Can Community Borrow from Social Media’s Bag of Tricks?

Cross-pollination is changing the game

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

The era of interconnected online communities is dawning. Cross-pollination stands at the forefront.

In this new age of digital engagement, people can opt for lively-but-respectful conversations over doomscrolling. Passive audiences will become active communities, co-creating with the creators they follow.

Two parallel trends have merged to bring us here.

On the one hand, a growing disillusionment with social media and a yearning for genuine connection have people re-evaluating their relationship with social platforms.

On the other, evolving technology is cross-pollinating audiences, allowing creators to reach and connect with more people – and to get paid while doing it.

The Cost of Social Media

Rising use of social media over the past decade has closely tracked with rising levels of mental health concerns, particularly among young people.

Often, these platforms that promised to connect us actually sow discord and disinformation.

In fact, while social media usage has climbed steadily, so have feelings of disconnection and loneliness. Last spring, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that loneliness has become a public health crisis.

In a podcast episode with science journalist Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, Dr. Murthy said the issue is not the digital nature of online connections, but rather their quality.

“There’s a lot of good that technology can enable, but we as humans are still learning how to live with it,” he said. “Not all screen time and not all apps are the same. Some benefit us while others can hurt us.”

When revenues depend on putting relevant ads in front of as many people as possible, algorithms amplify high-engagement content. Humans are hard-wired to engage with stimuli we perceive as a threat.

The same instinct that protected our ancestors from the tiger hiding in the grass now leads us to “like,” “comment,” and “share” posts that spark anger or fear. This inevitably leads to algorithmic selection bias in favor of negative and emotionally charged topics.

“Social media is designed, above all else, to capture our attention,” warns Brian Helfman, founder of Third Nature, a community offering immersive retreats and virtual programming. “You and your attention are the product. Their advertisers are the customer. A company like Meta’s No. 1 incentive is not to help you meaningfully connect with other humans – it’s to keep you engaged on the product for as much time as possible, maximizing the value of your attention for their advertisers.”

---

---

The Rise of Niche Communities

Even as people push back against the negative impacts of social media, they’re not ready to give it up cold turkey.

But rather than live on a steady diet of tweets and reels, people are ready to cut back on these platforms and supplement their digital social life with calmer, healthier engagements.

Niche communities have stepped up to fill the void, offering human connections and a sense of belonging in a curated environment that values digital well-being.

A community’s membership model prioritizes the quality of the member experience. It facilitates calm, honest discussions in which members feel heard and understood. Often a community manager moderates interactions to ensure conversations adhere to shared guidelines, values, and community norms. 

This model offers the deep human connections a massive public square like X simply can’t – even if it wanted to.

While curated communities are a welcome escape from social media toxicity, they’re not a panacea. Social media delivers a dopamine hit even a hyper-engaged community has a hard time replicating.

One of those dopamine triggers is novelty.

Dedication to a niche can be both a community’s greatest power and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, niches make communities attractive. Members know they will be surrounded by like-minded peers, and expect most of the content they find there to appeal to their interests.

But humans aren’t one-dimensional. A camera aficionado might be really interested in the content he sees in his amateur photography community, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t also like to see the occasional blooper reel or sports highlight.

Community founders work hard to grow engagement, handicapped by the monotony of being locked into a niche topic. 

To solve this, community needs to borrow from social media’s bag of tricks. Though dangerous and destructive at its worst, at its best social media is fun, entertaining, and captivating.

There’s an opportunity for community platforms to introduce the best elements of social media while protecting members from the worst.

That opportunity lies in cross-pollinating creator audiences. A system designed to help members discover new creators and new communities brings the delight of falling down a rabbit hole into the safe, curated space of a trusted community.

Cross-pollination is also key to helping creators monetize their communities. Even creators who find social media psychologically draining often believe it’s a necessary evil. The platforms offer the world’s biggest stage – and if content is engaging enough, the algorithm will surface it to people likely to enjoy it.

Meanwhile, the manager of the photography community runs herself ragged on marketing and promotion campaigns.

“The big trend we’re seeing now is the ‘scale challenge,’” Kevin Sutherland, strategy partner at VIDA and founding partner at VOLUME, told the Guild blog. “Few of these start-up businesses have the resources, capital, or capabilities to reach sufficient scale to be sustainable or investable on their own.”

The New Face of Community Monetization

Fledgling and micro communities have always struggled to bring in enough revenue to keep them afloat. Community founders had a choice: go deep on member engagement (and risk burning out on high-touch experiences), or go wide on member recruitment (and risk burning out on promotion).

That was before Web3 – the “read/write/own” space.

Gregor Young, CEO of Guild, describes a YouTuber getting a cut of ad revenue from the platform as Web2. A digital creator who gets money directly from their followers in the form of subscriptions, tips, or donations is Web3.

“We see more community hosts considering making their communities paid access,” said Guild founder Ashley Friedlein. “This trend began with the rise of the creator economy and is also growing in the professional sector, with experts looking to monetize their knowledge and relationships.”

When creators build an audience on a social media platform, the platform gets the lion’s share of any revenue generated.

But when a creator publishes an article on Medium or a newsletter on Substack, they can be paid directly through revenue sharing or subscriptions.

How Substack is Changing the Game

Substack has been interesting to watch over the past few years, as it has slowly rolled out new engagement tools. As the changes gather momentum, passive audiences of subscribers are transforming into active communities.

It started in 2019, when Substack introduced discussion threads, allowing paid subscribers to have an in-app conversation on a piece of content.

This year, the platform made Notes and Chat available. Notes appeals to subscribers because it resembles a space they’re already used to engaging in – a social media feed. Substack describes Chat as “a dedicated space for casual interactions with your subscriber community.”

Suddenly, Substack comments have become conversations – turning traditional “subscribers” into something more like “members.” The platform even recommends adding a Slack group or Discord channel to entice free subscribers into the paid tier.

In the toggling of a button, Substack creators have become de facto community leaders.

When compared to an all-in-one community platform, Substack’s community engagement tools are pretty primitive. But Substack has one more trick up its sleeve – cross-pollination.

When Substack creators recommend other creators to their followers … just like when Medium suggests new topics and creators to readers … or when the ConvertKit Creator Profile calls out additional email lists subscribers might enjoy – the platforms recreate that dopamine hit of novelty and discovery.

When ConvertKit launched the Creator Network, founder Nathan Barry said, “When I think about my creator career, it’s really the other creators that have helped me have a big impact and helped me get to where I am.” 

During David Spinks’ keynote address at CMX Summit ‘23 “Shine”,  he led an engaging conversation about “engineering serendipity” in community.

He focused on connections within one community, but imagine the possibilities of expanding that web farther. There is magic hidden in the seamless exchange of ideas, recommendations, and reciprocity not just within a community, but between communities.

This interconnectedness will enhance the user experience and create a more vibrant digital ecosystem.

After all, it’s the novelty and variety inherent in social media that’s conspicuously lacking in community platforms. It’s that dopamine hit of discovering something new and unexpected that keeps people coming back.

It’s also niche communities’ ticket to growth. This cross-pollination of creators promoting one another can get founders off the marketing treadmill, as their content surfaces to audiences already consuming related material.

Substack is positioning itself as a place where smaller creators can turn a passive audience into an engaged community, and where they can monetize that community without living in constant launch mode.

Cross-pollination in community platforms

As newsletter platforms act more like communities, community platforms are rolling out their own cross-pollination tools.

In October, Mighty Networks announced a new integration with ConvertKit, putting some of Mighty Network’s robust community tools at the fingertips of ConvertKit creators and some of ConvertKit’s audience management abilities into the hands of community managers.

The Guild platform includes a directory of publicly discoverable communities. If users browsing the list discover a new community that piques their interest, they can submit a request to join.

Cross-pollination is key to the success of communities operated by small and medium-sized businesses. These companies and founders create communities as an important opportunity to deepen customer relationships or boost recurring revenue, but they often struggle to get the traction and amplification they need.

Cross-pollination is one way platforms can make it easier for SMB communities to scale and for prospective members to find the community they seek.

Will 2024 Be the Year of Community?

Every year, the line between social media and online communities becomes more pronounced. This may be the year the two become completely distinct.

People once drawn to social media because it was “free” have realized that model only works when users are the product. Growing frustration with algorithmic manipulation and toxic newsfeeds will reach an inflection point this year, particularly with the high-strung rhetoric sure to surround the U.S. presidential election.

Under those conditions, a critical mass of people will be willing to pay for the relative peace and safety of online communities.

To capture this demand, community platforms must commit to developing tools that promote cross-pollination and curated interactions.

By building an interconnected network of communities, platforms can create a dynamic digital space that recalls the joy of social media while transcending its flaws.

Care to share your experience with social media or an online community? I’d really love to know your thoughts.