There are some things I have noticed over the years about the direct involvement of communities in any project, especially when the project goes on for many many years. If you’ve never watched a community evolve for over a decade, perhaps because you are still under 35 and have not engaged with anything as an adult for that long, these are not things you will notice… and nobody is really talking about them.
This isn’t something I noticed because I’m smart or anything. I’m just old. I’ve been in lots of communities, and many of them have been around for more than ten years, and whenever you do a lot of something you start to see patterns. Reality is fractal: big things act like small things and small things act like big things and things in general tend to look similar. Zoom in, zoom out, the patterns you observed in the middle are still there and look pretty much the same.
This is why economics is such a useful field to study: once you know how Alice and Bob decide on the price of something, you know how Alice sells to anyone and how Bob buys from anyone, so you understand the basic theory of how shops deal with customers and how customers deal with shops. You just expand this outward and take more uncertainty and larger scale into account. Maybe go read Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, it covers a lot of critical ideas in a fairly compact space.
Now, I’m going to be speaking primarily about software development, because that is what I particularly care about. But I’ve observed these things in other venues, as well - I’ve seen it in physical product design, in organisations, in media production. It has, however, become fairly endemic for the software industry in particular, which is causing all types of problematic shit.
Microsoft in particular has a culture of “dogfooding” and an attachment to the “growth mindset” which have ceased to be organisational values and turned into what is basically a cult. They now operate under the delusion that their employees are the community.
This reared its ugly head in my last project there, the Kin, which was an evolution of the Danger Sidekick - that product appealed most to teens, so of course our evolution of the product was designed to appeal to technical professionals. To Microsoft employees.
That was the problem, Microsoft employees did not like the Sidekick enough. It was silly and frivolous and came in fruity colours (like an Apple product) and did this unnecessary flippy thing when you opened it. We didn’t put it in these words, but the first and foremost design imperative was that the new product must not be cool. It must be a Very Serious Business Product. For serious business people. People like, you know, Microsoft employees.
But everybody understands bubbles. That’s not something we need to rehash, because everyone has already talked it to pieces and the dead horse is barely a stain on the ground by now.
The unmentioned thing about communities is, active involvement encourages you to communicate informally with the people in the community. And as you do this, you gradually lose the need to communicate formally. It just isn’t important. You don’t need to put in the patch notes that you’ve added this new feature, or changed this existing one, because you talked about it on the Discord for weeks. Everybody already knows about it.
So, of course, you don’t make a formal record. It doesn’t go in the patch notes and it doesn’t go in the documentation and nobody even updates the wiki. Why bother? Everybody knows. And this is absolute death for the most important group of people: new players.
One of the most overlooked aspects of your community is that in most cases, you have already got their money, so the continued survival of your business venture - assuming this is a business venture - depends on a constant flow of new customers. And every single thing “everybody knows” about your product is a barrier to entry for those new customers. It makes your product harder for them to use.
Over time, the list of things “everyone knows” could fill a book. And because you’ve never written that book, since after all everyone knows these things, the new customers have to figure out what’s in that book all by themselves… and memorise it. This is not fun. It is, in fact, the opposite of fun. It is simply absurd to expect anyone to like your product under these conditions.
And when the new users stop showing up, that’s when your company starts to die.
Your community is really, really important. You need to listen to them. But their suggestions still need to be vetted, and even if you decide to follow up on them, they still need to go through The Process so they are properly documented and recorded.
Which means even if it is just you, there needs to be a process. You need to have a system you use to make sure your ideas are good ideas, and worth implementing, and you need to make sure you’ve thought about how a new customer will engage with them. How will they know to engage with these ideas, and why would they want to? What is the scenario for this?
Basically it’s just dangerous. Once you have a community to engage with, remember that your community is really a subcommunity of your customers, and the people who engage with you are a sub-subcommunity of that. Just like my Discord has sixty people on it, but only four of them talk with any regularity. I might feel like I ran my ideas past “everybody,” but I really only ran them past the two people who were online at the time. (It’s always either the Polish dude and the Brazilian, or the two Texans. If I’m lucky one of the Filipinos will be online and I will get three opinions.)