The Shift to Micro-Communities 🏴‍☠️

Widely broadcasting days are behind us

Mar 08, 2021

Howdy y’all!

The stock market plunged last week—the worst performance since March of 2020. It was probably a good thing though, because I was about to quit my day-job and become a full-time Wall Street Bets day-trader, making trades entirely off this website that scrapes /wsb and layers sentiment analysis on top of it, to show which meme stocks to trade today (kidding, mostly).

So, alas, I’m here another week, sharing what I am currently learning.

Let’s get into this week’s topic.

The Shift to Micro-Communities

There has been a subtle, slow, but impossible-to-ignore-once-you-notice trend, over the last several years: the rise of micro-communities.

I have been thinking about this idea off-and-on for a year or two. So I figured I should put some thoughts to paper.

What do I mean by “micro-communities”? I’m wildly over-simplifying, but micro-communities are the third wave of the way we are communicating on the internet.

Wave 1 [1985-2000]
- The internet first enabled one-to-one connections, at scale.
- Think: Email.
Wave 2 [2005-2020]
- Next, the internet enabled the technological ability for one-to-many communications, at scale. This means anyone could send a message widely, for anyone else to read.
- Think: Twitter.
Wave 3 [2020-?]
- And now, there is a turning point happening—the shift to smaller communities for learning, sharing, and “digitally hanging out.” We’ll call this: many few-to-few conversations, at scale.
- Think: Subreddits.

This is a big shift that’s happening quietly under the surface, fueled by several macro-trends that have been swelling in the last couple years.

Community > audience

Ryan Hoover @rrhoover

People often conflate community with audience. A key distinction: Audiences are one-to-many Communities are many-to-many

Ryan (founder of ProductHunt, acquired by AngleList) goes on to say:

It’s not a community if people don’t interact with each other. And this is what makes communities potentially more scaleable and efficient than audience platforms. The platform (this includes creators) doesn’t have to do all the work.
Sometimes starting with an audience is easier and a smart first step toward building a community later on. I expect many broadcast platforms (i.e. tools used to communicate with an audience) will vertically integrate community building functionality in the coming months.
An obvious example of this opportunity is in Substack. Some writers like @lennysan have a private Slack group for his paid subscribers.

This is true for career learning and development, but also personal hobbies and general “play.” The most relevant information can be found in these niche groups. I’m personally a part of a dozen Slack groups, a couple Discord groups, a few Subreddits, a couple google groups, and too many text message threads to count.

I spend the majority of my time communicating with others in these groups. Not on public social feeds.

Different values of broadcasting networks

Kevin Kelly and Marc Andreeson did a talk in 2019: Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future.

The entire discussion is great. If you fast-forward 22 minutes in, you’ll hear them discuss the different types of broadcasting networks for a few minutes. I pulled out the talking points below, and added some graphs to help visualize the key differences in the three laws.

There are three ways that networks scale and turn into value:

Value of a broadcast network is equivalent to the number of nodes (Sarnoff's Law); scales linearly with “n.”
Value of a network is based on the connections to two points (Metcalf's Law); n2
Value of network is based on groups and sub-groups within the network (Reed's Law); 2N

I quickly plotted out what the network effects look like, on a graph, over time:

I'm really curious to think about content through the perspective of "Reed's Law." I also think companies may be able to take advantage of the dynamics of Reed’s Law. And I even think about it in everyday social interactions.

If I meet with someone for coffee, that is somewhat valuable to me and them. If I have a group of people and we speed date for 2 hours for 5 minute 1:1 coffee sessions, that's a little more valuable for everyone who attends. But, if I can create a group of 100 high-quality people, and within that group, sub-groups start forming that are specialized, then there's a ton of value (2N, to be exact).

Reed’s Law: in the wild

There are a few key examples of Reed’s Law-supported technologies today.

Twitter Super Follows launched this month. This allows you to charge for Tweets.

Circle.so is another great example of a platform supporting community builders:

Bring together your discussions, memberships, and content.
Integrate a thriving community wherever your audience is, all under your own brand.

And there are other examples we well, that got us to this point. Examples include: the rise of courses (Gumroad) which would fall under Metcalf’s Law, cohort-based learning (Udemy founder, Gagan Biyani just announced a platform to support cohort-based courses) would fall under Reed’s Law. And even multi-level-marketing schemes scale so efficiently because they leverage certain aspects of these network effects.

I'm thinking a lot about LinkedIn’s missed opportunity for groups in the business setting. Companies built for buyers to discover new products are a large opportunity (Capiche is one example, not too dissimilar from Quora, but more actionable). And also for continuous learning within your role, learning alongside others in similar roles at different companies (Bravado is doing this for salespeople).

Facebook was aggressively advertising Groups last year—their ads were every in San Francisco.

Clubhouse is another example of a platform that is comprised of a bunch of small communities. A podcast is widely broadcasting (and kept up forever). A Clubhouse Room is a conversation, built on a “Club” (basically, a Group). These communities are what make Clubhouse so interesting for everyone.

The creator economy is also spearheading the shift to micro-communities. Many folks in the creator economy space—investors, operators of businesses supporting creators, and creators themselves—continue to point to Kevin Kelly’s concept of 1,000 True Fans.

My take

A quick example to illustrate a point. Right now, early adopters who are reading Newsletters (mostly published on Substack) are hitting the first wall of “inbox fatigue.” This will be figured out over time (maybe with Substack Reader, tbd). Eventually, long-form content will get (re)bundled. And you’ll have your own personalized subscription.

In the same way we have unlimited music at our fingertips with Spotify, or unlimited shows with Netflix. The future world will have unlimited long-form writing, on tons of topics, at our fingertips. How that will manifest? I’m not sure yet. But it will happen.

If Substack can create community (conversation) on top of the already-existing infrastructure, they’ll win really big. But I suspect, the future will bend towards community-driven spaces.

/End

The FANG companies are getting too big. And it’s causing lots of issues. Technical limitations. Regulatory issues. Censorship debates. And general societal problems.

Decentralized solutions will emerge. The distribution will be more evenly spread. And ownership will be with the users.

The future will be less “widely broadcasting.” And instead, more “narrowly conversing.”

Specific groups of people similar to you will emerge. Professional networks like LinkedIn where you broadcast generally onto a single feed, will evolve into niche communities. We’ll continue to see wider spread adoption of groups built on Slack, Discord, Reddit and Circle.so.

The focus of the last decade was communicating with the biggest group of people possible (quantity).
The focus of the next decade will be to communicate with the most relevant and specific group of people (quality).