Building an ideal community platform. Uncommunity #16

Hi there, When you have a new home you can’t just stop talking about it. ;) Uncommunity V2 is live. Head over to Uncommunity and find out all the new things. I’m sure you’ll love it. Don’t take my word for it. KP just tweeted about the new Uncommunity. He said he is loving the minimalist design of the Uncommunity.

And guess what? Someone just bought us 5 coffees through Buy Me a Coffee and he loves the product. If you want to buy us a coffee you can do it with just a few clicks.

How Discord Won

There is this excellent post, "Everything you've read on the Internet is written by crazy people." Basically all the comments on Reddit are written by people who spend a lot of time writing comments on the Internet which is weird group of people. So you've to discount everything you read on these sites a lot of the times. I don't take it too personally.

Our 9th episode of Comunity Stories is live. I chat with Ian Vanagas, who’s a prolific writer when it comes to Internet communities and community platforms. He dissects in this episode why Discord is winning when it comes to Internet communities and how should an ideal community-building platform look like.

Listen to Community Stories on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

What else we’re reading/listening to?

• Reddit: Organized Lightning - One of the social media's oldest companies is also it’s most undervalued. Read the full piece by the legendary Greg Isenberg here.

• Reddit is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued companies in the world.

• A little over a week ago, Huffman announced the company had raised $250 million in new capital at a valuation of $6 billion. The round was led by Dubai-based firm Vy Capital, with follow-ons from a16z, Sequoia, and Tencent.
• To which we have to say: $6 billion? That’s it? ‍
• In a world in which Clubhouse is worth $1 billion after a year of (impressive) traction, and Dispo is pegged at $100 million for an app still in beta, Reddit — cultural petri-dish, bastion of expression, distributed hedge-fund, meme-maker, group-therapist — is only worth $6 billion?

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• How to moderate an online community. A list of skills, tips, and tricks - Moderators can make or break an online community! Here are a few tips I’ve learned from moderating communities of thousands of people across different platforms (Slack, Facebook, Clubhouse). Check all the tips & tricks here.
• Be Dynamic - Each community is different — moderating a Clubhouse room vs a Facebook group or a Slack Workspace is a completely different experience!
• Use your eagle eye to spot words, as you would do with body language - Online communication has its nuances — so, you will need to differentiate the tone of v̶o̶i̶c̶e̶ writing between the lines.
• Facilitate and mediate - This is one of the most important skills you need. Drawing the line between trolls, haters, someone having a bad day, or someone expressing themselves poorly is key.
• Cut through the noise - Differentiate valuable insights and irrelevant discussions, draw the line between different verticals and topics and redirect people to the right channel (if we think about Slack), topic, or thread.

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• Chief community officer is the new CMO - Community isn’t a single Slack group or event or newsletter. It’s an aggregation of all of these touchpoints and includes both customers, eventual customers, and one-time users. Read the article here.
• As the ‘aha’ moment of community continues, Commsor is a solution to help community managers prove that they’re not wasting the budget, and outcomes. Commsor, he says, is the operating system for communities, helping companies distill how their different communities look, and feel, which could eventually trickle down into generating sales leads and revenue. Commsor could pull an insight like, ‘here are three engineers that are using your platform from Google, maybe it’s time to approach Google and ask if they want an enterprise contract.” Finding those sweet spots, and bottoms-up community adopters, is Commsor’s bread and butter.

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• 6 reasons why a customer community is the best channel to collect customer feedback - It’s hard to capture all the ideas and suggestions that come in across tools and teams. So how can you democratize the customer feedback process and build transparent relationships between Customer Success, Product – and your customers? The answer is a customer community. Read in detail here.
• Facilitate unprompted feedback
• Avoid bias
• Prevent loss of context
• Offer full transparency
• Create a self-informed environment
• Generate peer-to-peer discussions

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• [PODCAST] Building the Dream Community Team - What happens when two OG of the community industry come together and jam on all things community? David Spinks is joined by Holly Firestone on Masters of Community to discuss how communities are built and structured. Listen to the full episode.
• David: What are the things that you look for when interviewing in order to be able to identify who, who would be a great community manager, community operator for your team?
• Holly: Number one is empathy. And I think that you can find that in your conversations with anybody and understand, are they thinking about the experience for the people in your community first and foremost, can they put themselves in their shoes? Are they thinking about, you know, building for that, for that group of people? So I think that that's the most important because I don't think anybody can do the work that you do in a community team without that.
• So how do we figure out what’s everyone thinking? 🤔

• Kindness first.

• Keep the resume simple. Everyone wants to standout, but 99% of the time goofy templates & colors & images aren't the way.

What’s new at Uncommunity?

• Products added:
• Skool - Like Facebook Groups, but better
• Goldcast - Create virtual events that feel like a Netflix show
• Talk Howdy - Connect to people with shared interests
• Experts Added:
• Alexis Ohanian - Alexis Ohanian is the co-founder of Reddit. He was previously co-founder & partner at Initialized Capital and now founder of Seven Seven Six.

Go to Uncommunity.club to find out about the latest tools and all new jobs that we added this week from companies like Mercury, Spotify, Vonage, Near Protocol, FingerprintJS. Check out the jobs.

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thank you ☕

for joining us in our journey. We both have full-time jobs and we have built Uncommunity in our free time as we have been exploring ways to give back and support fellow community builders in their journeys.

If you are enjoying our curation and want to express your appreciation, please feel free to spread the word, buy us a coffee, or let us know your thoughts/feedback.