How to manage an actual online community platform, with Oprah Daily’s Pilar Guzmán

The platform – which costs $55 a year to access – mixes aspects of YouTube, Facebook, Slack and Reddit. Oprah Daily posts videos of live audience recordings featuring Oprah Winfrey discussing topics like the teen mental health crisis, longevity and menopause with experts. And people can comment on the videos, pose their own questions in threads for other members to respond to and send private messages to one another.

“Everything that you can do on the internet, we can embed in this platform,” said Oprah Daily editorial director Pilar Guzmán in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Of course, there’s plenty of things people can do on the internet that the Hearst-owned publication or its tens of thousands of paying subscribers may not want embedded in the platform. Having only officially launched The Oprah Insider Community in September after testing it over the summer, Oprah Daily is still sorting out its content moderation strategy. At the moment, the publication’s staffers are taking shifts – including working weekends – monitoring the platform. But Guzmán acknowledged that eventually the platform will need a more formal oversight operation.

“Check in with me in six months, and I’ll tell you. But it’s definitely something that’s on the horizon and that we’ve been earmarking in terms of our org,” she said.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

On how the platform is organized

We call them villages. There’s a relationship village; there’s a weight village; there’s a menopause village; and then there’s something just called “Holding Space,” which is where people are really just taking their real-life issues. So you choose, for lack of a better word, the content area or the village or the tribe – the people that you want to be with who are workshopping a similar problem.

On putting The Oprah Insider Community behind a paywall

I think, necessarily, the community must live behind the paywall, at least some paywall. And we will continue to experiment with various levels of membership. Maybe people who only want to do [The Oprah Insider] Community and not anything else. For now, they’re a bundle because this is the enhancement to what we were already doing. But I could see that evolving.

On enlisting community members in the platform’s development

We launched with this cadre of super users who we have called the O’riginators. They’re sort of the founding members of The Oprah Insider Community. And we actually had a lot of exchange with them in the formation of even just how we decided to name these rooms, these little pods. So we actually talk to them quite a bit and get their feedback on stuff, and we’re constantly fine-tuning and changing things. We will enlist their feedback on a pretty regular basis.

On managing political discussions on the platform

I think we’re probably going to draw a pretty firm line around political discussion. I think we’re going to try to really hold true to that. We’re really trying to manage people’s anxiety on both sides of the aisle, frankly, around this election because it will be devastating to one in two people, no matter what side you’re on. And so it’s more how do you manage your anxiety, your own mental health and mental health of your family unit? 

This article has been updated to reflect that the name for The Oprah Insider Community’s group of super users is spelled “O’riginators.”