Most Community Metrics Are Meaningless
Follower counts, engagement rates, and DAUs tell you nothing about real community value. Here's what actually matters.
Most community metrics are meaningless.
Follower counts. Engagement rates. DAUs. These numbers dominate dashboards and investor decks, but they measure the wrong thing entirely. They measure attention. They do not measure authority.
The distinction matters more than most founders realize.
The Vanity Metric Trap
Every community platform optimizes for the same proxies: time spent, posts created, reactions given. These metrics are easy to measure and easy to inflate. They're also easy to game.
A bot can generate engagement. A growth hack can spike DAUs. A viral moment can multiply followers overnight. None of this builds lasting value.
The problem isn't that these metrics are wrong. It's that they're disconnected from what actually matters: whether the community creates real outcomes for its members.
A running club with 50 members who show up every week is more valuable than a Discord server with 10,000 lurkers. But standard metrics can't tell the difference.
The Signal Hierarchy
Not all community data is equal. There's a hierarchy of signal quality that most platforms ignore:
1. Stated Intent (Weakest)
What people say they'll do. Signups, RSVPs, expressed interest. Easy to collect, unreliable as prediction.
2. Digital Actions (Weak)
Clicks, likes, comments, shares. Observable but cheap. Low cost to produce, low signal value.
3. Committed Actions (Medium)
Payments, bookings, scheduled commitments. Requires sacrifice. More signal, still gameable.
4. Physical Presence (Strong)
Actually showing up. Attendance, participation, real-world engagement. Hard to fake, expensive to produce.
5. Repeated Behavior (Strongest)
Coming back. Recurrence, retention, sustained engagement over time. The only metric that compounds.
Most analytics tools stop at level 2. The valuable signal lives at levels 4 and 5.
What This Changes
If you accept this hierarchy, several things follow:
Stop celebrating signup numbers. A thousand signups with 2% activation is worse than a hundred signups with 80% activation. The smaller number wins.
Design for recurrence, not virality. A feature that brings 10 people back every week beats a feature that brings 1,000 people once. Optimize for the return visit.
Measure physical presence when possible. If your community has any real-world component, that's your most valuable data source. Protect it. Structure it. Build on it.
Treat engagement metrics as leading indicators only. They might predict behavior, but they don't prove it. Reserve judgment until you see the downstream action.
Takeaway
• Community value lives in repeated, real-world behavior—not in engagement proxies.
• The signal hierarchy runs from stated intent (weakest) to repeated presence (strongest).
• If your metrics can be gamed by bots, they're not measuring community health.
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At Avec Trois E, we design products and systems that capture real community signals and translate them into AI-readable authority.
If you're building a community product and these questions resonate, this is the layer we focus on.