I've noticed an uptick recently of large brands to start referring to themselves as "The [Brand] Community". The author pointed out Youtube here (who in an Orwellian manner calls their ToS "community guidelines") but I've also seen it with many other multi-million dollar companies such as Reddit, Twitter, etc.
Young people today are reaching out for real support structures, but only receiving manipulation from corporations that want them to watch ads, while occasionally arguing with pseudo-anonymous internet strangers.
The words "friend" (everyone knows how shallow a "Facebook friend" is), "share" ("ride-sharing" instead of calling a taxi), and "community" (is the entire customer base of Facebook really a community?) have been shorn of their sociable, human meanings. It's as if a corporation were mining the good will humans have accreted to those words over millenia.
Sometimes there are communities in these spaces - NUMTOTs or small Discord servers. Other times its just marketing foo foo.
Seems like almost every community nowadays has to have their own Discord server or private Facebook group. Often a deal-breaker for the more privacy-conscious people, unfortunately
My initial reaction to your comment was that privacy-consciousness has always been a potential deal-breaker for social engagement - which I think is true, building connection is an inherently vulnerable activity - but it's interesting how the word "privacy" means something very different on- and off-line.
We haven't ever lived in a world where not being "privacy-conscious" in a social setting could mean any of the following if that privacy is compromised by a corporation:
- Someone constructed a whole fake online presence using my data
- Someone used generative AI to make fake photos and videos of me doing things
- Someone has access to my bank accounts and all of my personal communications
- ...
We used to think of privacy as something that exists between people. Now we think of it as something that is mediated by corporations.
> We used to think of privacy as something that exists between people. Now we think of it as something that is mediated by corporations.
I have never heard of the second interpretation. The second sentence should in my opinion rather be: "Now we think of it as something that is violated by corporations."
> Often a deal-breaker for the more privacy-conscious people, unfortunately
You can’t have conversation in your community without them being public either. Saying anything in discord is just as public as on the middle of a busy shopping street.
Typically in public you don't have an irrevocable transcript of every word spoken. The predominace of electric communication and its natural surveillance has eliminated the ephemeral nature of conversation.
To some extend. But some must be pretty dedicated to find something you said even several days ago in a public discord. Coupled with the low stakes communication generally going on there it seems unlikely to me anyone would ever bother.
I'm a contractor working on the GTM side of a well a respected company with a very active slack public community. And let's just say all the activity in slack is piped into their data lake.
> I've noticed an uptick recently of large brands to start referring to themselves as "The [Brand] Community"
I don't think I've ever seen that. What I have seen is non-sponsored people referring to "the [brand] community" or "the [product] community" as a shorthand way of saying they discuss brand or product with other people with that shared interest on a dedicated Discord server or forum. The Sega community, the Final Fantasy community, etc.
The official forum for SAP users is called the "SAP Community"[0]. I've seen it in other corporate places too, but this was the first occurrence which came to mind.
This is another form of locking in the customer, because if at any point a customer wants to distance themselves from the brand, they are always distancing themselves from the "community", which is harder to do than leaving a brand.
> while occasionally arguing with pseudo-anonymous internet strangers.
Even this has been eroding, the amount of comments made by bots I see across reddit/Twitter has increased exponentially since the 2010s. It only got worse after LLMs.
You're probably not allowed to discuss it here because the people who own this website are currently making a lot of money from content stolen by bots, to be ingested by other bots.
So many SasS companies have their own slack and discord communities that I'm working on a project to automatically scrape the channel where people can share job postings.
A couple of them let me install my own apps and use the API, which is disturbing, but most either don't or use the free Slack tier and have maxed out the number of apps that can be installed.
Frankly, same thing with a lot of OSS projects. Everything is a "community," joyously writing code together and following community guidelines while singing and dancing! It's grotesque.
I agree, it rubs me the wrong way that simply enjoying or consuming a particular thing or doing certain activities seems to automatically make you part of the “community” of that thing. Or maybe this isn’t really true and is just what I perceive.
But I don’t like feeling like I am being spoken for, or have it automatically assumed that everyone partaking in something all share a set of values or community-wide beliefs.
