Hey everyone.
☁️ Lots of interesting things this week! ☁️
PG and Jessica
By Sam Altman
What did they do? They took bets on unknown people and believed in them more than anyone had before. They set strong norms and fought back hard against bad behavior towards YC founders. They trusted their own convictions, were willing to do things their way, and were willing to be disliked by the existing power structures. They focused on the most important things, they worked hard, and they spent a huge amount of time 1:1 with people. They understood the value of community and long-term orientation. When YC was very small, it felt like a family.
The future of online communities
By Jason Calacanis

Innovating with Personal Knowledge Mastery
By Harolde Jarch
The practice of personal knowledge mastery is that we should continuously seek new ideas from our professional social networks and then filter them through more focused conversations with our communities of practice where we have established trusted relationships. You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice.

And more this week...
- Terrell Johnson built a massive community around his running website — Simon Owen
- The Growth of Niche Communities in 2020 — Hannan Feroz
- Reddit Squashed QAnon by Accident — The Atlantic
- BlackPlanet’s Founder on Building Impactful Platforms and Communities — Community Signal 🎧
- Come for the course, stay for the community — Jonathan Hillis
- Community building activities (for educators) — OneHE
- Community Management Gone Right (and wrong) Amid Coronavirus — Carter Gibson
- Web Creators — A community for web creators to grow and get inspired — Google
- Why Community Belongs at the Center of Today’s Remote Work Strategies — Dion Hinchcliffe
- Remote Education: Creating community through shared experiences — GitHub
- The Economic Power of Real-time Chat Spaces — Tom Critchlow
- EP16: Creating a Safe Space: How Naj Austin’s Ethel’s Club was Designed for Intersectionality — Masters of Community 🎧
- How Teachers Can Foster Community in Online Classrooms — Wired
- Why use Discord for open communities — Chris Biscardi
- Writers helping writers 📬 Fiona Monga & Nadia Eghbal, Substack — Get Together
- Putting community at the core of learning and transformation — Happy Startup School 🗓
- Community Leadership Summit 2020 — All Things Open 🗓
🐦 And on Twitter…
What’s the hardest thing about building community?
— Rosie Sherry (@rosiesherry) September 26, 2020
Cities aren’t the main way to find like-minded people any more. It’s communities. It’s the sacred spaces where we can find our “tribe” + create “a piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people” - thoughts about Digital Community Gardens ⬇️🧑🌾 https://t.co/fmcNvYzRuO
— Alice Katter (@AliceKatze) September 27, 2020
“An engineer who worked on groups told me they found the group recommendation algorithm to be the single scariest feature of the platform — the darkest manifestation, they said, of data winning arguments.”
— Andrew Claremont (@andymci) September 27, 2020
Where we end up when chasing metrics w/o context: https://t.co/kbSc4eNAPk
What’s next:
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) September 24, 2020
🔜 Making the prompt smaller after you’ve seen it once, because we get that you get it
🔜Working on bringing these prompts to everyone globally soon 👀 pic.twitter.com/08WygQi06G