Why Online Community Fails
The missing foundation of trust and some practical tips for creating trust in your online connections.
Anyone who’s ever tried to organize a community online, or anyone who has participated in one (I’m guessing that’s all of us) knows how difficult it is to build and maintain communities online. It takes work to even get near the experience of community that emerges naturally from just being in the same physical spaces together.
We at Work Matters are trying to figure this out along with many, many people. Recently, I attended a call organized by someone in the online business world. They were selling a program that takes people through the process of building an online community business. At the end of the call, there were a number of questions that came up. I thought the questions were really interesting because it was the same fundamental question asked in three different ways: Why is it so hard to build online communities?
Now, I have my ideas about this, which include that the technology itself is not built for the purpose of helping people connect to each other. That we use it this way is just a byproduct of humans using online platforms in the same way that we took over the malls. As a Gen Xer, I remember how we turned malls into third spaces. They were commercial, but we did an awful lot of free-range socializing there — walking around, seeing and being seen. (That seeing and being seen is important. I’ll come back to that.) Whenever humans are involved, that’s what’s going to happen. For better or worse, it seems that online is effectively our third space now?
But why is it so hard to build online communities?
A woman, not coincidentally a Black woman, opened with a really good articulation of the question. She asked: “Why is it so difficult to create and sustain community online?” Then two others followed up with variations of this: One was about how to translate an in-person community that they were running to an online version. Another was about transforming an email list into something more like a community.
These were genuine questions with real urgency and curiosity behind them. But the answer they received, delivered in smooth corporate-speak about logistics and “many-to-many relationships” (which is the language of databases, a category mistake and not appropriate when speaking about humans, in my opinion) completely missed the point.
We’re Building Something, But Is It Community?
I have started to suspect that we may not actually be building communities online at all. We are building something — maybe they can be called groups, networks, audiences — but calling it “community” doesn’t make it so. In fact, it may really confuse us and frustrate our expectations and mess with our memories of what community used to be. (I’m thinking about how Facebook’s use of “friends” for online connections confused and rewrote what it meant to be friends with someone... arguably hollowing out the word and leading us to accept pretty shallow relationships as friendship.)
I have experienced community in my lifetime. I’m Gen X, so I remember the pre-computer era. I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other. I recognize the power and experience of community in pockets of culture where community is anchored to traditionalist values, like religious values. Churches are maybe the last bastion of community in the US. The left doesn’t build communities, we build movements….
When cars were first invented, people called them “horseless carriages,” right? Because they couldn’t understand the car itself except through analogy or in relation to what they already knew. My hope is that we may be doing something like that now, forcing new forms of connection into old frameworks. Community being tied to conservative values robs us of the ability to renovate that institution, to rethink it. And it could be that that’s what we’re doing without knowing that’s what we’re doing.
So maybe we’re forcing the new forms of connection that we’re creating into old, traditional frameworks because we don’t yet have the language for what we’re actually creating. A girl can hope!
Back to the online call, the woman leading the group insisted that online and offline communities are “basically the same thing, just with different approaches.” But what if they are fundamentally different? And if we begin from that assumption — that digital gatherings and physical communities are not equivalent, maybe only analogous — does reframing it make a difference? Because that assumption may be preventing us from building online connections effectively.
Who Is Not at the Table?
I couldn’t help but notice who was not at the table in this online call: people who could actually answer the questions that were being posed by the three participants, about why building online community is difficult—and if we take “online” out of that, just why building community intentionally is itself challenging.
Who was not on that call were community organizers and activists, people whose work has been systematically devalued for generations, but who may be the ones who understand something about how that’s actually done. It was clear to me that corporate facilitators don’t understand the essence of community, and my suspicion is this is no accident or innocent oversight. In any case, community isn’t a feature you implement or a metric you track. It is a living relationship that requires specific conditions to flourish. At the basis of that relationship, several things are important, but I think trust is key. And trust is precisely the thing that has been eroded for 50 years in the United States. I wrote about this two weeks ago in “Refusing the Power of Stranger Danger, Now We Build Community Trust.”
These organizers may know better how to use technology as a tool without letting it fundamentally shape or drive the community-building efforts. It is their successful use of Twitter to organize that has been met with algorithms that can block these efforts. They probably understand that platforms and tools should serve connection, not define it. But their expertise is nowhere to be seen in these types of spaces dominated by business logic, where “community building” means user engagement, and “trust” means brand loyalty.
The Trust Crisis at the Root
Underneath the logistical questions about posting schedules and content delivery lies a deeper problem: we’ve lost the ability to trust each other, and trust is more difficult online. Going back to that idea of seeing and being seen from earlier, I think a large part of how we humans trust is if we can see it. (And now with AI, we can’t trust our media, aggravating the problem…) Our trust is largely based in visual perception since vision is dominant for us. Notice when you get on a Zoom call, having that image of someone is super important to making that connection. If we can see, we get a lot of information from that. If we don’t see who we’re talking to, that connection is very difficult.
You can’t build community of any sort without trust at its heart. (You can build political coalitions, that is a different beast….) You can collect people and build followers that you can count, enjoy your metrics, subscriber lists, all of that. None of that is community. Community requires not a many-to-many relationship, but human vulnerability, reciprocity, recognition of each other, and faith that others will show up for you.
We are largely missing that foundation, and when that foundation is missing, you cannot build forward from there. No matter how good your engagement strategy is, if we don’t trust each other, if we don’t see each other and our shared interests, there is no there there.
Trusting each other also means taking a little bit of a risk, giving the other a chance. In that risk, there’s human vulnerability. We have to be able to take tiny then increasingly larger risks. Online, where we can’t see each other, we have to risk opening ourselves to someone who may not be who they present themselves to be. We all do that to some extent, but in real life we can read the other. It’s a little harder to do that online. But that risk is a necessary part of building trust, and of giving the other an opportunity to reciprocate.
Building Trust: What Actually Works
If you’ve read this far, here is the pay-off: The good news is that humans want to trust and need to trust each other. It is an irreducible need that cannot be done away with. We hunger for that human connection that is built on trust.
Here are some practices that community organizers and activists have used for generations. These are all pretty common-sense things. We need to get back to common-sense things.
Just like in real life, if you’re new in a town, how do you make friends? You start small and local. You start where you are. You find a place you like to hang out. A lot of adults will go hang out at the bar, but the idea is that you show up somewhere repeatedly over time. At first, people see you: You’re new, they’re curious about you. After you show up time after time, people start to approach you and ask you questions or open themselves up to conversation. Slowly. It’s a process that takes time and repetition. And those conversations lead to building other things. That’s the basis of community.
Start small and local. It’s the same idea online. Trust builds in small groups where people actually get to know each other. This is why for Couch to Community, we created very small sub-groups. Our scale of sociability has expanded, starting with Facebook where you could have hundreds of friends. I remember thinking, that’s ridiculous. I can barely maintain a handful!
So our scale has to come back down to a human scale. Massive online spaces diffuse accountability. Massive online spaces are the antithesis of how we should be building our connections online. Build the smallest viable community. It may be three people to start, and that’s fine.
Show up consistently somewhere. Choose an online space that you like and show up there consistently. I spend a lot of time on Substack. I spend a lot of time on Bluesky. Pinterest, Tumblr. There are several places that I go. Become intentional about it. You’re there to really make connections with others, not just to consume content. You may be there as a creator too, to share, but that sharing requires reciprocity as well. The point of sharing is to make a connection with others, so being seeing and interaction is key. Be intentional about that.
Be vulnerable first. Someone has to take the risk of genuine self-disclosure. If you’re building or facilitating community, model that kind of authentic presence that you want to see. Offer some details about who you are online. Recently I told someone where I lived—very small thing, but that sharing of a personal fact, the expectation is that it will be reciprocated. Then you can share something bigger and build it up that way.
Create opportunities for reciprocity. Trust grows when people can help each other, not just consume content from a central authority. In the spaces that you are, where you can meet with others and share with each other, model that kind of openness and create opportunities for others to reciprocate.
Commit to acknowledge and repair harm. Living in a multicultural democracy is a wonderful ideal and well worth the work. And there is work involved when people come from different backgrounds, may value different things, have different customs, look different. Within that, human conflict will happen. And that conflict is also part of the building of trust, knowing that we can resolve our conflicts. When you’re in a new relationship, that first big fight that you have… if you can weather that, if you can come to an agreement and repair and continue, you’ve passed a big milestone.
I think that even when there’s a good community with a good feeling and people are sharing, it’s often very difficult to resolve conflicts. Conflicts are avoidable online. We live in an era where ghosting someone is an easy way to avoid conflict. People just choose not to engage, and that cuts off the possibility of going to the next level. There has to be some sort of commitment to try and make it work.
Communities with strong trust don’t avoid conflict. They actually have processes that have emerged, that they have established, that people can see has been modeled (maybe it’s written down) for addressing harm and repairing relationships. If I’m part of a community and they have community agreements, and in those agreements there’s a clear process for what happens if someone is behaving in a way that is not agreeable to the community or is in violation of the established rules of conduct, I feel safer.
Move offline when possible. I think it’s easier to start IRL and then move online because then you know what that feeling of online connection could be. But if you are building connections primarily online, trying where possible to actually meet up with others is important. Video calls with cameras on, regular local meetups, phone conversations. Anything that adds dimensionality to a digital connection can strengthen trust.
Resist the pressure to scale. Already touched on this, but it is worth repeating: Growth often destroys the conditions that allow for trust to develop. So protect that intimacy over expansion. Protect and nurture that intimacy and grow as slowly as possible and keep things at a human scale.
You cannot possibly serve the needs of a thousand people. Your needs are better served in a smaller group. This is why when I run my feminist theory sessions, they are capped at 12 participants per section. Build small, intimate spaces online where privacy is protected and intimacy is protected. Our meetings are not recorded. They’re not distributed. They’re not for consumption. Our meetings are for those of us who showed up for each other.
Turning to a Different Question
Maybe instead of asking “How do we build online communities?” we should ask, “What human needs can online spaces actually meet, and what needs require physical presence?” Let’s make a list together in the comments below. I’ll start:
We humans, some more than others, need physical touch. Hugs. We cannot meet the need for hugs online.
The need for intellectual communion, I think that can be met online. It’s one of the easier things, but even that is hard to do. Maybe? What do you think?
Finally, let me say that Gen X women in particular have the most valuable skills needed right now. We remember community before the internet. We grew up in an analog world. We did a lot of emotional labor that our parents never got to. I think we have the knowledge that the world needs right now. We are so important to the world that is to come! You have been summoned.
I wrote a follow-up to this piece, in case you missed it
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Too many online communities hang off personal connections to just one or two people. Real communities need trust, reciprocity, and a sense of equality for all. If one person is the rule-setter, judge, and gatekeeper, with no shared accountability, it isn’t really a community, it’s more of a personality cult.
I think the question of what needs can be met and what needs can't is the right one. I think a need to know and be known can be met online in the right circumstances. I'll keep thinking.