9 Comments

I’ve been holding off launching a community because I knew Substack was building one. Now that threads has been launched, I’m very excited about the idea of keeping my community all on one platform, instead of making them migrate between them. Hopefully we can bring communities back, in a better way!

Expand full comment
author

You're beta testing their new tool right? How's that going?

Expand full comment

Yes! Only three days in, but so far so good. A lot of community engagement and it’s been nice to connect over things that might not be worthy of a whole essay.

Expand full comment

Great article, Simon.

I'd also emphasize:

1. Twitter is the place where most publicly accessible conversation around articles will take place.

2. Publications offering Discords/Slacks or fostering active online comment sections need to take a benevolent dictator approach to content moderation and not hesitate to delete comments/ban users that violate rules. In audience interaction, one or two bad apples can ruin an entire forum realllllll quick.

Expand full comment
author

Yes, I'm extremely judicious in quickly banning all trolls and spammers. Luckily I don't get many.

Expand full comment

I use:

- Discord (The Platformer-a substack creator, DALL-E official community, Kern.al - a tech startup), - Facebook Groups (Simon Owens)

- Slack (LION, News Product Alliance, and Prosocial Design).

My vote is...

- SLACK. The LION group for News Entrepreneurs is excellent example..lots of engagement and it has CHANNELS (Topics) and Messages within a channel are easy to create Threads. SEARCH feature works great. The News Product Alliance is great as well, and they run a cool bot called DONUT to create random 1:1 meetings for people as introductions.

- DISCORD: Really good for active community that goes back and forth in commenting to each other about current Newsletter topics which creator publishes. KEY: Creator needs to interact..kudos to Simon who does a great job trying to answer every post in his community tools. Very key for creators.

Expand full comment
author

Thanks!

Expand full comment
Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022

Discourse isn't listed in your poll. Thought I'd add a comment as a "vote."

Expand full comment
author

Yeah, at the very least I probably should have put something like "Other (leave your choice in the comments)"

Expand full comment