Rosieland Roundup 277

🌤️ Another week. Another week? How did that happen? Welp.

Do you AOTLOT? Add One Thing Like One Thing. — Simon Tomes

When visibility in community matters | Rosieland

10 mindset shifts to help you advocate for the fine art of freemium communities

There is a gap between open and closed communities.

Open communities are generally accessible to anyone and can be crawled by search engines.

Closed communities are generally paid or customer communities where content is all behind a wall.

The inbetween are freemium communities. They can exist in many ways and I often argue that all paid communities are freemium to some extent because they normally have to give something away for free to pull people in. What it is that they give for free can vary immensely on the community and the stage it is at.

Greg's Fridge

I left a note on Greg's Fridge. 😍 Just for fun, but little things like this could be so fun in communities.

Community And Choice Are Not Bubbles | Techdirt, Mike Masnick

Community, not performance 👏

For a supposedly dying bubble that no one wants to use, Bluesky sure generates a lot of traffic-driving hot takes. Which suggests that maybe—just maybe—the entire premise is wrong.

The real story isn’t about Bluesky’s supposed failures—it’s about how these critiques fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitutes healthy discourse.

Knowing Machines

Knowing Machines is a research project tracing the histories, practices, and politics of how machine learning systems are trained to interpret the world.

An interview with Bailey Richardson, OpenAI's Head of Community

📖 OpenAI’s ambition for “scaled access to intelligence”
🤲 How to engender trust with product in an AI-driven world
↔️ OpenAI's emphasis on "building with reciprocity"
💨 The unprecedented pace of ChatGPT's growth, who their earliest adopters are, and how that's rewired how they build

Reddit turns 20, and it’s going big on AI | The Verge

Reddit has gone big on real human responses, but it's also going big on AI. Combining the two seems to be working well in their favour, at least on the surface. I will still remain sceptical. 😄

AI is ruining houseplant communities online | The Verge

Communities like Reddit now ban AI photos, but as AI photos get better, will we be able to really tell the difference in the future?

Misinformation in communities is a problem, an increasing one in the age of AI. It does make me wonder if these easy to gather spots (like Reddit and Facebook groups) make AI slop too easy to be posted.

As community group leaders, is this what we really aspire to? Do we really have to accept AI slop? Maybe we need to raise our standards and build where the slop isn't attracted.

Niche Dynamics in Complex Online Community Ecosystems (ICWSM 2025) | Community Data Science

This one is for you if you like to geek out on data, mutualism and niche communities.

It’s easy to convince people of the power of community. It’s hard (or impossible) to convince organizations. Why? | Fabian Pfortmüller

I have a few takes on this:

It's because community is not (yet, or usually) part of the system. It doesn’t fit into the processes, the flows and the way of how businesses operate. It then becomes too hard to make any meaningful impact.Fighting, or finding the way into the system is hard.
Also, convincing people of the power of community is something we all nod our head along to, the difference is that most people don't take action, or do anything about it.
It's easy to talk. People don't take action. Companies don't take action. Lack of action is where the problem is.