Community Without the Noise, Revisited

Bob Dunn: Hello everyone, and welcome to Open Channels FM Podcast Network and today’s commentary on Open Channels News. I’m Bob, and a few years ago, I recorded an episode here called Building the Community Without the Noise, which seemed like a great commentary to share here on Open Channels News. I went back and read the transcript this week. And what struck me is how little of it had changed. I’m talking again, over 4 years ago. If anything, the idea matters more now than it even did then. Back then I was talking mostly to people building around WooCommerce. This time I want to widen the lens to open source and the open web in general, because that’s where most of the communities I care about live. So let me take another run at it.

Now, before I get into it, I want to say what’s changed, because a lot has. 4 years ago, the big question was which tool to use. Today, there is a bigger one. Who owns the space your community lives in? Now, through some research, this is what I’ve seen happen.

First, the platforms. Take for example, Slack had already capped free workspaces at 90 days of history back in 2022. Then in ’25, some of the biggest open source communities, including the CNCF and Kubernetes, were told their sponsored plans were ending and years of history could fall out of reach. Those downgrades were postponed, but essentially, as you probably maybe have experienced, it was a wake-up call.

Second, noise got cheap. January 26th, curl ended its bug bounty because of the flood of AI-generated reports. In March, Jazzband, a long-running collective of Python projects, announced it was shutting down. Its lead said open membership was no longer workable with AI-generated spam in the mix. These aren’t fringe projects. Maintainers have had to build walls just to protect their time.

Third, trust. A run of well-known projects changed their licenses, Terraform, Elasticsearch, and Redis among them. Communities answered with forks, OpenTofu, OpenSearch, Valkey. Many of those landed under foundations. The research I read had a line that stuck with me as I was going through it. That is, a project is much stronger than the company behind it. The community made that call.

And the thread through all of it, the louder and more automated things get, the more a community has to decide on purpose what it’s for, where it lives.

Here’s where I’m coming from. I’ve been building communities for a long time around my brand, long before I got into open source in 2006, and some of it long before anything was online. My brand, BobWP, started in 2010. I’ve been at it in one form or another ever since. I’m not a community expert. There are plenty of people happy to hand you a framework, and often they’ll disagree with each other. What I have is what’s worked for me and what I’ve watched not work. Take it as one perspective, not the answer.

And personally, prior to the internet or the beginning, I was just part of business communities where the status quo then was chambers of commerce organizations. But again, the online community found its way to me and then some unique earlier online groups. But as I started building my own communities, the first question was always the same. So are you doing a Facebook group? Someone would ask me. A Slack channel? A private forum? And every time I said no. Every time. Not because these tools are bad. They’re not. I said no because nobody was asking what the community was for. The tool was the default and the default became the plan.

Somewhere along the way, we decided community is a chat room, and if the chat room isn’t busy, the community is dead. Open source took that idea and ran with it. Slack workspaces with thousands of people, Discord servers with 40 channels, notifications at all hours, and then we wonder why maintainers are tired and good people go quiet. Plus, more of the fringe groups that would create channels where they spent time complaining, ranting more than ever, while never offering a conversation worth listening to.

So it became engage or die. You’ve heard it. Engage your audience or your community will die. But nobody defines engagement. In practice, it turns into a constant need to reply. Now, I’ve watched people drop into threads with simple comments like nice, great, cool, yeah. That isn’t engagement. That’s attendance. It builds a metric, not a community. To me, engagement is bringing something to the conversation, a real question, a fix, a different angle. If you have nothing to add, saying nothing is fine.

And the noise has a new layer now. It takes no effort at all to generate a reply that looks like participation. You’ve probably seen, I know I have, AI-generated comments or contributions in communities that we all follow. In fact, a lot of people talk about them and they’re so red-flagged. You can tell it a mile away. When noise costs nothing to produce, the people who protect quiet become more valuable.

So what about listening? Here’s the part I think about most, and I’ve talked about this a lot. I wonder if the art of listening is dying. You know, the threaded conversation where it looks like most people never read what others said. Half of them haven’t read the original post either. So each comment becomes about the person writing it. It’s a room full of people shouting their thoughts at the ceiling.

I listen a lot. I’ll sit in a group for weeks and just read. I’ll only add something if I have something worth adding. When I meet someone online or in person, I try to actually listen to them. And here’s what I found. All that listening made me, I feel, smarter. It gave me a more varied outlook than I’d ever get from just talking. In open source, listening is a form of contribution. Reading the whole issue before you comment, reading the discussion before you open the pull requests, understanding why a decision was made before you question it. It sounds simple, and it’s rarer than it should be. And as I said, when I’m listening, I often learn things that I never would have learned if I didn’t pay attention. And more concentrated on what I would say next.

So why does the open web matter here? This is where it connects to the open web. Most of the places we build community are owned, and the Slack changes I mentioned show what that can cost. A platform decides what gets seen, what gets buried, and what’s rewarded. Those platforms are built to maximize activity, and activity is not the same as value. The open web gives you another option, your own site, your own list. Writing that lasts and can be found a year from now instead of a thread that disappears down a feed. It’s slower on purpose. It leaves room to think before you speak, which is exactly what a noisy room doesn’t.

Now, I’m not telling anyone to leave the platforms. This is my commentary, and I’m saying be intentional about which ones you let set the rules. And although social platforms can go against all you believe and stand for and the people owning them, it’s a sad day because we still need them at some point.

So if you’re building or tending a community around an open source project or product or a group of people you care about, here’s what I’d leave you with. First, decide what the community is before you pick the tool. Second, engagement is value, not volume. Third, listen first. Have a voice, but make room for others to use theirs. Less noise doesn’t mean less conversation. It means the conversation you do have is worth having. That’s it. Community without the noise. Take it or leave it.