Community-Driven Social and Natural Discovery
By: Michael Silberling
Tags: Social Media, Business, Product Management, Tech, Community

Substack

On Substack, users can subscribe to content from writers and/or podcasters who publish to the platform. I may surprise some people by placing it in the social category, but here’s my case: Readers have a direct connection with the writer, but the collection of readers can also become its own community. Some Substack writers have even created weekly “threads” to encourage their reader community to debate.

The reader community is what I think makes Substack unique for consumers (they do a ton of interesting things for writers as well). Each reader shares at least one thing in common, they chose to subscribe to the same writer. So they at least read the same things, and share the same interest in whatever the newsletter focuses on.

These communities also have a weird quirk: The one writer, or set of writers, becomes the “figurehead” leader of the community. We can debate what that means, but if a decentralized, wide-open, free-for-all community has already proven to not work, maybe this will?

I’d keep an eye out for any community-driven features that Substack launches. There’s a ton of room to work with here. They recently launched a “Reader,” which I see as a step towards a unified Substack experience, to then build community features on top of:

Clubhouse

So, this one will be short, because I still haven’t actually used Clubhouse, and at this point I enjoy being the rebel. But, the core mechanics get at the community-driven social trend. At the time of writing, the Clubhouse app has risen to #13 in the US iOS App Store’s “Top Free Apps” rankings.

As I understand it: You can drop in on discussions, which sort of operate like a live podcast (or other stuff that I don’t want to get in to). On the surface, it appears to have the elements of community-driven social. Users have control over what they do and don’t see, and can choose who they want to follow. But, the live audio element of Clubhouse, versus asynchronous content on Substack changes the dynamic a bit.

On each, you still don’t necessarily know what you’re getting into until you click on it. To date, Substack has acted more like a “Shopify” backend technology, whereas Clubhouse seems to be an “Instagram” platform to discover content. This teeters on rehashing the same problems we have with wide-open social networks, just with different mechanics.

I’m not sure if Clubhouse is an alternative to social community, or if its actually a new media format competing with radio and podcasts? Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times reported that Clubhouse is working on creator monetization. This could incentivize users to host engaging conversations, suggesting the media format strategy. Again, I’ve still never actually used Clubhouse, so I’m just going off of Twitter and news articles.

Slack and Discord

I paired these two together, because 1) They’re pretty much the same thing with a few feature differences, and 2) I always use one to describe the other. I’m in a Discord server with a few friends from home, so that we can play Among Us as a group. To answer “What’s Slack?” for this group, I called it “the workplace version of Discord.” Similarly at work, I’ve called Discord “Slack for non-work stuff.” Each functions like a really big group chat, except that within each group, there are “channels” for discussion topics. As an example, there could be “#sports” or “#gaming” channels to designate where to have each conversation. Then a user could pick what topics they want to join in on.

Besides work, I’m also in a few Slack channels for podcasts and newsletters that I subscribe to (as nerdy as it sounds). I think of these groups as “tangential communities” to what I described in my Substack section. We all share at least one interest, and there’s way better functionality than a comment sections. These communities have had some super interesting and insightful discussions.

On the other hand, once these communities hit some critical mass of people and messages, they are IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with. I just opened Slack real quick to see if I’m missing anything cool. It feels weird to me, because on Twitter, I’m not concerned about missing anything. Although I’m addicted to Twitter, I feel like if I miss anything important, it will bubble up to me eventually (which is the “pro” case for algorithmic feeds).

Slack and Discord may be the purest definition of “community-driven social.” They’re opt-in communities based on a shared interest; however, there’s a challenge in how you create a “consumable” experience for members.

I’d be curious to see if either experiments with something here. Following conversations in an algorithmic order may be super difficult. I wonder if auto-generating a “digest” of the top few conversations would work?

Random memory: Back in ~2010, I would time myself to do planks for as long as it would take me to read through all the tweets I haven’t read yet. This would take about a minute or two, so it worked well to keep my mind occupied. There is no way that I could do that today, and that’s not just because I’m in worse shape now.

Snapchat and Messenger

On the total opposite end of the spectrum from “wide-open social,” is direct messaging products. The core offering for each is to enable users to send messages directly to individuals or to groups. What I find interesting here, is what gets built on top of messaging. Snapchat has already gone down a “media” path with a “Discover” tab for short-length shows. It also launched Spotlight in Nov 2020, a Tik Tok-style feature where can submit their “best video Snaps” for ”the opportunity to earn a share of more than $1 million that we’re distributing to creators every day!” I was just trying to do some first-hand testing myself, and fell down a rabbit hole… Where were we again?

Oh yeah, in messaging we’re likely more selective of who we interact with than any other social media type. It may be the most closed social platform today, but it could also become the safe-haven away from wide-open social networks. Like mentioned earlier, Facebook already knows this. Mike Isaac of The New York Times reported all the way back in Jan 2019 that Facebook planned to merge Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp together. Facebook took the first step by merging Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger in Sep 2020. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook kills the News Feed over the next few years in favor of a groups and messaging experience.

Snapchat appears to be going down a different path, more towards being a media company like I called out with Clubhouse. I originally grouped Snapchat and Messenger together around the “messaging” theme, but now this seems silly.

Side Note: Facebook’s Decentralized Web Ambitions

Ready for a big leap?

Facebook’s Diem (formerly Libra) peer-to-peer crypto network for payments is expected to launch in 2021 (per CNBC). If you think about Diem in context of Facebook’s unified messaging experience, you might start to get an idea of what they’re building towards. In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg wanted to build a peer-to-peer file sharing network called “WireHog” into the platform (as reported by TechCrunch). So, decentralization and peer-to-peer networks is not a new idea for Facebook.

I’d watch out for Facebook to position their unified messaging experience as a central hub for consumers to take part in the decentralized web (often called “Web3” or “Web 3.0”). Maybe it’s as a bank, a commerce layer, both of these and more, or something else that I can’t see right now… but there’s something interesting brewing there. This is not where I expected to get to from “Community-Driven Social,” but here we are.

Closing Thoughts — Discovery

I went into this expecting to write about how community-driven social media is on the rise and the wide-open networks may not be on their way out. I thought I’d explain how we can build a more controlled and private social media experience. I was going to make a call to guide people towards groups and eliminate the algorithmic newsfeed. But now, I wonder if the core issue is actually how we manage discovery? Once content that you never asked to see, or wanted to see, is automatically placed in front of you, have we already lost?

It’s almost like we need some friction to discover new content, so we know that we really want it. Once we introduce algorithmic recommendations, we rehash the old problems of wide-open social.

Maybe our social discovery experiences should try to emulate something natural like “word of mouth,” rather than “we know what you want?”

I’m not against algorithmic sorting, that’s what makes Twitter consumable. I’m against algorithmic recommending. Let me know what you think.