The Knowledge You Keep Buried

Consumer enthusiasm for AI-generated creator content dropped from 60% to 26% in two years ^[1].

A collapse. And... I bet it gets even lower.

Marketers poured 79% more ad spend into AI-generated content over the same period. So the supply went up while the demand went down. The feeds are full of the stuff nobody wants. And people are getting better at sensing it, even when they can’t name it. Digiday talked to agencies late last year and one of them put it plainly:

“Consumer sentiment is roaring [against AI]. They hate it! We’re in this massive reset” ^[2].

All of that is the context for something nobody in community is talking about loudly enough.

Every community I know is sitting on thousands of conversations where practitioners answered hard questions from real experience. Original research. Verified by actual humans. The kind of signal people are desperately hunting for right now.

But it's getting left in Discord chats and Slack threads. Buried. It's a treasure and we're all just sitting on it.

The people who figured this out

Morning Brew didn’t figure this out by accident. They looked at their audience… young, upwardly mobile, deeply engaged, and asked what it would take to interact with them instead of just publishing at them. The answer was the Breakroom: a standing research panel of 200,000 opt-in readers who agreed to be asked things on a regular basis ^[3].

In 2025 alone, Morning Brew ran 38 proprietary studies through that panel. The data now powers decisions across 200+ employees and 21+ brands: editorial, product, ad sales, all of it. Their CEO described it as bringing “from behind the scenes to the front of the scenes” the value that was already sitting in the audience. Revenue is up 15-20%, profitability up 50% ^[4].

Their newsletter can be copied, but the human signal flowing through that community cannot.

Lenny Rachitsky does the same thing, but at a different scale. His Community Wisdom digest is a weekly, hand-curated roundup of the most useful threads from his 30,000-person paid Slack. The community generates the insights, he packages them up, then he distributes them back to the rest of his audience of 1M+ subscribers. His Slack has become his real moat. Over $2M in annual revenue, driven in large part by retention, his paid subscribers stay because the community insights is where the real signal lives ^[5].

And then there’s Superpath, which we touched on in my last piece as a community doing trust right. What we didn’t cover: their newsletter literally publishes the best Slack conversations from the previous month. Community manager Eric Doty curates them and sends them out to 20,000+ members. Collective knowledge, packaged as editorial content, distributed back to the people who generated it. That loop is the whole game ^[6].

Three different operations. Three different sizes. Same logic running underneath all of them: the community generates the signal, the editorial function captures it, and distribution makes it compound.

A bigger name to convince your leadership

HubSpot just acquired Starter Story… a creator-led entrepreneurship publication built by a team of three people, with ~800,000 YouTube subscribers, a 275,000-person newsletter, and seven figures in annual revenue ^[7].

This is the same company that lost 70-80% of its organic search traffic between 2024 and 2025. The same company whose blog-driven pipeline cratered from the majority of leads to roughly 10%. They didn’t fix the SEO, though. Nor did they produce more content. They went out and bought human-led audiences with real trust already baked in.

HubSpot Media now includes The Hustle, My First Million, Mindstream, and Starter Story… 50 million monthly engagements, with YouTube-driven leads up 68% year over year. Their VP of Media said the future isn’t a search query or an ad. It’s a YouTube video.

The company that literally wrote the content marketing playbook just voted with its checkbook on what replaces it. Human signal. Creator-led trust. Audiences that actually believe the thing they’re reading.

The gap that’s hard to look at

67% of marketers say they wish they could prioritize community. Only 26% actually will. That data came from Morning Brew’s own Breakroom survey at their Marketing Summit last September ^[8]. The 41-point gap isn’t apathy. It’s not entirely a budget problem either. It’s a frame problem. Most community programs are set up to collect… and then stop. Members post. Posts accumulate. Analytics show things happening. The line goes up on the dashboard.

But nobody is doing anything with what gets collected.

Morning Brew built an operation around not letting that happen. Most of the rest of us just watch the good stuff sink.

What you’re sitting on

Go look at your threads right now. Not the dashboard. The actual conversations…

Somewhere in there, somebody described a real problem in specific detail and a handful of practitioners who’d actually solved it gave real answers. That happened. Then it got buried under two weeks of newer posts.

That’s original research. Generated for free. Thrown away.

The same questions come up again and again… and your community re-answers them from scratch every single time because nobody built the evergreen resource when it first appeared. Every month, same generation cost, same knowledge, zero compounding benefit. If that's you, you’re running a knowledge operation that doesn’t retain any of its own knowledge!

There’s also a member churn problem that’s easy to underestimate. When a trusted, senior member goes quiet… changes jobs, loses interest… the insights they dropped over the years of participation go with them. Not literally, the posts are still there. But nobody’s pulling them out. Nobody’s attributing them. Nobody’s making them findable. The archive exists and it’s also completely inaccessible. That’s a strange failure mode but it’s everywhere.

What the editorial function looks like

This doesn’t need to be a full operation on day one. Lenny started the Community Wisdom digest with one contractor reading the Slack and pulling the good threads.

One person, once a week. That’s it. The system is simple because the insight is simple: someone needs to read the thing and decide what matters.

The editorial function in a community context has basically three moving parts:

1. Someone with judgment reads and flags the signal. This sounds obvious but almost nobody does it systematically. Community managers are usually too busy responding to things to read for quality.
2. The signal gets packaged into a format a non-member can consume. A thread is not a resource. But a curated thread with context, attribution, and a short editorial frame on why it matters is.
3. It gets shared beyond the community. This is the part most community programs skip. The insights stay internal (like a community digest), which means the community never becomes a source of external credibility, and the editorial operation never compounds into something that attracts new members.

Superpath’s newsletter is this whole loop in action: community generates it, editorial packages it, distribution compounds. All built around a Slack community of a few thousand people.

Compounding benefits

Here’s what makes this worth caring about beyond just “post more content.”

Morning Brew’s 38 research studies from 2025 didn’t disappear, but became a data asset. They’ll be cited in future content, they give advertisers a reason to pay for access to the audience, and give the editorial team a reader to write to instead of a demographic. Each one compounds the value of the next.

The first piece in this column made the argument that trust compounds in ways attention doesn’t. The same logic applies to knowledge. A community that captures and publishes its own signal builds an archive that gets more valuable over time. A community that doesn’t is starting from scratch every month.

That’s the real cost of leaving the research buried. Not just the opportunity cost of content you didn’t create, but the compounding benefits you aren't capturing.

Where to start

So here's how to solve it. Pick the question your community answers most (the one that comes up every few weeks in slightly different wording). Find the three best responses to that question you’ve ever seen. Synthesize them into something a non-member could read and use. Give the contributors credit for the thing they produced. Then publish it somewhere outside the community.

Do that once a month. See what happens.

Morning Brew did it 38 times last year. Lenny does it every week. Superpath does it every month. None of them started with an editorial team. They all started with someone reading the community and deciding what was worth keeping.

HubSpot just spent real money to buy their way into that same game. You already have the raw material. Go make something with it.