(2020-11-09) Walk Coming For The Content Staying For The Community Started With Video Games, or Maybe Religion

Hunter Walk: “Coming for the Content, Staying for the Community” Started With Video Games (Or Maybe Religion?)

the introduction of connectivity to gaming (hello internet!) had really emphasized how much play was about community. Whether the MMORPG gaming guilds hanging out between dungeon raids, or casual sites like Yahoo Games where the checkers, backgammon, and so on were really just something to do while you text chatted, there were numerous examples of people talking more and more about how the game was a ‘third place’ for them.

Working on the virtual world Second Life at the time I had the proverbial “front row seat” to what online interaction could look like down in the future

we over-indexed on the community and left the content largely up to the inhabitant which was only appealing to a limited number of passionate users

Over the last year I’ve started paying more indie creators directly for their work — heavily biased towards podcasts and newsletters/blogs. The other night I was wondering which ones I’d likely still be subscribing to a year or two from now. The “absolutely yes” category was dominated by creators who had branched beyond their initial piece of content and created some persistent space for the community to aggregate. Most typically in Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp or Discord.

So it’s not a question of “how many newsletters can one person pay for?” it’s “how many communities does someone want to be a part of?”