The three ingredients of a great online community

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Style Pass

2021-07-03 14:30:06

Before I welcome you to this edition of the newsletter, will you please just Venmo $20 to your friend that has a podcast they want you to listen to that’s not very good, and sign them up for The Edit? We’ll help them make it good so that you don’t have to feel bad about not listening anymore.

Welcome! We’re here in the #vanlife of podcasting publications—always exploring somewhere new, and always exactly where we want to be with good podcasts along the way.

Today we will talk about the thing that every company is touting yet failing at: community. To start, herding people into an area is not building community. A Facebook group or subreddit with thousands of members that mostly don’t know each other and spend time trying to work around self-promotion rules is not a community.

We’ll use In The Heights as our guide. I’m sure you saw it within the last couple weeks? It is a moving, singing, joyous ode to community. It highlights the three key ingredients that make Washington Heights a wonderful community. We’ll go through each one.