Somebody, right now, is calling their email list a community. Somebody else is calling a Discord full of people waiting for product drops a community. A SaaS company is calling its monthly active users a community.
The word is getting smeared across everything that vaguely involves more than one person.
If the only things you give people are content and the chance to buy something from you, you have an audience. Call it what it is. Audiences are great. I've worked with some of the biggest and best in the world. They're a real, proud, and useful thing, and some of the sharpest marketers I know have built careers serving them beautifully. Just don't put a community costume on one and expect the trust to transfer. Words have to mean something to be worth anything.
Right now... community doesn't mean much. And its all of our faults.
Here's the thing that keeps me up, though: we have been here before. Very recently. With a different word. And it didn't go well.
"Social media" used to describe something specific. Platforms where you could stay connected to the actual people in your life. Share an update. Check in on a friend. Keep up with a cousin who moved away. It was new and useful and worth logging in for.
Then it scaled, got profitable, and algorithms began to replace friends. Performance replaced conversation. Feeds replaced timelines, and rage bait replaced neighborhood gossip.
The word social barely describes social media anymore. It got hollowed out by the product it was supposed to name. Show a Facebook user from 2007 what the platform looks like today and they'd close the tab and never come back.
But it didn't happen overnight. It happened one compromise at a time, one quarter at a time, one A/B test at a time, until the name on the box had nothing to do with what was inside.
Community is on the same track. And we're closer to the end of that arc than most people want to admit.
I've said before that as the attention economy wanes, trust is the only thing that matters. The trust collapse is accelerating and it's happening inside the communities you run right now.
The communities these posts land in are haemorrhaging trust with every synthetic drop. It's the attention economy's worst habit crawling across the fence into the one place it was never supposed to reach.
The same playbook that hollowed out social is now being pointed directly at the spaces that existed to fix what social broke.
Don't let it happen again!
You need to start pushing back if you haven't already.
"AI helps me write better," "English isn't my first language," "I have dyslexia," "I'm not good at putting my thoughts together."
Fine. Use AI. That's the tool working! We don't have to be anti-AI. The line worth holding isn't whether AI touched someone's words. It's whether AI is helping them communicate or doing the communicating for them.
If they wrote the thought and used AI to translate or polish it - that's ok. They're participating. Their thinking is still the thing on the page.
Prompted AI to generate the thought and then posted the output? That's not participation. The community didn't get the real them.
Stack Overflow banned ChatGPT answers less than a week after ChatGPT launched. Their reasoning: answers were frequently wrong, looked convincing, and could be generated faster than any volunteer could verify.
r/programming, 6.9 million members, one of the largest developer communities on the internet, just banned LLM-generated content outright. Expert spaces don't function when low effort synthetic content floods the same channels as hard won experience.
But the community to learn from is r/AskHistorians. One of the most rigorous discussion forums on the internet... serious historians answering serious questions, where "I found it on Google" will get you removed. They allow AI as a translation tool. A historian writing in German, running their answer through ChatGPT and posting it in English is fine. But the answer itself... the expertise, the analysis, the thinking... that cannot come from the machine.
Not "no AI ever," just no AI as the substance of your contribution. That's the line, and it's the forming consensus.
Cornell researchers found moderators across 100+ active subreddits flagged three consistent fears about AI content: declining quality, disrupted social dynamics, and impossible enforcement. A broader analysis of Reddit's AI rules found 55% are outright bans, 24% are qualified bans, 18% require disclosure. Roughly 97% of communities that took a public stance chose to restrict AI, not welcome it.
If "community" keeps getting slapped on every list, feed, and newsletter in tech, the term becomes meaningless and the places that built something real will have nothing distinct to point to. If what you're building is a real community, then protect it ruthlessly. Write the AI line into your values and your participation guidelines. Say what counts. Say what doesn't. Enforce it.
We can't lose the moment when one human reaches out to another, and something real happens between them.
That's what community is for! That's the whole damn thing. It's the only thing on the internet that can't be faked without the fake eventually killing it.
"Social" used to mean something. Community still does… let's keep it that way.
Jon is the community builder behind global ecosystems at Microsoft and DocuSign. Keynote speaker, YouTube host & creator. Motorcyclist, skier, and collector of moments.
