The Community Currency

Hey

Reader —

I did a count this month and realized I've been posting things online for about 35 years. Started in 1991 on a thing called Gopher — text-based, clunky, thrilling. From there it's been radio station bulletin boards, homebrew CMSes, WordPress, a long stretch of writing 3,000 words a day before breakfast, and now this.

The embarrassing part: I haven't posted to my own personal site in about four years. Caregiving, COVID, my wife's recovery from three accidents, client work that filled every spare hour. The cobbler's kids really did have no shoes. I'm fixing it. The post I wrote about all of that is in the blog section below if you want the full story — but the short version is that this newsletter, and the writing on my own site, is going to be a more regular thing again.

Thanks for being here. Old reader or new — I'm glad you're around.

3 Things I'm Thinking About

1

Communities can't be bought — only built around something worth gathering for.

Meta has now lost more than $73 billion trying to manufacture connection inside the metaverse. Notion got to 100 million users with almost no advertising. The difference isn't strategy — it's whether the thing in the middle is worth showing up for. I went deep on this in the new podcast episode, but it's been rattling around in my head for weeks.

2

The Wayback Machine is in real trouble.

If the Internet Archive keeps losing access to major news sources, big chunks of the early digital record could quietly become unfindable. As someone who spent years building stuff for the web that I now rely on the archive to remember, this one isn't abstract for me. It's the difference between having a past and pretending we don't.

3

The GenX "what were you like in the '90s" wave is hitting harder than it should.

Some of it is the kids-going-to-college thing. Some of it is that the music we grew up on — Wilco, Whiskeytown, the weirder Americana stuff — keeps showing up in TV shows now scoring scenes we weren't ready to feel scored. The nostalgia isn't really about the '90s. It's about the version of ourselves that hadn't started apologizing yet.

One Thing I Learned This Week

Coaching the work is harder than doing the work. For most of my career, I was the guy who'd disappear into a doc at 11 p.m. and reappear with a polished thing at 6 a.m. This year I've been deliberately handing that off — not because I can't do it, but because someone else needs the reps. Every time I sit on my hands instead of jumping in, the team gets a little stronger and I have to accept that the version they ship isn't the version I'd have shipped. That gap is where leadership actually starts.

Links That Made Me Stop Scrolling

The Web We Want Vs. The Web We Have

John Battelle's Search Blog

Battelle on how AI is forcing a return to the outcomes a customer actually wants, instead of the journey through an interface. Twenty years of "make the path enjoyable" are about to collide with "just give them the thing." I'm not sure he's wrong.

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

Wired

The companion read for thinking item #2. Wired walks through what's actually at stake if the Wayback Machine erodes — and there's no real public substitute waiting in the wings.

Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in an AI World

uxdesign.cc

Matches what I'm seeing in the field: everyone is full-stack on every project team now. Great if you've built a culture where good ideas come from anywhere. Brutal if you've been operating as a collection of silos.

On the Podcast

Marginally Better S01E16: The Community Currency

This one's about Notion, Figma, Discord, LEGO Ideas, and a knitting site called Ravelry that has 11 million members and almost no growth strategy. The thread running through all of them: you don't engineer community, you build a place worth showing up to. It might be my favorite episode of the season so far.

Listen to the episode →

New on My Blog

35 Years of Posting Things Online

The full version of the story I started in the "Hey" section. Gopher in 1991. Homebrew CMSes in 2000. The four-year stretch where I went silent on my own site while everything else demanded attention. And what I'm doing about it now.

Read the post →

Currently Taking On: A Few Coaching Conversations

I keep trying to wind down the coaching practice and people keep showing up with problems worth thinking through — leadership transitions, deciding whether to bring AI into a team, figuring out what the next 14 years of a career should look like. If that's the kind of conversation you've been wanting to have, the door's still open.

Start a Conversation

Joe Taylor Jr.