What’s the meaning of communities?

We hear the term community all the time, but what does it truly mean? Is it just a group of people in the same chat room? Or is it something more?

CommunityOne has been around for 3 years and we've been looking over many many online servers. Over the past few years, we’ve asked more than 1000 server owners what they think of their communities and collected more than 6000 suggestions from regular members on how to improve their communities via our Hype Engine feature. We’ve personally checked in with many servers, big web3 communities or smaller friends servers and see how people behave differently in different settings.

Below, we will share some of our findings, both from ad-hoc stories and from our data insights: 

From Audience to Ecosystem

Almost all communities start with a central figure—a YouTuber, a brand, or a creator. People initially join a Discord server or forum in the hope of connecting with that figure. The magic happens when those individual spokes start connecting to form a wheel. A genuine community develops when its members start interacting with one another, a transition from a pure parasocialin the hope of connecting relationship.

While most people do eventually talk to each other in the same space, this transition isn't guaranteed. If a space is purely transactional, where users are only there for customer support or financial incentives, they have little reason to connect on a human level.

The most enduring communities are complementary to a larger purpose. Think of a YouTuber's Discord where members share what they're learning, or The Coding Den, a server dedicated to connecting expert programmers with novices. The community becomes the vehicle for a bigger, shared goal. On the other side, communities don’t last long when projects build a server because of some external pressure. 

The Universal Desire for Connection

Regardless of why they join, most people have a fundamental desire to share parts of themselves and form friendships. We often see this: members suggest servers to create games where they share personal details and have others guess the context, such as '2 Truths, 1 Dare' type games. This desire is universal, whether they're in a server to make money or to solve a technical problem.

Here’s another example, in a lot of web3 servers where members get together due to some financial incentives, when we ask how they want their servers to get better, instead of demanding their servers to ask less of them (let it be invite competition, or chat as many as you can), they ask for MORE. More events, more games so that they can truly enjoy spending more time and making friends with others. 

Another remarkable observation is that the desire to connect and make friends transcends geographic, age, and nationality. It doesn’t matter if you are a kid looking to find your first social group or an adult with a family and a steady job. The demand from ordinary people to genuinely connect has never been more universal. 

The best way to connect. 

Many studies have shown that the most effective way to form connections is by being vulnerable, sharing personal experiences, and remaining true to one's emotions and feelings. An alternative approach to connecting in social settings is by bonding together over a shared struggle, obstacle, or goal.

In community settings, a desire to connect doesn't automatically create a culture of sharing, let alone one that fosters vulnerability. While this is true in most broadcasting social media (IG, X, TikTok, etc), it is also true in much smaller, non-algo-driven yet public communities. 

In Discord, we notice that whether people share or not is set from the top. The server owners and moderators play a crucial role in fostering an environment where people feel safe and encouraged to be vulnerable. Without this, you can have a few hyperactive members while the majority remains silent, their desire to connect unfulfilled.

Everyone says they want to share more about themselves in our private survey, yet something about our current internet structure actively dissuades people from doing so.

This is backed by data. Servers with the most messages per member, a hallmark of engagement, tend to be significantly smaller in average size.  

Can a public community of strangers ever reach the level of connection seen in small groups of real-life friends? No. The barrier of trust is simply higher with strangers. You can build a better space, but people don’t share as much about their personal lives in semi-public spaces as they do with close friends. Over the decades, there had been startups built around people sharing their true thoughts anonymously, but all of them have faded, even be real.

Not all is lost. Remember the second way for people to bond: sharing a common goal or obstacle. In this aspect, the top communities in our data do far better compared to smaller, initial friend-base communities. 

And this is why public communities exist.  

The perfect communities

Here are some real examples of what a great community looks like:

1. A Russian member decided to learn English and Japanese by dubbing his favorite anime. He shared snippets of his work daily, receiving constant feedback and encouragement. When he finally posted the finished video, the entire community celebrated his incredible achievement with him.
2. Another member, inspired by a streamer, decided to transform his life. He shared his entire journey with the community: quitting junk food, starting at the gym, getting a , including quitting junk food, starting at the gym, getting a new job, moving out of his parents' basement, and eventually finding job, moving out of his parents' basement, and eventually, getting a girlfriend.

These examples reveal the two core components of a perfect community:

1. A Meaningful Challenge: Members have a personal, meaningful, and challenging goal they are working towards. This could be learning a skill, changing a lifestyle, or creating something new.
2. Accountability in a Safe Space: Members are held accountable, formally or informally, by sharing their progress and receiving feedback from familiar faces in a trusted environment.

The best community dynamic

Feedback. Getting acknowledgments and feedback from the public is one of the best aspects of community dynamics. Feedback can be as simple as a gesture or a cool emote reacting to a message. It can also be a member who checked in with you a couple of days ago. Additionally, it can be a glorious acknowledgement from a mod sharing something you are working on with other members. 

Skittle has an official Discord server. The ex-head of marketing at Mars was the community manager for the server.  After Covid is over, he insisted on continuing to manage the Discord personally despite the pressures to shut it down. The reason? Because there are so many people inside the community sharing about their personal life changes, and he wants to see what happens. 

Help. Actual magical experiences happen when someone asks questions in a good server. The asker will receive real human help, ideally instantly, from someone who knows their craft (but neither is required for a great experience). Most importantly, the responder will have the opportunity to showcase their knowledge, feel good about helping someone, and receive a mini ego boost from their online peers. 

In a famous YouTube community where people ask questions about cooking, one member is responsible for 40% of the answers. He spends about 14 hours a day scrolling through Discord and makes sure to answer STAT. He is a high school student who dreams of becoming a chef one day. He was not a mod. Since the creator never checks the server, he probably doesn't know that he has a super active Samaritan in the community either.

Competition. Healthy competition is one of the most significant levers you have in a thriving community. For instance, some of our most dedicated users on Hype Engine are driven by the simple goal of winning against the moderators. This competitive spirit can be channeled to encourage positive behavior and high-quality contributions.

Gamify the dynamics

In the right setting, a community is a powerful force that helps people achieve their goals. Here’s how you can "gamify" that process:

• Focus on Personal Journeys: The most meaningful goals are those that are personal. Instead of assigning goals, help members define their own and then assist them in structuring the steps to achieve them.
• Break Down a Hard Challenge: Big goals are daunting. Break them down into small, progressive steps that members can conquer one at a time.
• Create Feedback Loops: Design ways for members to self-report their progress and track it over time. Feedback can be as simple as an acknowledgment or as significant as a special role that makes them stand out.
• Use Competition Wisely: Competition isn't for everyone, but for your most engaged members, it can be a powerful motivator. The desire to "beat the mods" or top the leaderboard drives incredible effort.
• Combine Motivations: Few people can stick with a goal solely on the basis of intrinsic motivation. A community is the perfect context to add extrinsic motivators, like a spot on a leaderboard, to complement a member's internal drive.

Build something forever

YouTube serves as an example of something forever. It is both entertaining and educational. It gets better and better every day because there is always someone having something genuine to say (with or without AI). It is diverse enough to offer something for everyone. You are most likely to be able to rely on your favorite creator to do this for a long time because YouTube provides them with a way to live on this and then some. 

A forever community is a microstructure of this. Your community should be engaging, in a way that allows people to connect and make friends. (By the way, the magic number is 7 – this is the number of chatters you need in a public group to make someone feel that you are alive.) It should be educational in some way. People find it helpful, and their lives are better because of it. So don’t get your members hooked for unhealthy reasons. Human are very smart in the long term and eventually get rid of, or significantly reduce the consumption of toxic things that impede their development.  

There needs a stable stream of great people in the community that are willing to help and guide others. This is something that great community freakishly does extremely well. 

We once worked with a highly talented YouTuber who initially didn’t want to spend a lot of time in his Discord. He wanted to focus on creating great content. After a few months being active on his server, he ended up spending way too much time. For example, he increased the frequency of Discord streaming from once a week to three times a week and was ready to make it available for free (rather than as a paid subscriber’s privilege).

Great people create great content. Great content makes people come back. This is the oldest rule on the internet. 

The Money Question

The final point to build something forever is to give the system a proper incentive. No one can do anything forever without getting paid. Life moves on. 

Since a great community helps and improves people's lives, there must be a way to properly monetize it and allow someone to make a living from it. The best community managers we know spend every waking hour tending to their community—nurturing the good, moderating the bad, and handling the ugly. They are the proactive force, the event planners, and the conflict resolvers. Most web2 servers do not die from inactivity, but because they accidentally empower an abusive or negligent moderator who poisons the culture. Professionalizing the role of a community manager is the most effective way to protect and grow the value of your community.

This means that for most communities, there has to be a way to introduce an ad system into the servers for maximum impact. The era of brute-force ads is over, but there are better ways to deliver them. Make ads interactive, target them better, change their form (from banners to possibly sponsoring a community event), or make them into quest forms and allow for opt-out. 

Because a community is not a scalable structure. It is generally true that after a certain scale, the bigger it gets, the worse the individual experience becomes. Ads should not be based on impressions, but rather on more meaningful measures, such as affiliate marketing, cost per click, or cost per action. 

So there are meanings to communities, even the online ones, where you gather a bunch of strangers who don’t care about each other initially. In the vast realm of the internet, strangely, there is no space where we can genuinely acknowledge each other (unless you have a large following), other than a small, semi-private/public community. With the right setting and design, strangers who come for one reason will stay for each other, support one another, and grow together.

We are working on hype engine v2, if you are interested in building a meaningful community with us together, reach out or sign up here: https://communityone.io/hype-engine/#waitlist