A friend of mine recently launched a very successful membership community, hosted on Slack. In just one year they signed up hundreds of members who are paying thousands of dollars.
If you’re talking about scaling a community and you have to say “Effective? Yes. Ethical? You decide.” after the first strategy point you discuss, I sorta feel like I have to assume everything past that is gonna be largely bullshit of the same flavor. I can’t believe you actually offered writing fake content that looks like it came from influencers as a recommendation. What the fuck dude?
Hey Steve, I’d be very happy to clarify what I said and add more context. I’d also be happy to have a discussion about the ethics of astroturfing, or related tactics, in communities.
But I’m not sure you came here for a discussion. Your comment felt a lot more like an attack. I see that you run several communities. Can you imagine someone coming to your community or your newsletter for the first time and commenting with the same tone and language you’re using here? How would that make you feel? I can tell you it didn’t make me feel very good.
Yes, my comment was an attack. Because you have set yourself up as a voice of experience in a difficult field and right off the bat in this article you're encouraging people to use unethical methods to build communities for monetization purposes. I would like to think any decent person would hold you accountable for that.
And regardless of whether some rando like me deserves a response or not, I think for the sake of your more ardent readers you should absolutely clarify what you said, add more context, and probably walk back the implication that "anything goes when you're getting started" is an acceptable way to build anything.
That’s a shame Steve. You could have come in and ask clarifying questions without attacking me. I wish you more positivity in your life than you’ve shown here today.
The clarification: I never advocated for writing fake content that looks like it came from influencers. I said they manually wrote content for their founding members to post.
They would send the content to the member and the member could edit it however they want. The members wouldn’t post it if they didn’t want to. And since they all signed up to be founding members, knowing that the expectation was to help get the community going, they were grateful to have that content created for them. It made their job a lot easier.
In relation to your three paths, I’m assuming you know about Hidden Brain podcast. Great discussion about a variety of social science topics
I hadn’t heard of that one, I’ll check it out, thanks!
I dig that "here's what we covered today" David.
good validation that I should keep doing it (= thanks thomas!
great read! Thanks David!
thanks benoit!
Extraordinarily high value content.
I can’t tell you how much I needed to read this article. You are a gem! 💎
Glad it arrived at the right time for ya (=
If you’re talking about scaling a community and you have to say “Effective? Yes. Ethical? You decide.” after the first strategy point you discuss, I sorta feel like I have to assume everything past that is gonna be largely bullshit of the same flavor. I can’t believe you actually offered writing fake content that looks like it came from influencers as a recommendation. What the fuck dude?
Hey Steve, I’d be very happy to clarify what I said and add more context. I’d also be happy to have a discussion about the ethics of astroturfing, or related tactics, in communities.
But I’m not sure you came here for a discussion. Your comment felt a lot more like an attack. I see that you run several communities. Can you imagine someone coming to your community or your newsletter for the first time and commenting with the same tone and language you’re using here? How would that make you feel? I can tell you it didn’t make me feel very good.
If you’d like to have a discussion, let me know.
Yes, my comment was an attack. Because you have set yourself up as a voice of experience in a difficult field and right off the bat in this article you're encouraging people to use unethical methods to build communities for monetization purposes. I would like to think any decent person would hold you accountable for that.
And regardless of whether some rando like me deserves a response or not, I think for the sake of your more ardent readers you should absolutely clarify what you said, add more context, and probably walk back the implication that "anything goes when you're getting started" is an acceptable way to build anything.
That’s a shame Steve. You could have come in and ask clarifying questions without attacking me. I wish you more positivity in your life than you’ve shown here today.
The clarification: I never advocated for writing fake content that looks like it came from influencers. I said they manually wrote content for their founding members to post.
They would send the content to the member and the member could edit it however they want. The members wouldn’t post it if they didn’t want to. And since they all signed up to be founding members, knowing that the expectation was to help get the community going, they were grateful to have that content created for them. It made their job a lot easier.