“It’s not a question of ‘how many newsletters can one person pay for?’, it’s ‘how many communities does someone want to be a part of?’”
Hunter Walk, a VC and YouTube’s former head of product, blogged recently about virtual spaces turning into the “third place” between work and home. The internet is the safest place for social interaction in the pandemic, but Hunter writes about watching this phenomenon evolve from his front-row seat as an early developer on the video game Second Life. Gaming is one arena where this is most visible — the New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz wrote last week about the communities that have grown around the indie social-detection game Among Us, which Congresswoman AOC said yesterday she would be streaming on Twitch in a get-out-the-vote effort. Hunter connects the dots to the vibrant virtual communities have also sprung up around newsletters and podcasts with dedicated Slack groups. Content, it seems, is just a gateway to social connection.
