Communities don’t have any stored value as of now.
I’m a part of 100+ communities and engage only in a few. They have low switching costs. I can stop showing up from tomorrow as there’s not much incentive to keep going. The limiting factor is time. You can only meaningfully contribute to a handful of communities.
Every community has a shared purpose that brings people together. It needs givers to thrive. A structured way will push more people to become givers.
Say you enter a writing community and get some tokens weekly. You give feedback on peer drafts. Their tokens are distributed to people who gave them feedback (pagerank). Providing high-value rewards will incentivize givers.
Think Reddit karma or Quora credits but they can be redeemed for money or help from an expert who they can’t reach out on their own. The rates would be dynamic. A free market. Buy. Sell. Earn tokens. Redeem them.
There’s a lot of alignment with CBCs here. The members have paid upfront to have skin in the game. Now they get money back on contributing meaningfully. Alum community is a good place to test out this model first. Nobody owes you feedback. It’s a rare gift. But that’s how you course correct.