Millennials invent a forum. Part One

Part one: Why build a community?

The latest trend in marketing talk is how to build an independent community. A very good topic to talk about.

Before Facebook, people read the news on media sites, talked and argued with each other on forums and chats on many different websites.

The Facebook era made great changes to how people consumed and created content. With rapidly increasing Facebook popularity, a huge part of the audience moved there and started to get daily news updates only on the social network. The reason is easy to understand; everything was collected and aggregated in one safe place. The next step well-know and respected media started to share content on social network.

Finally, we get a golem. The next generation believes social networking is literally the internet. It was funny until it became sad. The undisputed truth is that nothing comes for free. Facebook doesn't even charge a dime but gives a wide-range of benefits – a variety of ways to consume the content, easy-to-use tools to create it, an audience to share content, and perfect safety.

We can see that basic physics laws are perfectly applicable to the world wide web. Fast social network growth was taken from the other sites. No one blames a network, but before the social media era, websites earned money by showing advertisements to the audience. However, in order to create a completely restricted network while maintaining a growth rate, social networks began to charge for their services by collecting and using user data for different purposes.

For one moment, with such a huge resource in one hand, Golem starts to believe he is a king. They have enough data to make a decision for people on what and how to watch, and what to say or don't say.

People's recent and rapidly growing interest in privacy, information diversity, and, most importantly, the ability to make their own decisions rather than relying on what a well-educated recommendation engine decides for them. It shows perfectly that the beginning of the end has officially started.

The fictitious force is another fundamental force in physics that is perfectly applicable to the social network. There is still huge revenue and a huge audience, but internal audience requests are for independence.

So, why build an independent community? Simply put, everything you post on social media is no longer yours. You don't own the content you create, you don't own the audience you grow. You own nothing, but pay a lot with time, energy, and your data.

But how to build community without all these fancy tools people get to use in social networking? This moment, a well-known instrument called "forum and chats" has been re-invented.

Tomorrow we will talk about synchronous and asynchronous ways of communicating and building communities.