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AI has fundamentally transformed digital communities by commoditizing answers. Where previously one would have posted the question on a forum, or started a conversation on Slack, Discord, or other channels, now a simple prompt is enough. In this new landscape, community value shifts entirely to verified human experience, trust, and shared economic alignment. Building a sustainable digital community today requires moving towards facilitative ecosystem support, where participants can maintain ownership over their identity and collective knowledge.
Building an online tech community used to be straightforward. You created a forum, a Slack workspace, or a Discord server, and in these spaces, people would start gravitating towards each other for questions and answers, gaining insights, and support.
If someone hit a cryptic error code during a platform migration or needed a quick snippet to connect two APIs, they searched the community. Traffic flowed, memberships went up, and community managers pointed to thread volume as the proof for a thriving ecosystem. That model is slowly going away.
In the latest episode of The Open Podcast, Sander Mangel sat down with community strategist and founder at Sifa ID, Guido Jansen, to break down what happens when generative AI changes how people search for answers and shifts the underlying economics of online communities.
The effect of AI on communities
To understand where online communities are going, you first have to look at what used to drive their day-to-day activity. Historically, the majority of community interactions were transactional.
Simple queries that receive simple answers. Questions like, how do I override this template in Magento? Or what’s the API rate limit for this endpoint?
These exchanges accounted for up to 80% of forum posts. They created the picture of high engagement, but they were fundamentally functional rather than relational. People came for a quick solution and left.
Now, large language models give developers and merchants those answers instantly. There is no longer any reason to log into a community forum, search through pages of outdated threads, and hope someone replied in 2021 with the right answer.
“If it's very transactional in that I just wanted an answer and the forum gave that to me, that's at a higher risk of being replaced by AI than something that's more about the feeling of community and wanting to belong somewhere,” Guido noted during the podcast. “With AI, the answers are now free, but the trust is expensive.”
For community leaders used to measuring health by thread volume, this decline looks like a problem. But as Sander pointed out, this is actually a gift. When basic answers become a free commodity, the surface-level engagement disappears, leaving behind a clear view of whether your community actually offers real human connection or was just serving as a documentation index.
The value of human trust
If quick answers are free and abundant, what becomes rare and valuable?
The answer is context, years of experience, and human trust.
An AI tool can read platform documentation and generate an implementation plan in seconds. What it cannot tell you is real-life cases of what will affect your client's inventory sync when order volume increases or when a particular vendor’s support team takes 4 days to respond during peak season. That kind of knowledge doesn't live in public documentation. It lives in the knowledge of senior practitioners who have actually built systems and fixed them under pressure.
“You want to hear it from people that you trust, that you know, that they live through and that they have a stake in the things that they're saying,” Guido explained. “Like an AI doesn't have any stake in being right or wrong, it just gives you an answer.”
This shifts the whole purpose of community spaces. Modern digital communities are now peer-validation networks. People join spaces not to find a generic answer, but to check decisions with peers they trust. Instead of asking "How do I install X?", community members now ask:
"We're evaluating this architecture for a multi-region deployment. But I’m getting conflicting answers from AI”
"Is this vendor easy to work with?"
"How are you structuring your retainer agreements?"
These questions require lived experience, shared context, and mutual vulnerability. These are things that an AI prompt cannot replicate.
Mutual economic alignment vs. unfunded altruism
One of the most common misconceptions of community building is that true communities must be built on selfless altruism. Corporate leaders often praise "passionate community members" while expecting them to answer questions, mentor newcomers, and write tutorials for free.
Guido and Sander pushed back hard on this ideal, drawing from years of experience building B2B e-commerce ecosystems around platforms like Magento and Spryker. Communities that rely purely on unfunded volunteerism almost always burn out. For a community to endure, there must be clear and mutual economic alignment. Every participant, whether an independent freelancer, an agency founder, or a platform vendor, needs to receive tangible commercial or professional value that justifies their time.
It means structuring the ecosystem so that contribution naturally leads to professional growth, reputation building, and business opportunities. When everyone’s incentives are aligned, participation functions as a core business driver.
Why do corporate-backed communities fail
If economic alignment is essential, why then do so many corporate-backed communities fail? Because most organizations confuse facilitating a community with owning an audience.
The moment a company views an ecosystem purely as an uncompensated lead-gen pipeline or a channel for marketing announcements, that authentic community dynamic collapses.
Sander noted that companies face backlash “when the relationship becomes less symbiotic, right? [We need to ask] how can we both extract equal value out of the ecosystem?”
“A lot of communities grow organically. So as a company, you can facilitate the community.” Guido emphasized. “Having a strong community is one of the best modes that you can have as a company. A competitor can copy your product one to one, but it doesn't mean they instantly have your market share, right? Community is a very sticky thing, but it's not impossible for communities to decide, we don't like what you're doing.”
Extractive behavior takes on many forms:
- Community managers deleting posts that mention competing tools.
- Account executives scraping member lists to send unsolicited pitch emails.
- Brand guidelines that turn open technical debates into PR statements.
To build a community that lasts, companies must adopt a facilitative leadership model. The best corporate stewards act as hosts rather than masters. When a brand creates a safe space for practitioners to speak candidly, it earns a level of credibility that money cannot buy.
Where should your community live
In recent years, most tech communities migrated to centralized and proprietary platforms like Slack, Discord, or LinkedIn. While these offer convenience, they introduce a major vulnerability. Platform risk.
When you build your entire community inside a proprietary wall, you are operating on borrowed time. Algorithms and pricing structures change, and export tools can disappear which then hides your data behind a paywall. This issue is compounding as major platforms increasingly silo user-generated content and interactions, locking down their APIs to prevent data from leaking into external AI platforms or to monetize it as their own training sets.
As a result, the articles, expertise, and reputation you build become the property of the platform rather than the author. A contributor might spend 5 years building authority in a platform, only to have that entire body of work and reputation vanish if the platform decides to shut the workspace down, update its terms, or migrate systems.
To counter this shift, Sander and Guido discussed the growing need for community sovereignty by looking at decentralized open architectures like AT Protocol and Guido's startup, Sifa ID, as alternatives that allow users to own their identity and data.
“If LinkedIn shuts down tomorrow, then I don't have a CV anymore, right?” Sander noted. “And all those wonderful thoughts that I've written for years are gone.”
Guido highlighted how open architectures return data ownership directly to the user:
“With AT Protocol, basically all your data from all the apps you use live in a single place... All that data is still in your personal data server, not on my servers, so another app can still build upon it. If you have a single account, you can go to a new community and bring your content and reputation with you.”
This prevents a single vendor or platform operator from holding an entire network hostage, ensuring your digital identity and reputation remain yours regardless of where the platform hosting them goes.
Building communities for the long term
The rise of generative AI isn't the end of the digital community. By taking over the repetitive and transactional job of answering basic technical questions, AI forces us to focus on what communities were always supposed to be about and that is human trust, shared experience, and collectivity.
When you bring real practitioners together and give them room to speak honestly, you build an engine that drives real business growth, resilience, and momentum across the entire ecosystem.
Looking for more insights like this? Follow The Open Podcast and stay tuned for more episodes on AI next month.
