🚨 A Weekend EXPERIMENT That Made Me Question How We’re Using SKOOL!

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(or… the weekend I stopped posting content and went FULL HUMAN)

Right… so this weekend I ran a little experiment on myself that started as curiosity and ended with a bit of an OOOFFFF moment.

For three days I stopped posting content completely.

No posts inside my community or outside

No “quick thoughts”.

No AI-ing (anywhere).

Nada. Not a tofu sausage.

Instead I decided I was only allowed to do one thing.

Actually talk to humans.

Reply to comments.

Jump into existing threads.

Go back through notifications.

Respond properly instead of doing the lazy “great post!” drive-by.

And oooffff… the results surprised me.

Not because of anything clever I did.

But because of what it revealed about how I (and probably a lot of us) spend our time inside communities.

◉ WHERE THIS IDEA EVEN CAME FROM

Last week I was watching the Skool news and Sam Ovens mentioned something that made my brain go HMMMM.

He said he posts maybe one piece of content a week and then spends most of his time inside conversations. Listening to people. Replying. Being present in the comments.

Now before anyone jumps on me with “CONTENT IS IMPORTANT” yes, OBVS DUH content matters. I literally work with messaging and content all the time so it would be a bit awkward if I suddenly pretended content didn’t exist.

But the thing that stuck in my head was the balance.

How much time are we actually spending creating content… versus actually talking to HUMANS.

Because if we’re honest (and we’re allowed to be honest in here hey)… writing content can feel productive, but it doesn’t always mean we’re actually connecting with people.

So instead of debating the idea in my head I thought…

Right… let’s test it.

◉ THE RULES OF THE EXPERIMENT

For three days I gave myself two rules.

1️⃣ Rule one was NO CONTENT AT ALL.

No posting in communities.
No posting on socials.
No quick updates.
No “this might be interesting” thoughts.

2️⃣ Rule two was NO AI. (whatsoever)

No brainstorming.
No structuring ideas.Nothing.
Now here’s the funnyish bit.

The first thing that showed up wasn’t some deep insight about community building.

The first thing that showed up was how STRONG the posting habit is.

The amount of times I opened something and thought“oh I’ll just quickly post this thought” and then had to stop myself… was ridiculous.

At one point I actually posted something by accident and deleted it about 4 seconds later because technically that was cheating my own secret mission.

So the experiment quickly became less about content and more about habit awareness.

◉ WHAT I DID INSTEAD

Every time I had the urge to write a post, I opened my journal instead.

Which was actually one of the nicest parts of the whole experiment because it reminded me how I used to process ideas before everything in my brain became potential content.

No formatting.
No structure.
No “is this good enough to post” stuff.

Just thinking in the moment.

And that alone felt surprisingly refreshing 🍹

◉ THE ACTIVITY TEST (THIS IS WHERE IT GOT INTERESTING) 🟩🟩🟩

Inside Skool there’s the activity tracker with the little green squares — you know the ones. (Head to your profile and check it out.)

The minimum activity to keep the fire alive is 10 interactions, which if we’re honest is very easy to hit.

So I decided to test something.

I set a timer for 30 minutes and told myself that for those thirty minutes I could only do one thing.

Intentional conversation.

No scrolling aimlessly

No fluffy fluff comments

No “great post!” poop.

Actually reading posts and responding properly as the human I am.

Thirty minutes later I checked the activity count.

91 activities.

Ninety one.

In half an hour.

Which immediately made me ask myself a slightly brutal question…

What on earth am I doing on the days when my activity number is something like 19 or 22?

Because clearly if I focus for thirty minutes I can create far more interaction than that.

◉ THE RIPPLE EFFECT I HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT

And then another little lightbulb went off. PING.

Those 91 activities are not just 91 ticks on a dashboard.

Every time you comment somewhere something else happens.

Someone gets a notification.
They come back.
They reply.
Other people see the thread.
They jump in.

So one comment often creates multiple interactions.

Which means thirty minutes of conversation probably didn’t create 91 interactions.

It likely created hundreds of small engagement ripples across the platform.

And that’s when I started wondering if something important gets missed in how we think about content vs conversation.

◉ SO I PUSHED IT FURTHER

Because I was already in the flow, I extended it to an hour.

During that hour I spoke to people I hadn’t interacted with in ages, responded to posts that actually resonated, supported a couple of people sharing struggles, and celebrated a few wins people were having.

After one hour the activity number was 140.

That was just one hour of intentional conversation.

◉ THE WEEKEND TOTALS

Saturday I repeated the same idea.

One focused hour of interaction, then later in the day I jumped back in for more conversations.

By the end of the day the activity number was 242 activities.

Two hundred and forty two interactions.

No posting

No broadcasting.

Just conversation.

Which made me realise something slightly uncomfortable.

If I ever say “I don’t have time for conversation” in my business… that’s probably not true at all. Pffffttt.

◉ THE DISCOVERY RANK BIT (THIS MADE ME GO HMMMM AGAIN) 📊

Now here was another little twist in the story that made me raise an eyebrow.

During those three days of NOT posting content, something else quietly moved in the background.

The Discovery Rank of the community shifted.

Before the experiment it had been sitting around #633-ish for weeks.

Not moving much. Just kinda chilling there doing its thing.

But over the three days of this little human experiment… it jumped to #521 😳

Now I’m not pretending that one tiny test suddenly cracked the code of the Skool discovery (pffffttt calm down Mimi), but it definitely made me curious.

Because if no new content was posted during that time… then something else must have been driving the movement. Which made me go back and actually read how Skool describes Discovery Rank.

Skool says groups are ranked by:

• member growth

• engagement

• retention

Which in plain English basically means things like:

how many conversations are happening

how many replies people are leaving

how often members come back

how long they stay interacting

So when conversations start looping…

reply → reply → reply → reply

you create what I can only describe as engagement chains.

And those chains are actually incredibly powerful inside communities.

Which made me think something slightly interesting.

Maybe we’ve all been trained to believe content is the engine.

But maybe inside communities…

conversation is actually the fuel.

◉ THE INTERESTING SHIFT I NOTICED

Something else changed when I stopped posting content.

People seemed to move from reading mode into participation mode.

When community leaders post a lot of content people often read, react, maybe comment quickly, then move on.

But when the leader starts interacting more inside conversations instead, something different happens.

People reply more.

Threads keep going.

More people join in.

It starts to feel less like an audience… and more like a room.

◉ THE THEORY I’M SITTING WITH RIGHT NOW

This experiment wasn’t about deciding between content or conversation.

Content still matters.

Content still brings people into spaces.

But what this experiment made me question is whether we sometimes over-index on content creation and under-index on conversation.

Because right now the theory forming in my head is something like this

Content brings people to the door.

Conversation is what actually makes the room feel alive.

◉ CURIOUS WHAT OTHER SKOOLERS HAVE SEEN

So I’m totes curious what other people have noticed.

When it comes to building communities and relationships online, where do you think most people spend too much time?

Creating content.Consuming content.Or actually having conversations.

And if you’re brutally honest with yourself for a moment…

Which one are YOU personally doing the most of right now?

I found this mission so interesting to do, loved learning and discovering loads through it… but yes also CELEBRATING some content again now, phew HELLO 😝

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