Imagine a neighborhood farmers’ or a local market where the fruit vendor knows your name before you would have said anything. Though here transactions do happen, the transaction is not the point. You can easily spend two hours and leave with nothing, and you are still welcome.
Most of us knew a place like this once.
What Community Actually Means
Community, in the simplest terms, is giving without expecting anything in return. Serving because it matters, not because there is something to gain.
A rural panchayat is working through a water problem. A tech meetup where someone shares what they figured out the hard way so others don’t have to. A neighborhood that shows up when there is a funeral. There is no ROI, no conversion target, and no strategy behind it.
I am part of the Connectivity Standards Alliance for two reasons: to share what I have learned from my work, and to bring back what others have learned and apply it at my workplace. That is the whole of it. No hidden agenda, no product to sell, no audience to build. Just people in the same space, trying to get better at the same problem.
That is what I have seen in a thriving community. That intention has quietly walked out the door.
The Word That Replaced the Thing
“Community” became the easiest word to reach for in business. It signals warmth. It lowers resistance. It makes a sales motion feel like belonging.
The discussions that take place in these spaces are real. The connections people feel are real. Nobody is lying about that part.
But the purpose sitting behind it is often different.
In a real community, you give first with no guarantee of return. Something grows, or it doesn’t. In today’s definition of community (from an enterprise perspective), the sequence is planned from the start: bring people in, keep them engaged, move them toward a purchase. The intent shapes everything, even when the surface looks identical.
What Drift Looks Like
A few days back, I was part of a business proposal judging panel. Pitch after pitch used the community as the centerpiece: not as a value, but as a mechanism. All of them were building a community around the product. Use the community to drive retention. Monetize the community once it scales.
Not one pitch talked about what the community would actually do for the people in it. Nobody asked what members would learn, or how they would be better off for having shown up. Community was the strategy, not the outcome.
That is the drift.
It does not happen because founders are dishonest. It happens because the word has been stretched so far that it no longer carries its original meaning. Meaning has totally changed.
The Question Worth Sitting With
An audience is not a community. A loyalty program is not a community. These are legitimate things, but they are different things, and we do not have the honesty to call them what they are.
The cheese vendor at the old farmers’ market or local market did not need data. He remembered your name because you kept coming back, and why you kept going back because there was something worth returning to. It was not produced by some sophisticated system or a corporate strategy. It just happens when people show up for each other without an agenda.
If the first instinct in building community is to gain rather than to give, then that is worth pausing. I’m not suggesting that doing business with the local population is wrong, but if we capitalize on the community for their own needs, then we need to protect the meaning of “community.” When that meaning is gone, what exactly are we gathering people around?