Communities
Branded space are audiences, not communities.
You can’t build a community if you’re looking for an audience. An audience is based on similarities of interests; it is a place of exchange that resists change and divergence. Communities, in their fuller sense, are spaces that don’t ask you to fit in, where you can be generous without knowing that you went to the same school, know the same people, or worked at the same company.
Communities built around similarities necessarily invite a limited way of showing up. A space for designers will only temporarily tolerate non-design topics. Other topics will be perceived as a dissonance to the type of content this space expects.
Audiences seek media, while communities seek a changing form of belonging.
If you want to pressure test this point, I would like to invite you to test your affordance to bring new topics to a chosen space.
p.s. I recommend Scott Page’s The Diversity Bonus (YouTube video) to add to the creative value of the shift from audiences to communities.