Welcome to The Community Nerd

A 52-week nerd deep dive into better questions for better communities.

Communities are often explained in terms of energy, momentum, or personality - yet only as loose analogies. When they succeed, we credit the vibes and/or the product for “acceleration”. When they fail, we blame the people (and community staff) for not maintaining the “velocity”. And so on.

What gets far less attention are the systems underneath - behavioral, structural, and cultural systems quietly shaping how people participate, disagree, collaborate, and eventually decide whether to stay.

This Substack exists to examine those systems more closely.

In 2026, I’m running a simple experiment: one question per week, for fifty-two weeks to see if it helps me become a better systems thinker who can more easily articulate the complex concepts ricocheting around my nerd brain.

Each post will begin with a question that has shown up repeatedly in real communities I’ve worked with. These are not optimization questions or growth tactics. They are questions about how communities actually function once real humans are involved.

Some of these questions will sound somewhat familiar. Others may feel uncomfortable. For example, when does friction improve a community rather than harm it? How can dissent strengthen a culture instead of destabilizing it? What happens when incentives quietly reward behaviors that leaders claim they want to discourage? And why do some communities feel like well-designed opera houses able to hold complexity, disagreement, and noise while others feel like overly loud restaurants, where sound bounces endlessly and nothing resolves?

This project is not intended to be a playbook or a collection of best practices. It is not a list of tips, templates, or “proven strategies.” If you’re looking for a quick win or a silver bullet, you are not there.

Instead, it is an ongoing examination of community and physical architecture, how rules, incentives, norms, and tools interact with human behavior in ways that are often invisible until they fail. It draws from behavioral science, systems thinking, metrics, and lived experience building and observing communities at scale.

I’m choosing to focus on questions rather than answers because answers tend to age poorly. Contexts change, tools evolve, and yesterday’s solution often becomes today’s constraint. Well-formed questions on the other hand, continue to do useful work. They help surface hidden assumptions, stress-test norms, and create space for more intentional design rather than imitation.

Each week, I’ll take one question and explore what it reveals about behavior, where community design commonly goes wrong, and how leaders, builders, and members might think differently about the systems they are shaping… whether deliberately or by default.

This Substack is for people who find themselves thinking deeply about community, even when they don’t mean to. It’s for those who have wrestled with a rule because they sensed it would change behavior in unexpected ways, or who have felt that a space was misaligned long before the metrics caught up. It’s for anyone who wants better language for understanding why a community feels coherent, resilient, or endlessly fragile.

If that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place. Welcome to The Community Nerd.