Betting Against the Inherited Playbook

Let's see how these hold up over time. Am I wrong? Or am I right?

This is the part of the weekly article where I usually start off with some grand thesis and analogy and such. But honestly, fellow nerds - I just got some wisdom teeth yanked late last week and I am feeling very little creativity.

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.