Chat Liquidity

Most online communities die.

I'm in a graveyard of servers, channels, and chats across Discord, Slack, Telegram, Twitter/X, WhatsApp (and more) for everything from large companies to small friend groups.

All of them were exciting at one point in time, but few still are. Why is that? What makes one community persist while most others die off?

Here are some patterns I’ve noticed among strong communities in crypto:

Hype. There is initial energy around something that brings people together. This could be traders exchanging trade ideas, artists connecting to share artworks in progress, people discussing protocol design, or whatever else. Anything that leads a group of folks to show up somewhere and share some high intensity excitement. Think about early Bitcoin meetups or the early Bored Ape Yacht Club scene.

Belonging. The groups that last the longest tend to have ways for members in the group to differentiate themselves from people outside of it. “We” own this kind of asset (Chainlink Marines). We believe this blockchain is better than the other blockchain (Solana bros, .eth people). We use this sort of language (the early NFT community and their wagmis and frens). There is a version of “us versus them” in play that gives definition to the in-group. 

Action. Strong communities offer ways for people to participate. This could be about information flow and checking in to stay in the loop about some niche topic. It could be simple speculation where people come back again and again in anticipation over the next drop, release, event, and so on. Some communities also have status “mini games” - whether formally or informally - where members can progress inside the community by acquiring a prized asset or accomplishing some achievement. In short, people need things to do.

Rituals. Every quality group that I’ve been a part of also had (or still has) what I think of as “minimum viable rituals.” This point pulls on both the “belonging” and “action” points above. Groups who do things together create lasting bonds. For example, in the early days of CryptoPunks, when a lot of sales happened on a given day, everybody would come back to the Discord server to hang out and get in on the action and euphoria. This would refresh relationships and give energy to the community.

Now, on the other side of this conversation… many communities fail. Badly. Completely. Sometimes this even happens to groups that have done everything we’ve talked about so far and done it well. So, how does that happen? 

Here are some recurring things I’ve seen:

Stagnation. People's interests change, people stop checking the chat, the energy dies off, there’s no vision for what comes next, and the community fades into a “group chat I used to know.” Everyone reading this has probably lived through many of these. The episodic nature of human attention makes it very hard to sustain communities over time. Also, sometimes groups just don’t work out. 

Bloat. Too many people join a group and dilute the positive aspects of what made it compelling in the first place. Somehow when a group has too many people it can cancel out “belonging” and “common interests” as well as reduce people’s participation. CryptoPunks is a good example here. During the 2021 NFT euphoria, the Punks Discord server became overcrowded and lost its salience, so many of the early Punk enthusiasts moved into smaller side chats. 

Betrayal. Trust gets broken for one reason or another. This could be theft from a team member or an entire project/business “rugging” their users/members. It could be one person going behind other people's backs, or really any other reason why humans lose trust in one another. Shit hits the fan, and something about the group ends up forever changed, then it dies.

Wrapping up here, when I really stop and reflect on the groups or projects or guilds or servers I’ve been a part of across crypto, I think their success or failure can be understood through the lens of these 7 categories.

I get that there is a lot of nuance to this conversation. After all, “community” is a broad concept that includes everything from small group chats to the social layer around large companies, but sometimes stopping to reflect about common patterns like this can be helpful.

Thank you to Josh, Apix & Tylr for feedback and review.