The quotes below can be found down around the end of that Fast Company article. They are the only few bits in there I (mostly) agree with.

Marketers in a dying internet: Why the only option is a return to simplicity
Fast Company, November 2024

“For marketers, the only option is a return to simplicity, while also emphasizing authenticity.”

“People sought community online long before the World Wide Web was a thing, congregating in the USENET communities of the 1980s. And it’ll continue to exist in a similar form, taking place in niche websites and messaging groups.”

But even those bits are narrow and understated. Look, the concept of seeking community is inherent in humans (and many animals, for that matter). It’s not the result of the web, or usenet groups, or websites, or anything else produced by Silicon Valley. Those are just digital tools to extend the real face-to-face work of building communities with real humans in the physical world. It’s interesting that that notion of reality doesn’t appear in the article, which, instead, focuses only on how marketing teams can push their pitches to all those nasty little niches out there. They are chasing clicks. That’s all.

But marketing teams can easily contribute to real software community building programs when directed to do so. They just don’t. And they no longer know how, too. But it gets better. This was an issue decades ago when FOSS really started eating into corporate and closed software programs from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, etc. Oh, goodness, how to handle all of those radical developers storming the gates? Gaaa!

Well, along came The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 which beautifully articulated a FOSS-like specification for direct engagement in the community building process across the firewall. Simple. The mantra back then was “Markets are Conversations.” Cluetrain was basically “open development” for marketing. We implemented the concept years ago for OpenSolaris pretty aggressively in marketing and engineering — the engineers took to it easily, obviously, whereas we had to train the marketing teams and product managers a little bit more. LOL. But back then our focus was more on real world engagements and code contributions. Very different from today.

Anyway, it’s all been forgotten these days and simplicity and authenticity seem silly in the face of all the overt fakery going on via AI. But if you want a simple spec for authentic communications based on FOSS engineering principles then you won’t find a single document that comes close to Cluetrain.