"I don't really know what 'community' means. And I never use that word"

A blunt confession about one of tech’s favorite abstractions, the statement casts doubt on a word often used to sanctify scale and soften power. “Community” is invoked by platforms, brands, and institutions to suggest belonging, mutual care, and shared purpose, yet it frequently stands in for looser, transactional arrangements: audiences, markets, or user bases. Refusing the term becomes a refusal to launder asymmetries of control through warm language. If you won’t define who belongs, who decides, and what obligations bind members to one another, you may not be talking about a community at all.

The hesitation also signals epistemic humility. Real communities are thick: they carry norms, memory, lines of accountability, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and often material interdependence. They involve boundaries and consequences. Online networks can host community, but engagement metrics and follower counts are crude proxies for those dense bonds. Calling every collection of people a community collapses important distinctions, between neighbors and subscribers, co-workers and fans, a union and a comment thread.

There’s a moral dimension too. Labeling users as a “community” can conscript them into a narrative of shared fate without granting governance or rights. It can pressure dissenters to conform, who wants to be the one undermining the community?, while masking who sets the rules and who benefits. Eschewing the word is a way to avoid making unearned claims about solidarity and to keep language honest about relationships of service, product, and power.

Precision matters for design and policy. If you mean customers, say customers; if you mean a network, say network; if you mean a member-owned, self-governing body, then “community” might fit, but be ready to show the charter, the processes, and the costs. The skepticism invites a disciplined practice: name the relationships you can actually support, the obligations you’re willing to carry, and the governance you will share. Anything less is branding, not community.