This post is a response to 
We cannot rely on communities to do the work of facilitating relationships, and therefore productive exchanges, on Steem.
A community is a group of humans with some shared purpose or trait. This excludes then groups of people who simply exist in proximity (be it physical or virtual) with each other, which we may instead just call a "society". While I would be willing to split hairs on this in a debate (come at me bro!), I am using this definition as pertaining the post this post is in reaction to. And to boot, it is sensible.
Therefore, as such there are a multitude of communities here in Steem city, but the persons in the city themselves do not constitute a community. This fact is important to establish and understand for two reasons:
- It was clearly assumed by the founders that a single community of some sort would form in order to evaluate the members' content fairly, and
- Knowing now that this has failed, calling for communities to take up this failed job will also fail.
As someone who has attempted to create several communities, both on chain and unconnectedly elsewhere, I know a thing or two about how they work, and more to the point, fail. A few minutes ago I shut down the Nth Society Discord server. The Nth Society community died long ago under my experimental anti-leadership-leadership, but thankfully not without achieving at least a few steps of it's hoped mission, to discover more about what a voluntaryist simulation game would look like. RIP Discord server, the project lives on - barely - but the community is dissolved.
Success for a community however is not uncommon here in Steem city, though it always seems to rely on a few key factors: good leadership, lots and lots of volunteer personnel and time, and most importantly, some kind of agreed goals. Wonderful as this is however, it does not scale to the size of a city. It may work at say 80% inclusiveness maximum in a large village, but not a hundreds of thousands size city.
What people need in a city are services, and the communities will take care of themselves.
You might be familiar with what a cooperative (co-op) is, but there are multiple variations on the theme of mutual ownership. Consider here one of the definitions from Wikipedia:
businesses owned and managed by the people who use their services
This is essentially what so-called "communities" here are. Take a moment to consider that definition to see that the benefiters of the business (who use the service) are those who run it. This ranges from a circle jerk voting ring to 
I don't criticize this model per se, in fact I used it once upon a time to create the short lived Steem Coop! ... kind of, we didn't actually do anything except discuss Steem topics 😅 I do however call into question the notion that this kind of project can scale.
You might retort that Steem itself is in fact such a system. Perhaps on the surface it appears that way but it is not. Not everyone can really benefit, as we all discover at one time or another, especially those who at today's prices gambled on a higher token price when they bought at say a 80c STEEM, those who were once the beneficiary of fairly consistent whale votes which dried up, or a delegation, or have seen their readership grow disinterested on no account because of a writing change.
People will form communities around their interests, goals and common beliefs, that's what people do, but that does not mean that those communities can or should replace the systems which stop a city from collapsing. The language of "community" is an appeal to sign up to someone else's vision, to join a cause or pitch into something. These can be great and worthwhile things, but I repeat, it does not scale, not everyone can share your vision, and most importantly they should not be required to for the ecosystem to thrive.
As I see it members clubs are not the way forward. Impartial services are the key to success if we are really concerned with benefiting everyone. For example a cinema generally does not force you to become a member to watch a movie, and they do not need to know who you are, or ask you to rally for the cause of great and better movies just to enjoy one. Neither, for that matter, do soup kitchens (though you may be accosted in tandem by the religious). Communities, in their natural inclination for closeness, demand more than the causal user is willing to invest in the medium and long term. We must create places in Steem city we can walk up to that are not simply for buying votes (or money now for money later), watching videos or, yes, writing blog posts. It can be more I think, but not primarily through the narrow lens of community.
There is no community which is diverse enough in aims to include all people without simply being "society".
Photo Attribution
The photo used is "People Girl Woman" by StockSnap, licensed CC0 public domain. No attribution required, but doing it anyway, really nice photo with a lol-tastic keyword title 😂