The Maintenance Crew Problem

What if your engaged users are actually infrastructure, not audience?

Lurking always gets treated like a diagnosis. Something’s wrong with the patient, and the cure is more participation: nudges, gamification, badges for showing up. The dreaded undying 90-9-1 rule gets cited like a law of physics instead of what it actually is: a description of what happens when you design for talking and quietly label everything else a problem.

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.