The Community Delusion: Why Most Tech “Communities” Fail Before They Begin

The Mirage of Community: Why Most Programs Fall Apart

When executives greenlight a community initiative, it’s often framed as a growth experiment: increase loyalty, reduce churn, improve customer experience.

But that framing contains an unspoken assumption - that a community is something you create, control, and eventually monetize.

In reality, communities don’t begin with your brand.

They begin with the people you’re trying to serve.

They gather, usually quietly, in group chats, Reddit threads, conference hallways, or even private DMs.

If you’re lucky, they let you sit with them.

The minute you assume your job is to create a community from scratch, you miss the truth: it likely already exists.

Your job is not to “build” it.

Your job is to find it, respect it, and slowly earn your way into it.

From Misalignment to Mistrust: How Bias Distorts Community Strategy

Several cognitive biases quietly shape how community initiatives are launched and mismanaged.

They distort priorities, set unrealistic expectations, and cause well-meaning teams to burn out or give up too early.

1. Survivorship Bias

Founders and marketers often point to success stories - companies with vibrant, engaged user bases - and assume they can replicate the same outcome.

What they don’t see are the thousands of dead Discords, ghost-town Slack groups, and failed forums that never made it past month six.

The visible few aren’t representative. They're outliers.

2. Planning Fallacy

There’s a persistent belief that community growth will follow a predictable timeline, usually tied to quarterly OKRs.

In reality, community growth is nonlinear.

It's slow, often invisible, and tends to accelerate only after a long, messy middle.

Internal stakeholders vastly underestimate the time, emotional labor, and iteration it takes to earn trust.

3. Authority Bias

Often, community building is initiated from the top down - a CMO hears about “community-led growth” and instructs a team to go “build one.”

The problem is that authentic communities don’t emerge from PowerPoint decks.

They emerge from lived experience, shared purpose, and decentralized ownership.

When a community is dictated instead of discovered, members sense the disconnect immediately.

The Real Anatomy of Community: Mission, Trust, and Mutual Incentive

If a community isn’t a product, a channel, or a brand strategy, then what is it?

At its core, a real community requires three foundational elements:

1. Mission

People don’t gather without a shared purpose.

That mission might be personal (navigating burnout), professional (solving specific technical challenges), or cultural (advancing a marginalized voice within an industry).

Mission is what compels people to show up the first time and return when things get messy.

Too many companies skip this step.

They assume the mission is implied - “we’re here to support our users” - when in reality, that message rings hollow unless it's rooted in a problem the members care about more than your product.

2. Trust

Trust is the oxygen of any real community, and in industries like cybersecurity, it’s in short supply.

Practitioners are skeptical by design.

Many have been burned by exploitative vendor communities, invasive data collection, or bait-and-switch tactics disguised as value.

Trust isn’t gained with brand tone or occasional giveaways.

It’s earned over time by listening more than speaking, by being human, and by showing up consistently without expectation of return.

3. Mutual Incentive

Healthy communities operate on a cycle of give and get.

Members contribute insights, support, or content because they believe they’ll receive something of equal or greater value in return.

This could be knowledge, recognition, job opportunities, or simply a feeling of belonging.

The moment that exchange becomes lopsided, when the few give too much, and the rest passively consume, engagement stalls.

Communities don’t die from inactivity. They die from imbalance.

What Real Community Builders Do Differently

Successful community builders are sociologists, moderators, and sometimes therapists.

They understand that their job is less about broadcasting and more about maintaining cultural hygiene, fostering safety, and connecting people who can help each other grow.

Here’s what they prioritize:

Curate, Don’t Control

You can’t script organic interaction. But you can create the conditions for it.

Great community builders design with intent, but not with ego.

They elevate member voices, not their own, and know when to step back.

Focus on the 70% Who Never Post

Most communities are built by the 10% who contribute but sustained by the 70% who watch quietly.

Silent lurkers often derive immense value without ever commenting.

Your job isn’t to force participation.

It’s to make sure they feel safe, seen, and welcome when they’re ready.

Respect Emotional Labor

Behind every “highly engaged” community is a burned-out moderator.

Community management is emotional work - holding space for others, enforcing norms, resolving conflict.

This labor is rarely visible to executives.

If you don’t plan for it, you will lose your most valuable stewards.

Define What You’re Not

Many companies treat community like an open buffet - serve everyone, please everyone.

But real communities thrive on clear boundaries.

Who’s it for? Who’s it not for? What kind of behaviors won’t be tolerated?

Culture is shaped by what you allow and what you don’t.

Communities Don’t Scale, But Their Impact Does

There’s a hard truth that tech leadership often ignores: communities don’t scale like software.

You can’t automate belonging. You can’t A/B test your way to trust.

But what does scale is influence.

A trusted member telling five others about your space.

A respected practitioner sharing their experience in a private group.

A lurker who finally engages after a year of silence because they saw you were still there.

The most powerful communities aren’t the ones that grow the fastest.

They’re the ones that last the longest through economic cycles, leadership changes, and algorithmic shifts.

Because they were never built on metrics.

They were built on meaning.

Closing Thought: Stop Trying to Manufacture Meaning

If there’s one shift tech leaders need to make, it’s this:

Stop trying to build community like a product.

Start trying to earn it like a reputation.

Before you launch a new initiative, ask yourself:

• Are we solving a real problem that people care about?

• Are we listening to the community before we speak?

• Are we showing up to serve or to be seen?

You can create a community with a roadmap.

More importantly, you can cultivate one with humility, patience, and deep respect for the people you’re inviting in.

That’s not strategy.

That’s stewardship.

Until next time,
Dani