Building Communities That Think

Social media and instant messaging fundamentally changed how we talk to each other.

The paragraph has ceded power to fast moving and ephemeral chat that inevitably leans toward the shallow and reactive. Easy and immediate access to information, has replaced depth with speed in both digital and offline conversations. We talk, and we talk fast, and we rarely stop to listen.

When discussion - deep, human discussion, with substance - is swapped out for fast communication, ideas become harder to understand with any degree of accuracy. Writing those ideas down in paragraphs challenges people to think them through in depth, and it provides context for an honest back and forth based on a review of the relevant details. 

In the absence of presence and measure, people turn assumption into meaning, almost instinctively.

I’d go so far as to call it a decline in understanding, and it has a flow on effect – ideas aren’t critically challenged when they’re not fully understood. In communities, the cost of "instant everything" is even higher. The lack of documented discussions, debates, decision making and critical thinking causes a change (at best) or even a wholesale breakdown of cultural identity.

LLMs excel at generating ideas with stunning speed but very little depth; and when we turn to chatbots and text generators almost by default, it’s not unreasonable to fear losing the human factor to our interactions. Depth is the hallmark of deep thought and connection - both uniquely human traits that rely heavily on the presence of time. Without it we operate under urgency, throwing down loosely held thoughts with little to no intentionality or critical thought. Ephemeral,fast communication allows us to operate in this way without immediate repercussions, but if we remove the space needed to revisit our ideas and question our assumptions, the value of our documented collective knowledge is compromised. 

That’s a steep price to pay for instant gratification.

What Does It Mean for a Community to "Think"?

Slowing things down is the act of making room for thoughtful analysis and critique, and it both encourages creativity and supports the development of ideas. Participation becomes meaningful, inclusive, and respectful of our time and our attention. Communication moves from reactive to proactive, creating a dedicated space for empathy – the bedrock of any healthy community.

Communities that actively nurture and grow a culture of deep consideration share some attributes that (I believe) have value:

• They prioritise long-form communication, encouraging people to take time to process and reflect on the importance of the message being conveyed and the way in which it is communicated. The resulting discussion is more informed, reasoned and empathetic. 
• They incubate nuanced perspectives by creating the psychological safety people need in order to challenge each other in healthy ways, stimulating discussion where members can build an equal and deeper understanding. Complex thinkers who may be excluded by frivolous narrative or fast paced discussion are given both the tools and the time to contribute. 
• They recognise the inherent value of an organisational working memory supported by a library of institutional knowledge. In addition to strengthening the operational bus factor, a growing body of writing is a medium for reinforcing collective values.
• They champion inclusive participation free from timezone and schedule constraints by removing the expectation of an immediate response. When that boundary is respected, communication naturally happens at a slower pace. People have the facility to respond from a less reactive position, resulting in richer discussion and deeper connection.

The Asynchronous Advantage 

Thinking communities embrace asynchronous communication, respecting that we don’t all share the same cognitive rhythms - and offering flexibility to engage at a time that works best for each individual, no matter their circumstances. Giving people agency over when they engage leads to higher quality contributions and a more reasoned collective mindset.

Interacting on a slowed cadence enables deeper participation because it affords adequate space to read and consider other positions before forming an opinion. When the expectation of a quick response is removed, there is space for curiosity and questions. This approach includes the quiet voices – people less inclined to join in rapid-fire discussion because they’re uncomfortable thinking under pressure or communicating in a second or third language.

Asynchronousity capitalises on the real, tangible benefits of having a global reach. Scalability and diversity challenges are easily overcome, enabling communities - including critical international research and open-source projects - to operate effectively and intentionally.

Reducing interruptions unlocks focus, which is critical when complex and detailed information has to be both shared and understood, or when it needs to be recorded with structure and clarity. 

Communities that effectively collaborate asynchronously set clear boundaries around availability and define explicit response time expectations. Acknowledging and respecting the difference between urgent and crucial conversations is an important cultural norm to instill. 

One relates to time, the other necessity.

Building Memory Into Your Community 

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it’s possible to build an active community on a short-form platform like Slack or Discord. But the value proposition is vastly different to that of a truly thoughtful community. Interactions are immediate, brief and ephemeral – lacking in any real depth and unable to support the development of ideas, beyond the level of a group chat

It’s a medium that works for socialising, getting quick responses to urgent questions and collaborating in real time; but it isn’t designed for communities who value the act of walking away from the discussion for a while, who recognize that as the key to critical thinking. As a result, chat based communities are generally more impulsive and frequently less inclusive.

Perhaps Jeff Atwood said it best:

Consider the difference between a chat room and a discussion. Chat is a never-ending flow of disconnected, stream of consciousness sentences that you can occasionally dip your toes into to get the temperature of the water, and that’s about it. Discussion is the process of lobbing paragraphs back and forth that results in an evolution of positions as your mutual understanding becomes more nuanced.

A community that builds a collective base of knowledge is a community built to last; but it needs, it craves a foundation of permanent, discoverable conversations. Chat based platforms might keep a searchable record of all your discussions, but the highly unstructured nature of the format makes it unsuitable for the long-term storage,sharing and revisiting of knowledge.

To create a collective working memory and support its long term preservation and functionality, a platform must provide solutions for tagging and categorising information in a logical and discoverable way. It creates a culture where ideas evolve over time, fueling innovation as concepts are rediscovered, decisions reexamined, and old assumptions challenged.

A chat based community may enjoy early stage growth and healthy engagement, but without easy access to its crowdsourced memory bank the signal to noise ratio doesn’t scale, and the result is an echo chamber of the same questions on repeat. The people with the answers begin to get response fatigue until eventually all the valuable information drops off into more-than-3000-messages purgatory.

The role of working memory is to create fertile ground for thinking, learning and problem solving. Without it, we can’t learn from past experience. When information is ephemeral it’s a hard ask to translate "what happened yesterday" into "what have we learned?" in any meaningful way. When you have easy access to a detailed written history you have the basis of post-mortems, run-books, policies, and other forms of working documentation at your fingertips. Suddenly the value of those historical discussions increases dramatically.

Designing for Depth Over Speed 

When building a community that prizes depth over speed, it pays to invest in a platform that fosters reading and reflection - while staying intentional with your choices and avoiding unasked for, unneeded complexity.

Features create choice and choice is a dangerous distraction, and the last place you want to find distraction is in the tool you use to write.

Design for simplicity or use, ensuring the following functionality is included in some form:

• Longer-form posting capabilities – rich composers, preview panes, accessible fonts, customisable UI/theme
• Threading that connects related ideas – recommended topics, quoting functionality, replying as a linked topic, information tagging and categorisation capabilities
• Moderation that values quality over quantity – persistent/visible guidelines, gamification that rewards read time over engagement statistics, emojis as an alternative to low quality replies

Be intentional about designing inclusively for “lurkers” – those people that for any number of reasons are more comfortable reading than writing. Think through functionality that invites those with quieter voices to the table – things like assignments, mentions, and personalised content feeds.

Community guidelines have a part to play in shaping discourse quality. While they work to the extent that they are understood and enforced, guidelines are an opportunity to set expectations and document your shared values. ‘

The only form of moderation that scales with a community is the community itself - so give people agency to build a culture that they want to be part of. How that culture evolves will depend on the characteristics of the community and its members, but instilling values that result in the generation of thoughtful and civilized discourse is a pillar of thinking communities. 

The Paradox of Inclusive Urgency 

Without a shared set of deeply instilled values and a collective understanding of expectations, people feel compelled to engage quickly before they forget or the discussion moves on, resulting in shallower interactions, decreased connection to the conversation and less reasoned decision making.

The exclusionary environments created by the "real-time" requirements of short-form communication self-perpetuate as the tension between the perceived need for immediacy and the ease of engaging increases. Yes, it poses a challenge to globally distributed communities, but fast moving discussion can be exclusionary to a multitude of other groups.

Making space for different communication styles and cadences doesn’t have to slow decisions or reduce productivity; in fact, it enriches them by bringing a wider range of perspectives and knowledge. The key is balancing efficiency and responsiveness with thoughtfulness, weighing the urgency and complexity of a situation before choosing how to engage. Some situations call for synchronous communication, but most do not - as communities that operate and thrive across time zones clearly show.

Practical Steps for Community Builders 

Thoughtful communities thrive when supported by adaptable platforms. Reducing friction in reading should be a priority—achieved through real-time updates, contextual linking, and eliminating pagination. Slow people down by making reading enjoyable, and reward them for investing their attention. At Discourse, we resolve the paradox of fast chats vs deep thinking by making it seamless to transfer discussions into long-form, building that reading experience into the platform.

Shaping perception matters. Subtle moderation tools can shift the emphasis away from sheer post counts, while just-in-time messaging can guide newer members toward more constructive communication. Gamification (when used with intention) can inspire members to spend more time crafting higher-quality responses.

The strongest communities hold a culture that prizes consideration over quick takes and recognizes that the best conversations often come from those who spend more time listening than speaking. These behavioral norms should be embedded in the fabric of the community, beginning with how value is measured. Instead of defaulting to traditional engagement metrics, thinking communities measure their health by retention, the richness of discussion, the depth of connection, and the breadth of collective knowledge.

The Future of Thoughtful Communities 

When the pace is dialled back, there’s time to reflect and ponder – uniquely human qualities and activities that support the creation of wisdom. The time it takes for our minds to process our thoughts is a feature, not a bug - allowing us to integrate memories, emotions and existing knowledge. If we force ourselves to speed up we bypass the place where meaning is made.

There is a very real fear that rapidly developing AI will dehumanise our connections. Now is the optimal time to leverage the competitive advantage of communities that truly think, and think together. Those communities are powerhouses of human creativity; and while LLMs have the obvious benefit of speed, without persistent training on thoughtfully human generated data they will continue to recycle the same information with no contextual or recursive growth. 

The future of civilised discourse is in the hands of thoughtful community builders. They hold a generational chance to reaffirm the value of collectives, nurturing them into intelligent channels for creating and redistributing authentically human knowledge.

This is a call to action: we have to champion and prioritise depth, the space where people turn ideas into meaning. The speed of technological change in how we consume information might feel unsettling, but it’s exactly now that we must set aside that unease and reclaim our agency.