When we think about communities and community platforms, we as builders help communities thrive in part by not reinforcing an illusion that the platform is the community.
Great community technology can emerge by observing how great communities function outside of technology. And sometimes from questioning some of our assumptions about what communities actually need.
There is one metaphor that shows up in most community platforms that comes not from how communities work, but instead how technology and social media work: the “Post Feed.”
Posts and post feeds are problematic for a number of reasons.
- They create a hierarchy – the person posting is dominant.
- They encourage a self-promotion mindset. Posts are structured like ads of oneself.
- They are not conversational, one posts not knowing who will or won’t see the post and thus often lacks meaningful context or a clear idea of what the information shared is meant for.
- They are, in most online communities, dominated by just a few people. They feel like overkill to share a small piece of information and can lead to lower participation overall as a result.
- They ‘contain discussions’ that are usually not very easy to follow, not transparent, and easily get lost. And yet lead people in the discussion to feel as though they’ve been sharing transparently and others should be informed as a result.
- The conversations within a post are typically text-based, have a high bar for expression, are disembodied, and are easy to misunderstand.
- The feed metaphor leads to a finger-in-the-river feel when most community information-sharing benefits from being able to be either retrievable or to be clearly ephemeral (such as date-driven information)
Can we actually think of any real-life communities where there even exists something that mirrors the metaphor of a Post (which is essentially one person broadcasting some information and then other people having clearly less important responses to that broadcast) and a Feed (an endless list of things people share)?
Instead, what if we use a different structure, one in which we design for conversations that happen between people more naturally and equitably, and for information-sharing that may prompt discussion but doesn’t masquerade as such?
There are two key ways information-sharing typically works in non-platform-based community.
One is some kind of “bulletin board” or “announcements time”, where there is just the information being shared, and often that kind of broadcast is normatively reserved for things clearly of importance to the group at large.
The other is in an actual conversation or meeting where information is submitted or shared to be discussed (often as an agenda item) and there are facilitated or normative ways that a discussion occurs.
Though it’s perhaps difficult to move away from technology designs people are “used to”, or the way technology has trained us to interact with it and one another online, it’s not actually that difficult to design a different kind of division between information sharing and discussion. Information in posts is very difficult to organize and filter, whereas a system where people can share information only makes it easier to make sense of.
When we look at how great communities and collectives operate, connection and trust-building is prioritised and baked into the practice. It’s also fractal, in which individual values, relationships, and collective actions and communication are aligned.
It makes more sense to emphasize meetings and conversations where connection and trust emerge and to let information-sharing be a smaller piece of the platform. It makes sense to choose design patterns that work against dominance. It makes sense to help communities support members’ journeys and to encourage real interaction than to be a private social media where everyone sees a feed of posts.
Communities online have begun to regard platforms like Mighty Networks, Circle, Slack, or Discord as gathering places but for the most part, they are not very broadly participatory, inclusive, or connecting.
This is a UX problem. As community platform builders, we have a real opportunity to use the best practices of offline communities to inform the way we imagine spaces we offer online. And choosing to do things differently is only a good thing when it comes to what the impacts we’ve seen are from how technology has been built in the past, not to mention the benefits of positioning and innovating.