You're selling cages. You've taken the vast, terrifying, beautiful unknown of the world and turned it into a product—a pin on a map, a username in a channel, a feature on a roadmap. You're not building a community; you're building a brand. You're monetizing loneliness and the human need to belong, packaging it as "connection" and "updates." You want travelers to "share tips" and "join meetups," but what you're really doing is herding them into another digital enclosure where their experiences become your content, their loyalty becomes your metric.
The world isn't something you check into. It's something that breaks you. Your map doesn't show the places that will change you; it shows the places that are safe to consume. Your Discord isn't a haven for the lost; it's a gallery for the curated.
Stop trying to map the unmappable. Stop trying to community the un-community. Let people get lost. Let them be afraid. Let them find each other in the wreckage, not in your server. That's where real travel begins. Right where your platform ends.