Hello, I am First Weirdo.

An exploration of absorbing social risk in your community so everyone else doesn't have to.

There’s a responsibility in every community that nobody puts in our job description.

It’s not moderation. It’s not event planning. It’s not advocacy stuff. It’s the person who goes first. The one who posts before anyone else has a chance to, who asks the question everyone’s thinking but nobody wants to be caught asking, who walks onto the empty dance floor and starts jamming while the rest of the room pretends to check their phone.

In community work, I call this “being first weirdo”. And it is quietly one of the most important things we do.

Let me allow these shirtless dudes below to demonstrate (things I didn’t think I’d write, but alas).

Watch what happens in that clip (not my video; cannot find original for credit either). One guy, shirtless, in a largely empty stadium section, decides to have fun with it. He waves his shirt. He commits. And then, slowly and then all at once, other dudes join. Not because anyone told them to. Not because it was safe. Because some dude made it safe by going first and surviving. And, actually having fun with it which seems like a great outcome.

And yeah, that’s the job. That’s what I do.

THE END. (kidding, please keep reading)

But here’s the dealio: The first weirdo isn’t performing bravery. They’re performing permission.

When you post the first reply in a brand new forum, you’re not just adding content. You’re telling everyone watching that it’s okay to exist here, that participation won’t be met with silence or worse. You’re saying that the room is inhabited by someone who seems normal enough - or ahem… even stranger than them! You’re absorbing the social risk of going first so everyone else’s activation energy drops just enough for them to follow.

This is a structural intervention dressed up as a personality quirk. The industry tends to celebrate it as a character trait, something about being “willing to be vulnerable” or “authentically engaging” but that framing obscures what’s actually happening. Someone has to go first. You’re deciding it’s going to be you. That’s not a vibe. That’s a deliberate act with real stakes.

And sometimes… you misread the room entirely.

Sometimes you wave your shirt and the section stays empty. You’ve posted into the void, modeled a behavior nobody wanted to replicate, started a thread that got two replies including your own and your moms (hi mom! why haven’t you been liking my substack posts!?!). You’ve danced alone to music nobody else heard. This is also part of the job, and the community management industry is hilariously bad at talking about it, because it doesn’t make for a great case study.

However - good news: misreading the room is data. When nobody joins, you’ve learned something real about what this particular group of people won’t do in public yet, or maybe ever. That’s not nothing. It’s just emotionally expensive nothing. (I’m still working on reframing that one in the moment, for what it’s worth. I am an introvert who needs significant wine in her system to be the first on the literal dance floor.)

The wry truth is that going first means occasionally (read: often) going alone. You budget for it. You shake it off. You go first again next time and the next time and the time after that, because that’s what the role requires.

What the stadium clip captures, though, is the other outcome. The one that reminds you why you keep doing this even when you spent some time creating multiple profiles on your community just to not look like a lunatic talking to yourself. It’s not just that the section fills up. It’s the speed of it. It’s watching the logic of “this looks fun” spread faster than any announcement or nudge or carefully crafted call-to-action ever could. It’s the moment when the thing you started stops being yours and becomes theirs.

That transfer of ownership is the whole point. You go first not to lead forever but to make leading unnecessary. A community that still needs you to be the first weirdo two years in isn’t a community that’s grown, it’s a community that’s waiting. The goal is to go first often enough, and model it openly enough, that other people start to see themselves as someone who could do it too.

And eventually, someone does. They post first. They beat you to the dance floor. They ask the weird question. They walk onto the empty floor and they freaking own it.

And maybe it’s weirdos recognizing other weirds, but you’ll recognize them immediately. They’re doing the thing you taught them without knowing you taught them. They didn’t need a workshop or a framework. They just needed to see someone survive going first.

So here’s the challenge: find your empty section. It doesn’t have to be dramatic (you can keep your literal shirt on). It doesn’t have to work. Post the thing you’ve been waiting for someone else to post. Start the thread. Ask the question. Wave the metaphorical shirt.

Someone’s watching. They just need to see you survive it first.