerprint on the place or members bucked so hard against the rigidity they broke the foundation. You can build something beautiful and airtight and still end up with a building nobody wanted to move into.

Leave the 40% empty. Somebody’s going to want to fill it in for you.

They shouldn’t be.

A community that answers its own questions well enough that people stop asking them isn’t failing. It’s finishing the job it was designed for. Hurrah!

We built our metrics around visible activity because visible activity is easy to count. Questions asked, threads started, replies posted. All of it assumes that a healthy community is a busy one, forever generating fresh confusion for people to resolve together. But that’s not maturity. That’s a community that hasn’t figured most things out yet.

A community that stops generating the same questions over and over isn’t dying. It’s the thing you were trying to build in the first place.

Think about what actually happens when a knowledge base does its job. Someone hits a snag, searches, finds the answer that three other people already worked out and documented, and moves on with their day. No thread. No reply count. No ping in your notifications to reassure you that people still need you. Just a problem that quietly stopped being a problem. You built infrastructure specifically so people wouldn’t have to ask, and then you built a dashboard that punishes you for succeeding.

But alas… this is where the maturity curve gets mistaken for decline. Early on, a community is loud by necessity: nothing’s been answered yet, so everything gets asked. That’s when the metrics look great and the leadership meetings feel easy. But the curve should bend. Questions should get more novel, less repetitive, further out on the edge of what your content already covers. If your question volume looks the same in year two as it did in month two, that’s not stability at all. More like a sign your knowledge base never actually absorbed anything. Oof.

So what do you actually do with this?

First, stop reporting question volume as a headline number without context. A raw count tells you nothing about where a community sits on its own curve. Pair it with something like question novelty (are people asking things you’ve genuinely never addressed) or repeat-question rate (how often is someone re-asking what’s already answered, which tells you your content isn’t surfacing, not that your community is thriving).

Second, get specific about what “declining engagement” could actually mean before you let anyone panic in a meeting about it. A drop in basic questions paired with a rise in novel, complex ones is a community leveling up. A drop across the board, novel and basic alike, might mean people left, or gave up, or found somewhere else to ask. Same number, opposite story. Your dashboard can’t tell the difference. You have to.

Third, this changes what you build toward. If the goal was always fewer repeat questions, you should be celebrating your best FAQ articles and your clearest documentation as much as you celebrate your busiest threads. Right now most of us report on what happened in the community and quietly ignore what the community made unnecessary. That’s backwards. The unnecessary is the win.

Fourth and potentially uncomfortable: this means part of your job, maybe the best part of your job, produces no evidence of itself. The four support tickets that never got filed because the doc was clear. The onboarding question that never got asked because the welcome flow already answered it. You will never get credit in a headcount meeting for a fire that didn’t start, and you have to make peace with that or you’ll spend your whole career optimizing for the wrong signal because it’s the only one that shows up on a chart.

Fifth, and this is the one I’m living right now: if the absence of a question is the win, then seeding a brand new community with those answers before anyone asks is not busywork, it’s the whole strategy. I’m building a community from zero right now, and the temptation is to wait, let real questions surface organically, then respond and look responsive. But every question you preempt is a person who got value in their first five minutes instead of their first five weeks. A new member who searches on day one and finds the answer already sitting there doesn’t experience that as “nobody’s talking in this community yet.” They experience it as “oh, this place already gets it.” Seeding isn’t faking activity. It’s compressing the distance between showing up and getting something out of showing up, and that distance is the whole battle in the early days.

I’ve got ways of tracking this now, question novelty scoring, repeat-rate baselines, the works. I’m not going to hand you the exact framework, because the version that works for my community is tuned to my community, and a framework built for one group’s maturity curve is a great way to make a completely different group’s leadership panic for entirely new reasons. Build your own. Watch your own curve. The point isn’t the specific formula, it’s that you need one, and “trust me” without any formula at all doesn’t survive budget season.

But the reframe matters even without the perfect metric. The next time someone tells you engagement is down because the questions dried up, ask them what dried up first, the questions or the confusion. Those are very different problems, and only one of them should be keeping you up at night.

But anyways.

Not only have I built a lot of community launch decks, but I’ve sat through probably 50x as many community decks from platform vendors, other communities, and more. And more than a small handful have a similar slide: a stunning landing page, a big ol’ friendly button that invites users to join, and someone excitedly explaining onboarding functionality like it’s the only way anyone will ever arrive. One door. One hallway. One version of hello.

That was never fully true, but it’s now catastrophically untrue. Someone finds your community through a Google search that dumps them straight into a three year old thread about a bug that was fixed two releases ago. Someone else asks an AI assistant a question and gets a paraphrased answer with a link buried at the bottom, if they get a link at all. A third person hears about you at a conference bar because a colleague name dropped your forum while complaining about something unrelated. Three people, three completely different rooms, and you designed a reception for… well… none of them.

I gave a talk last year about how architectural principles shape human experience across physical and digital environments, and I keep coming back to it because it maps onto this almost too cleanly.

A front door isn’t just an opening in a wall. It’s a invitation. You walk in, there’s a reception, maybe some much needed information, and a beat where your eyes adjust and your nervous system registers I am allowed to be here. Then you’re guided toward wherever you’re actually going via hallways, corridors, walls, signage, and more. And that’s truly just grand if you need that experience.

Now let’s say you already know this place and you know exactly where you want to go. You know there’s a side door that takes you right to where you want to be. Also truly grand.

But both of those are very intentional behaviors. You entered the space with a desired outcome; the first with exploration and the second with direction.

So now let’s say you didn’t see the front door, grabbed the handle of the side door. And the side door just skipped all of that ‘truly grand’ stuff from above. It drops you straight into the kitchen mid dinner party; no reception, no adjustment beat, just you and a room full of context you don’t have.

Uh… am I allowed to be here?

Search and AI summaries are side doors. They don’t route people through your front door and to reception. They drop them into a specific room, mid conversation, and expect that room to make sense on its own. So does it?

Most communities have spent a decade perfecting the front door and completely ignoring what happens at the side entrances.

That’s the thesis, and it’s worth sitting with, because it explains a specific kind of failure you’ve probably felt but not named: the sense that your community’s best content, the stuff that actually converts curiosity into belonging, gets buried three clicks deep, while a half baked thread with a so-so title is quietly doing the work of your entire acquisition funnel.

So what does it actually mean to design for three doors instead of one.

Your reception content (the landing page, the welcome thread, the about page) still matters, but it’s no longer your primary entrance. Its job shifts from persuasion to orientation: helping someone who’s already inside find their bearings, not convincing a stranger to walk through the wall.

Your side door content, the stuff that gets surfaced by search or scraped into an AI answer, has to work as a complete room. No hallway, no reception, no assumed context. A piece of knowledge that can’t stand alone and still be true, still be useful to someone who has never heard of your community, is not going to survive being extracted. Write for the person who arrives with zero reception.

Word of mouth is its own kind of door, and it’s the one most people forget is architectural at all. Someone vouched for you before the visitor ever showed up, which means the visitor is walking in with trust already extended on your behalf. Over explaining insults that trust. Under delivering breaks it. The room needs to be exactly as good as the person who recommended it implied it would be: no more theatrical, no less substantial.

The part that’s genuinely uncomfortable if you’ve spent years optimizing a single funnel: you don’t get to choose which door most people use anymore. The AI summary door is only going to get busier. The side entrances outnumber the front one now, probably permanently, which means the room by room experience of your community matters more than the building’s facade ever did.

I still love a good reception. First impressions matter and that the welcome experience deserves real design attention. But if every door except the front one drops a stranger into an unfurnished room with no context and no signage, the reception as entry point never mattered. It was just the door you happened to be standing at when you built the place.

Go check your side doors. I promise you’ll find at least one room with the lights off and nobody there to make sense of the chaos.

The ones who are quietly dismantling their communities because AI is going to make them obsolete anyway.

The ones who are carrying on like it’s 2019 and nothing fundamental has shifted.

And then there’s a smaller, quieter group. We’re a mix of deeply understanding what’s happening and adapting accordingly… or those just getting on with it because why the heck not?

This article is for that third group. But the other two are welcome to stay. Maybe we’ll convert you to the dark side.

But first, we’re going to need you to accept a really harsh reality: AI didn’t change what good community knowledge looks like. It just made it impossible to pretend that bad knowledge architecture was fine.

Do you know the move I’m talking about? Someone posts a question your community has definitely answered before, and instead of pointing to a crisp, documented resource, someone types: “Oh, great question, you should ask Jillian, she handled this exact thing last quarter.” And Jillian answers, because Jillian is generous and competent and has the institutional memory of a small government agency. Crisis averted. Thread resolved. Nobody notices that the actual answer lives entirely inside Jillian’s head.

That worked. Until it didn’t.

The communities that are panicking about AI right now were always one Jillian-on-PTO away from collapse.

Think about what “ask Jillian” actually means. It means your knowledge was never really in your community. It was in a person, and that person happened to be reachable. The member who joined six months ago and doesn’t know Jillian yet? They either figured it out themselves, gave up, or got lucky. That’s not community knowledge. That’s a single point of failure with good vibes.

And yes yes - we know the retort: “But but but… AI!”

AI didn’t create this problem. It removed the social scaffolding that let us ignore it.

Here’s where I’d gently push back on a story we tell ourselves about human cognition: we like to think we navigate knowledge relationally, that we’re fundamentally different from machines because we connect ideas through people and context and lived experience. And sure, there’s something to that. But mostly? We know where things are because we have context. We remember that the onboarding doc lives in the folder that so-and-so reorganized last spring. We know the workaround for that integration bug because we were in the Slack thread when it happened. That’s context. Not magic. Not some ineffable (how great is that word?) human quality that machines can never touch.

The gap between how humans find knowledge and how AI finds knowledge is narrower than we’d like to admit. (I know, I know. Uncomfortable. Stay with me.)

Which means the communities that will hold up, the ones that serve members well regardless of whether those members arrive having already asked ChatGPT something, run it through their company’s AI tool, or just typed a search query like it’s 2011, are the ones that were already doing knowledge architecture right. Clear, contextual, findable, not dependent on any single person’s availability or generosity.

This is not about making your community “AI-ready,” a phrase I’d actually be gloriously happy to retire. Communities serve humans. Full stop. But humans now move through information differently. They come in with partial answers. They paste things into tools and come back with follow-up questions. They expect to find what they’re looking for without having to know who to ask or which part of your site to go to. That’s not a new expectation, actually. It’s just newly consequential when it goes unmet.

So what does this mean practically? It means documentation that stands alone, with enough surrounding context that a reader (human or otherwise) doesn’t need backstory to make use of it. It means tagging and titling that reflects how people ask questions, not how the internal team thinks about categories (I’m glaring at you personas). It means periodically asking: if Jillian left tomorrow, what would actually be findable? What would disappear with her? (Not much actually; Jillian knows to document her brain on the regular but Jillian is weird.)

It also means letting go of the fantasy that relational knowledge transfer scales. It doesn’t. It never did. Jillian has been subsidizing your knowledge architecture for years, and she deserves a vacation. Italy or France will do.

The communities worth building, right now, are the ones that work when nobody knows anybody. They’re also the ones that become richer when people do connect, when Jillian’s expertise gets documented and built upon rather than just tapped and forgotten.

And y’all… that’s not an AI story. That’s just a community worth having.

Go give Jillian some time off.

A former boss of mine (Rachel Happe: LinkedIn | Engaged Organizations | Control is for Amateurs) used to gleefully and mischievously say “Control is for amateurs”; so much so that she made us t-shirts. She’d just drop it into conversation, totally unprompted, like it was obvious. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what she meant.

I kept waiting for the second half of the sentence. The “so instead, do THIS” part. The framework. The playbook. The three steps to structured freedom or whatever. It never came. Because that was the point. The people who feel compelled to reach for control, to define the outcomes, to spell out exactly what participation looks like and what it’s for… those are the amateurs. The masters are doing something sneakier (and sneaky she was - still IS!). And more interesting.

Here’s the thing we tell ourselves in community work: clarity drives participation. Make the ask specific. Show people exactly where their contribution lands. “Your answer helped 42 people this month.” “Your post was the top resource in Q3.” Explicit impact, explicit prompt, explicit result. Tight loop, measurable, reportable to stakeholders. Clean.

And it’s not wrong… exactly. It works. People respond to it. But it’s also a ceiling.

Here’s what social physics (yes, that’s a real field, and yes, it will make you feel like a puppet and a puppeteer simultaneously) keeps showing us: human behavior is not nearly as spontaneous as humans believe it to be. We are wildly, almost insultingly predictable. The conditions you set determine the behavior you get, far more than the individuals making choices inside those conditions. Which means the actual job of a community designer is not to control behavior. It’s to architect the conditions that make the behavior you want feel like the member’s own idea.

The best community design is invisible. Not because it’s subtle. Because it’s a theme park.

Think about how a theme park works. Every path, every sightline, every queue is engineered. The “spontaneous” detour through the gift shop? Planned. The feeling that you discovered that hidden churro cart? Designed. The mechanical box you never noticed because it was painted “Go Away Green” (no, really - it’s a thing)? You are being guided at every moment, and you are having the time of your life, and you will go home and tell people you just wandered around and it was magical. Disney didn’t hand you a map with the route highlighted and a timer. They built an environment where you couldn’t help but do exactly what they needed you to do, while feeling entirely free.

That is what mastery looks like in community design.

So what does this actually mean for how we work? A few things worth munching on.

First: Stop over-narrating impact. When you tell someone exactly what their contribution accomplished, you close the loop for them. You also close the door on their imagination, which is almost always more generous than your metrics. A member who wonders “I hope that helped someone” will carry that question into their next visit. A member who knows “that helped 12 people” has completed a transaction. Leave some darn room, willya?

Second: Watch what happens when you remove the explicit prompt. Most community programs are prompt-heavy: “Share your story,” “Answer this week’s question,” “React if you agree.” These work. They also train members to wait to be asked. The communities with the most durable contribution cultures tend to have softer structures, ones that create occasion without dictating behavior. There’s a difference between a room with assigned seats and a room with good acoustics. Both fill up. Only one feels alive.

Third: Trust the container more than the content. Your job is to build the walls, the lighting, the ambient conditions. What happens inside is, genuinely, up to the people in the room. The instinct to over-program, to fill every silence, to make sure every interaction has a clear purpose and a tracked outcome… that instinct is not serving your members. It’s serving your anxiety. (I say this as someone who has definitely built a spreadsheet tracking “spontaneous” member interactions. We contain multitudes.)

Fourth, and maybe the hardest: Get comfortable not knowing exactly what worked. Ambiguity in impact is not a measurement failure. It’s a sign that people are doing things you didn’t design for, which is the whole goal. The moment your community is perfectly legible is the moment it has stopped surprising you. And a community that can’t surprise you is one that your members have already outgrown.

My former boss was right. Control is for amateurs. The professionals build the theme park and then buy a ticket if for nothing else but the people watching.

And trust me, y’all are predictably entertaining.

But I’m going to suggest a uncomfortable swap, though. Well, uncomfortable for you. I got comfy with this a long time ago.

What if the lurker isn’t the edge case you’re tolerating? What if they’re the actual user, and the person posting is just... infrastructure?

Marinate in that for a second, because it changes everything downstream. Most community programs are built, measured, and pitched to leadership around the people who show up and talk. The 1% writing the posts, asking the questions, starting the threads, they’re treated as the community itself, the thing you’re trying to grow. Everyone else is a rounding error, or worse, a problem to be “activated.”

But think about how you actually use most communities you’re not active in. You search a Slack workspace for how someone else solved the bug you’re stuck on. You read three pages of a forum thread before deciding not to post. You scroll a subreddit for twenty minutes during lunch, contribute nothing, ever, and leave knowing something you didn’t before. None of that shows up in a dashboard. All of it is the thing working.

The 1% aren’t the community. They’re the maintenance crew for a building full of people they’ll never meet.

I don’t love writing that sentence as I am, after all, part of the 1% in most of the communities I belong to, and “maintenance crew” is not exactly the origin story I tell myself (I prefer “architect of chaos”). But if the lurker is the primary user, the people posting are providing a service to someone else, not building a thing for themselves. Bit of an inversion, eh?

So if we take that inversion seriously, a few things stop making sense the way they used to.

The whole vocabulary of “community” starts to wobble. Trust, reciprocity, belonging, a sense that other people are there with you, those words assume two-way contact. If your primary user never posts, never replies, never even creates an account, do they have any of that? Or do they get a version of it anyway: trusting the same FAQ a thousand other people trusted, absorbing the same norms by reading instead of participating, feeling like “people like me are here” because the archive proves it, just distributed across time instead of synced across people?

I genuinely don’t know. Some days it feels like community, evolved, quieter, asynchronous, but still very very real. Other days it feels like a ghost of community from the days gone by: a town that’s all storefronts and no residents, kept running by the handful of people who still show up to stock the shelves, while everyone else just... walks through, takes what they need, and leaves. Same buildings. Different town.

And maybe that’s the part worth not resolving. Because here’s what doesn’t change, regardless of which version you believe: if your strategy, your roadmap, and your metrics are all built around the 1%, you’re optimizing for the maintenance crew and ignoring the building’s actual occupancy.

That means the read experience needs as much design attention as the write experience, because for most of your users, reading is the entire interaction. It means “active member percentage” stops being a meaningful headline number (a concept I’ve thoroughly explore in other articles here), because it was never measuring your primary user in the first place, it was measuring your staff. It means onboarding has to account for someone who’s already had four useful visits before they ever consider creating an account, because by the time they show up in your numbers, they’ve already gotten most of what they came for. And it means the loud, visible, engaged minority deserves a different kind of recognition, not because they’re “the community,” but because they’re doing labor on behalf of people who will never know their names.

Whether that’s still community or something quieter wearing community’s name, I’m not sure it matters as much as we think it does. What matters is whether you’re building for the people who show up in your reports, or the people who show up, get what they need, and never appear in one at all.

Go ahead and thank the second group. They won’t see it. They’re not logged in.

What doesn’t make it into the onboarding deck is this really finicky little thing: the moment your first members walk in, you start making promises. Not in your guidelines. Not in your welcome post. In the design itself and your behavior. In who you let in first, how you responded to the first difficult thread, whether leadership showed up in the forums or stayed behind glass. In all of it.

By Year 3, those promises are big burly walls.

We (me included) talk a lot in this profession about community design like it’s a series of discrete decisions: category structure, membership tiers, moderation policy, gamification. And it is. But it’s also something harder to name. Every design choice in Year 1 sends a signal about what this space values, who it’s for, and how status works inside it. Members absorb those signals. They build their participation habits around them. And then, quietly, they build their identity around them too.

So therefore: your founding ethos isn’t what you wrote in the mission statement. It’s what your earliest members learned to expect.

This is the thing that makes Year 3 redesigns so much more treacherous than they look on paper. You’re not updating a category taxonomy or refreshing a recognition program. You’re renegotiating a social contract that your community didn’t know it had signed, with members who didn’t know they were signing it, but who will absolutely notice when you try to change the terms.

Take something as seemingly low-stakes as expert-to-novice knowledge flow. If your community launched with strong subject matter experts front and center, and your early moderation rewarded definitive answers over exploratory questions, you’ve done more than establish a posting norm. You’ve told your members what intelligence looks like here. You’ve created a hierarchy, and some people have climbed it. When you decide in Year 3 that you want more peer-to-peer conversation, more vulnerability, more “I don’t know, what do you think?” energy, you’re not just asking for different posts. You’re asking the experts who built their reputation on certainty to step down a rung. And you’re asking the community to redefine what it means to contribute well.

And while it feels like a content problem, it’s not. It’s an identity problem.

The same dynamic shows up in access and responsiveness. If your team was highly visible in Year 1, answering questions fast, showing up in threads, being genuinely present, members calibrated to that. It became the baseline. The expectation. When your team grows and bandwidth stretches thin, or when the strategy shifts toward member-led support, the community doesn’t read that as a natural evolution. They read it as withdrawal. Because from their perspective, something was offered and then taken away.

And yes, you can explain the change. You can announce it thoughtfully. But you’re still arguing with the founding ethos, and the founding ethos has three years of precedent on its side.

None of this means Year 1 decisions are irreversible. Communities do change, and some of them change well. But the ones that manage it tend to share a quality: they treat the redesign as a renegotiation, not a correction. They name the original ethos explicitly, honor what it built, and bring members into the conversation about what needs to shift and why. That’s slower and messier than a clean product update. But it also actually works.

The harder lesson, the one I’d have wanted someone to hand me early in my career, is that intentionality in Year 1 isn’t just about building something good. It’s about building something you can actually change later. Because you will need to change it. But will you be renegotiating or apologizing?

Choose your founding ethos on purpose. Your Year 3 self will be living inside it either way.

And so once again, we’re going to visit a metric I despise: monthly active members. Some community dashboards will give you daily actives. A few will break it down by post type, session length, time of day. You can slice your membership into cohorts and watch them drift in and out of your engagement funnel like tides.

What none of them will show you is the conversation, conversion, or behavioral shift that happened because of your community, somewhere else entirely.

Your member who lurked for six months before pulling a thread on customer onboarding and sharing it in her company’s internal Slack. The practitioner who cited a three-year-old discussion in a presentation to his leadership team. The person who never posted once but quietly absorbed enough that they stopped making a particular mistake. That value left your platform. It’s living somewhere you’ll never see. And it’s been happening since the first community went online. And it’s probably the best thing your community will ever do and keep on doing.

This is not new behavior. Communities have always been leaky by design, in the best possible way. We learn things and we take them with us. That’s the whole point. A community that produced knowledge people hoarded inside it would be a pretty useless community.

But alas… The problem isn’t that value escapes the platform. The problem is that we built dashboards that can only see inside it and expectations only aligned to what we can see.

Think about a library. A library doesn’t know that you recommended a book to your sister, or that you spent three hours with a resource and it changed how you approached a problem, or that the idea you found in the stacks eventually ended up in a report that influenced a decision at your organization. It knows you checked out the book. Maybe it knows how many people checked out that same book. The rest is invisible, which doesn’t make it any less real.

Community platforms work the same way. We instrument what happens inside the walls because that’s what we can count. Logins, posts, replies, reactions. Useful signals, all of them. But they’re not the whole picture, and for a long time we let the measurable crowd out the acknowledgment that something larger was happening beyond it.

We designed for re-entry when we should have been designing for portability.

That means asking different questions about what we build. Is your best content accessible to someone who hasn’t logged in recently, or is it locked behind a gate that requires fresh authentication? Are your templates, frameworks, and resources structured so members can actually take them somewhere? Is your community producing the kind of distilled, usable knowledge that travels well, or is it mostly in-the-moment conversation that loses context the moment it leaves? These aren’t arguments against a logged-in experience, but they are arguments for being intentional (and realistic) about what you’re making and where it’s going to end up.

But why is this feeling really uncomfortable right now? Why are you squirming reading this going ‘oh, I feel seen and I don’t like it’?

A lot of us are confronting this belatedly because our new AI overlords have made the invisible visible. Language models trained on forums, help communities, and practitioner discussions surfaced, at scale, the knowledge our communities had been producing for years. The value was indexed… outside our communities. It was findable… outside our communities. It turned out our members’ collective intelligence was genuinely useful and widely usable… outside our communities.

However, we didn’t measure that. We didn’t build for it. We were watching active member percentages while something else entirely was happening with the content we’d spent years cultivating.

There’s something both validating and humbling about that moment. Validating because it confirmed what community builders have always believed: this work produces real, lasting value that’s so good that WE are the ones feeding AI the valuable stuff. Humbling because the entity that made that legible wasn’t our analytics platform. It was someone else’s model.

So here we are. The behavior was always there. The knowledge was always escaping the walls and making its way into the work. We just finally have a mirror big enough to see it.

A little too late, but better late than never.

So am I alone in this? Or is this a thing?

The reality is that just one bad review can outweigh five good ones. Not because people are irrational, but because recency and specificity do something to our brains that aggregate ratings can’t undo. A glowing 4.8 with 200 reviews means nothing if the most recent entry says “got food poisoning, still not over it.” You close the app. You pick somewhere else. (Reminds me to go leave a review on the place that gave me food poisoning last weekend…)

I think about that a lot when I’m looking at community spaces.

We spend a lot of time in this profession talking about what our best interactions look like: the member who got a thoughtful response, the feedback thread that turned into a product feature, the support question that became a knowledge base article. We curate those wins. We screenshot them for our quarterly reviews. And none of that is wrong, exactly. But it might be obscuring the more important question which is: what did the worst interaction in your community teach every lurker who watched it?

Because someone is always watching.

The psychological cost of participating publicly in a community, whether to ask for help or critique a product, isn’t fixed. It fluctuates based on what people have already seen happen to others. Before anyone posts, they do a quick, mostly unconscious threat assessment. They scroll back. They read a few threads. They’re not looking for the average experience. They’re looking for evidence of the worst case.

This is why support and feedback feel like the same problem even though they’re not quite the same risk. When someone is considering posting a support request, the vulnerability on the line is competence. What if I’m the only one who doesn’t understand this? What if someone tells me to read the docs in a way that makes me feel stupid? When someone is considering posting product feedback, the vulnerability is credibility. What if I suggest something that’s already been rejected a hundred times? What if the response makes me look uninformed? Different fears, same mechanism. They’re both scanning for evidence of how this goes when it goes badly.

The floor of your community sets the ceiling for participation.

This is the thing we underinvest in. We optimize for making great interactions great, and we let the bad ones quietly do their damage. A cold, dismissive response to a frustrated user doesn’t just affect that user. It’s a public record. It sits there, searchable, permanent, training every future reader on what this space does with vulnerability.

So what do you do with that?

First: your worst public moments deserve the same strategic attention as your best ones. Most community teams have a plan for amplifying wins. Very few have a plan for actively rehabilitating bad threads. That doesn’t mean deleting them (almost never the right call). It means going back, adding context, following up, making sure the public record reflects that the community course-corrected. A thread that starts badly and ends well tells a better story than a thread that starts well and gets abandoned.

Second: if you’re designing for participation, you’re designing for the lurker. The person considering whether to post is your real audience. They outnumber active posters by a lot (honestly, by a lot… most community benchmarks suggest somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of community members never post at all). They’re not going to tell you what scared them off. They’re just going to stay quiet, or leave, or pursue a 1:1 avenue instead. So when you’re thinking about how to respond to a tricky feedback post or a frustrated support thread, think past the person in front of you. Think about who’s reading.

Third: response quality to difficult posts is a brand decision, not a support task. I know that framing makes some people uncomfortable, because it sounds like it’s adding pressure to already-pressured community managers. But consider the alternative framing: every response to a hard post is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate what this community is for. The member who posts “I’ve been asking for this feature for two years and nothing has happened” is handing you a moment. What you do with it is up to you.

The floor matters more than the ceiling. Your community’s best thread is a nice thing to have. Your community’s worst thread is what people make decisions based on.

Next time you’re reading back through your space, try to find the one that makes you wince a little (or a lot). The one where the response was curt, or the feedback got dismissed, or the frustrated member never got a real reply. It’s still there, doing its quiet work. That’s the one worth fixing first.

Right?

Not really. The problem is that by the time your content looks stale, the decay happened a long time ago. You’re working from a lagging record, not a live one. Knowledge decay isn’t just a content problem. It’s a participation problem that eventually shows up in your content. The content is just where it becomes visible.

Outside of all things nerd related these days, I’m working on trying to get the last few details figured out for a new home build. And of all freaking things - water tables and aquifers are very much on my mind.

So we’re gonna run with that analogy.

Think about an aquifer. The water table underneath a region can drop for months, sometimes years, before anyone notices the wells running low. On the surface, everything looks fine. The tap still works. You don’t know the recharge stopped until you’re already in trouble (arguably well into trouble). Community knowledge works the same way. The knowledge base can look intact, even active, while the conditions that keep it alive are quietly disappearing underneath.

And therefore… the leading indicators of knowledge decay aren’t in your content. They’re in your participation patterns.

The first thing to watch is expert withdrawal. Every community has people who actually know things, not just people who post a lot. When those people start going quiet, the knowledge base has lost its primary source of new deposits. The existing content doesn’t change overnight. But the system that generates and validates knowledge has already started shutting down. If your subject matter experts are still showing up in your metrics but only reacting, not responding, that’s worth noticing.

The second signal is question deflection. Pay attention to where hard questions go. When community members stop expecting good answers from the community itself and start saying “DM so-and-so directly” or “ask in the Slack channel,” that’s a participation pattern telling you something. The community is no longer the authoritative source. People still show up, but they route around it for anything that actually matters.

Third, watch where correct answers come from. This one takes some active monitoring, but it’s worth it. Are your best answers coming from community members drawing on lived experience and collective memory? Or are they increasingly citations to external docs, support tickets, and search results? A community that answers its own questions is a recharging aquifer. A community that outsources its answers is running on reserves.

The last one is the hardest to catch because it looks like humility. Watch for hedging in responses. When declarative answers (”here’s how you do this”) start giving way to qualified ones (”I think this used to work, but I’m not sure if it’s changed”), you’re watching knowledge confidence erode in real time. Nobody decided to stop knowing things. The community just stopped being the place where knowing things gets reinforced and updated.

What do you do with this? The honest answer is that recharging a depleted aquifer is much harder than maintaining one that’s healthy. But you can’t fix what you can’t see, and most community managers are watching the wrong layer. Start tracking expert participation rates separately from general participation. Map where complex questions get answered, not just whether they get answered. Notice when your answer quality shifts in register.

You don’t fill an aquifer by updating your FAQ. You fill it by creating the conditions that make expert participation worth sustained investment, and catching early enough when those conditions are starting to fail.

The tap still works. For now.