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The metrics you're reporting to your leadership are measuring the wrong things.
DAUs. MAUs. Engagement rates. Time on platform. Posts per member. These numbers have been the standard for years. They're also becoming increasingly meaningless. You had a gut feeling… I am here to confirm.
I've spent the last decade scaling communities at Microsoft and DocuSign, mentoring community leaders, and getting my hands dirty directly in the creator economy. The troublesome truth I keep running into: we've been optimizing for attention when we should have been building trust.
That distinction is about to determine which communities thrive and which become ghost towns.
For fifteen years, the playbook was simple: capture eyeballs, measure engagement, report growth. Platforms rewarded reach. Algorithms rewarded frequency. Community leaders became content factories optimizing for the feed.
And look! It worked. Attention was genuinely scarce. When Facebook was novel, when Slack was new, when Discord was niche… getting people to show up was the hard part.
That era is over.
Attention isn't scarce anymore. It's commoditized. Every platform, every community, every creator is fighting for the same finite hours with the same damn playbook.
The result? Your members are drowning. And you're just handing them more water.
I've seen the data from my own work in the travel creator space: people save 847 Instagram posts and visit zero of those places. They bookmark 156 articles and read none of them. They join 23 Slack communities and engage meaningfully in maybe two.
The problem is when everything demands attention, nothing earns trust.
Look at what's actually happening beneath the surface:
Trust in anonymous recommendations has collapsed. Five years ago, 79% of consumers trusted online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Today? Just 42% do [1]
The fake everything epidemic is accelerating. An estimated 30% of online reviews are now fake. AI-generated reviews have increased 400% since ChatGPT launched. Google blocked 240 million policy-violating reviews in 2024 alone [2].
People are hoarding, not acting. Planning time now exceeds doing time for most experiences. Hotel booking abandonment rates sit around 84%. Travelers consume 303 minutes of travel content in the 45 days before booking… then many still don't pull the trigger [3].
And the irony here? AI is accelerating this trust collapse while simultaneously being our best hope for rebuilding it at scale. The same technology flooding platforms with synthetic authenticity might be the only thing capable of filtering it. That tension is the defining mess of the next decade for anyone building communities.
The common thread in all this, is people simply don't trust the signals they're getting. When trust erodes, attention becomes worthless. You can scream into a void with perfect SEO. It's still a void.
This isn't just a theory but something that's happening right now. The business models built on aggregated attention are collapsing.
G2 - the software review giant has watched its global ranking drop 36% in two years, from #15,482 to #21,036. Traffic fell another 7% last month alone [4]. The review platform model is eroding beneath their feet.
Chegg was once valued at $12 billion. Today it trades below a dollar. Non-subscriber traffic collapsed 49% year-over-year as Google's AI Overviews started answering questions directly instead of sending clicks [6]. They're now suing Google [5], but the real story isn't the lawsuit. It's that "being the answer" stopped mattering when anyone could synthesize an answer.
HubSpot lost 70-80% of its organic traffic between 2024 and 2025. They now brag about being "cited in LLMs more than any other CRM." Only 10% of leads come from blog traffic now… down from the majority of their pipeline. The content marketing playbook they literally wrote is being rewritten [7].
Meanwhile, Gartner spent $30 million acquiring Pulse [8], a peer community platform for C-suite executives, "to empower business and technology leaders to make peer-led decisions." Even the company that sells data decided the future isn't aggregation, but trust.
The pattern is unmistakable: platforms built on capturing attention are hemorrhaging value. Platforms built on cultivating trust are where the smart money is going.
Nobody might want to say it internally, but these aren't consumer trends happening "out there" to other people. Your members are those consumers. They bring these broken patterns with them every single time they log in to your owned platforms, too.
Someone in your community asks "what's the best X for Y?" They get replies… thoughtful, detailed, contradictory. They thank everyone, but implement nothing. Six months later, same person, same question, slightly different wording.
It's the 84% hotel abandonment rate wearing a different hat. Same paralysis, different venue.
Or think about your community lurkers. They join, they watch, they save messages to "read later," they never ask a question. It's not disengagement… it's the same hoarding behavior driving those 847 saved Instagram posts.
They're the same people carrying the same depleted trust batteries into every space they enter. If your community isn't actively building trust, you're another tab they'll simply close. Probably already have.
The shift from attention to trust is already happening, one community at a time. There are already patterns showing up:
I've seen experienced this myself. At Microsoft, I built a core group of Power Platform enthusiasts: #FlowFam. A group of three dozen people who effectively guide the decisions for over two million community members. They're a deliberately diverse crew: different backgrounds, different industries, different approaches to the technology. Men and women. Engineers and citizen developers. Corporate types and solo consultants. I know them all personally. We still have an active group chat years after I left. They are like family to me and each-other.
Their influence was built on trust. So when they spoke, people believed them. When one recommended a solution, it worked. When another asked for help, they got answers from people with actual relevant experience. Real answers from real people, united by a cause of automating bullshit work away.
The result was a small, highly-trusted group with outsized influence. It can't be gamed. It takes years to build. But trust like that is now the only moat that matters. Everything else is theater.
You're not the first to notice. Some communities are already rebuilding around trust instead of attention:
Pavilion (formerly Revenue Collective) has built a 10,000+ member community for B2B go-to-market leaders with a "give to get" philosophy baked into membership. They're invite-only, they charge real money ($700-$7,400/year depending on level), and members consistently report that a recommendation from a fellow Pavilion member carries more weight than any vendor pitch.
Superpath created a content marketing community that explicitly prioritizes quality contributors over member count. Jimmy Daly's approach: smaller cohorts, higher commitment, and recognition systems that surface credibility rather than activity. Their paid tiers ($500-$1,200/year) filter for people who are serious.
Modern Sales Pros runs an invite-only community for senior sales executives that one member described as "a place for people to truly come together to share, inspire, and connect without the self-promotional nonsense that dilutes the ability to learn and grow." No vendor content. No growth hacking. Just peers helping peers.
The pattern across all of them? Smaller is intentional, friction filters for commitment, and trust beats reach every time.
The difficult to swallow truth: some of your most "successful" programs might be actively undermining trust. That viral challenge that drove 10,000 new signups? If those members never convert to trusted participants, you didn't grow your community, but diluted it. That "growth" made things noisier. You made the signal problem worse.
If you're still reporting attention metrics to leadership, you're telling the wrong story. Worse… you're lying to yourself about what's working or what will be working very soon.
Stop optimizing for:
Start measuring:
These are harder to measure, but if your metrics are easy, they're probably measuring the wrong thing. Vanity metrics are comfortable. They're also why your community feels busy but hollow.
It's not just your mindset that needs to change. Your executives probably still think in attention-economy terms, too. They want to see the line go up. They're comparing your community's reach to competitors. They're asking you for engagement benchmarks.
You need to reframe the conversation, but without sounding like you're making excuses for flat numbers.
The pitch: "We've been measuring community like a media property… reach, impressions, engagement. But community isn't media. It's infrastructure for trust. And trust compounds in ways that attention doesn't."
The evidence: Point to the trust collapse in traditional platforms. Show them the fake review crisis. Explain why their own marketing team is struggling with declining ad effectiveness and influencer ROI. Then position community as the antidote… but only if it's built on trust, not attention.
The ask: Permission to pilot trust-based metrics alongside traditional ones. Six months. One program. Prove that trust-optimized communities drive better business outcomes than attention-optimized ones.
You won't win this argument with philosophy. You'll win it with results. So go get some.
Here’s the good news! We're in the early innings of this shift. But if you start to look… the signals are everywhere:
Right now, it's a trickle. The community leaders who act on this shift early have a window to rebuild their programs around trust before attention metrics become obviously bankrupt.
That window won't stay open forever, though. When the flood comes, and executives finally realize that engagement theater isn't driving business results, you want to already have the trust infrastructure in place. Not be scrambling to build it while the water rises.
The communities that figure this out first won't just survive the transition. They'll be the ones actually worth trusting.
So... start building trust. Stop gathering attention.
Jon is the community builder behind global ecosystems at Microsoft and DocuSign. Keynote speaker, YouTube host & creator. Motorcyclist, skier, and collector of moments.
