How creators build thriving communities with clear boundaries

At Hot Topics: Boundaries, an online, audio-only event hosted by Patreon, two creators — community-engaged artist Brenda, known as Art in Jest, and Nico, YouTuber and creator of channel WhatchaGot2Say — shared their approaches for building a healthy community online. Their conversation covered how to address parasocial relationships, build sustainable boundaries, and more.

Session transcript

Erin:
Any creator who shares their work online knows how difficult it is to build a healthy community. If you're not active enough, your community might not be as lively, and if you're too active, it can result in burnout or parasocial relationships. So today we will hear a discussion between two creators on Patreon. We will get to know them in their work as well as how they set boundaries in always on spaces so they can take care of their own wellbeing. First up, it's my pleasure to welcome Brenda to Hot Topics. Hi Brenda. Thank you so much for being here. How are you?

Brenda:
I'm so well. Hi friend, how are you?

Erin:
I am doing great. Could you please introduce yourself to our audience today?

Brenda:
My name's Brenda. I use she/her pronouns. I'm also totally comfortable with they/them. Either one feels great to me. I'm in Ottawa, Canada, and I have had my Patreon since 2018, and actually it was a community member that pointed out to me when I had rounded the corner on five years. Technically, my streams, the tagline for my streams is it's an art stream sort of. So I am supposed to be doing a lot of painting and drawing and occasionally a little bit of sculpture, but I'm what most people would call a community engaged artist, which means I do make visual art, but more often I make stuff happen. So most of the things that I'm doing now are community projects, primarily with the folks that I hang out with on stream, on Twitch, many of whom are here today and many of whom are not only patrons of mine, thank you all, but also up to their eyeballs in all of our shared projects that we do together.

And Twitch has really been the main place that I connect with my community really only for the past couple of years. And I actually credit streaming on Twitch specifically for taking me from having a longstanding Patreon that I'm super proud of and grateful for. But it was streaming on Twitch that let me really establish a connection with a community that brought me all of the joy of being a Patreon ambassador. It's what opened the door to being able to do things like this with Patreon. I would credit live-streaming on Twitch with what really made my Patreon take. Enormously grateful.

Erin:
Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. And I love that community engaged artist. I would love to hear more about how you came to identify as such.

Brenda:
Sure, yeah. I went to school for fine art, but I also did English literature because you got to do something practical. When I was in school for fine art, I saw lots and lots of examples of people who were really successful artists and really unhealthy, unhappy people. There was a really strong culture around really suffering for your art, and it was supposed to be a little bit torturous. It was really hard. It was long hours. That trope of starving artist was alive and well, let me tell you. Maybe that was just my perception. I don't fault the program, it's just the way that I took it in at the time. But it led me to leave the art program and get kind of a busy, important corporate job that I had for a while. And then when I finally got to return to the arts, I realized pretty quickly that making a painting and being sad by myself in my studio just wasn't going to work for me.

So I started doing a lot more projects that would involve things like workshops or starting something and asking the public to finish it, doing installations anywhere that I could get away with it, where I would sort of leave hints or the framework of something and I would be asking for people to engage and to interact. And that type of art making became a much more nourishing and alive thing to me than making a painting and saying, "Please buy my painting," ever really felt like. And I think one of the reasons why streaming feeds that experience so beautifully is that you're basically just hanging out in a room with a bunch of your friends and doing projects together has opened up to pretty much anybody who can participate in the stream due to the time zone and the language. Those are really the only restrictions I have. Now, there is no more geographic boundary, which has been an incredible experience for me.

Erin:
Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Brenda.

Brenda:
My pleasure.

Erin:
Yeah. All right. Let's meet our next guest, Nico. Hey, Nico, how are you?

Nico:
Hey, 안녕하세요. That's hello in Korean. You'll understand a little more of why I chose to say hello in Korean here in a second, but hey, how you are doing? It's good to be here.

Erin:
Awesome. Can you introduce yourself to everyone who's tuning in?

Nico:
Yes. I'm Nico with WhatchaGot2Say. My pronouns are he/him and bruh. I'm a bruh man. Where I come from, we say bruh a lot. In fact, in my community it's caught on so much that everybody's bruh. So he and him pronouns. And then I live currently in Fort Worth, Texas. I've been a creator all of my life really, but I've been a creator on YouTube. That's where I primarily create video content. It's about 13 years. And I've been on Patreon since 2019, so about four years. Before I go any further by myself, I got to give a shout-out to a celebrity up in the chat that I see right now. Shout out to Jane. Yes, Jane is a Patreon celebrity for me. I got to give you a shout-out fam. You are second only to Jack Conte himself for me as far as Patreon goes. So yes, shout out to Jane, my representative.

Yeah, okay. But yeah, so I've been a creator, like I said, all of my life pretty much. I'm known for creating video content on YouTube, currently focusing on reaction videos to K-pop music. And for those of you who don't know what K-pop is, that's Korean pop music. And if that's not niche enough, let's niche it down a little further because we primarily focus on the group BTS. So if you haven't heard of BTS, yeah, I would definitely encourage you to check them out. If you love music, you're going to like BTS. I'm more than sure.

So with our channel, we're a little unique in that with our reaction videos, first and foremost, it's three Black guys, and I say that I want you guys to understand that when it comes to K-pop music, you normally don't associate that with Black guys. You're more associating with teenage girls pretty much. But we're three grown ass Black guys who really love Korean pop music and we're sharing our excitement, we're critiquing it, giving our impressions of the music and the visuals and everything like that. We go in deep, deep detail to the point we also do podcasting as well, which we just started.

So we absolutely love what we do. And ultimately, for me personally, I just love to create in general. I really create based on what my interests are at the current time, what makes me happy. So I have also done gaming content. I've done motivational content on YouTube. And those of you who are on YouTube, you know how it goes. There's a bit of an up and down with YouTube. So I've had to, over the years, kind of step back from YouTube and not be... or fulfill my creative self because I either wasn't working or I pretty much couldn't make it work because of financial reasons. I had to do adulting.

But yeah, I mean, that's what really it is about me when it comes to creating, man. It's just like I just do what makes me happy, and I just have this just burning desire to create and see my creative vision that's just bouncing around in my head come to fruition. And that's another reason why I've chosen video content, or I should say the primary reason why I've chosen video content because I just love to see my creation come to life. And I've gotten pretty decent at it, I would say. So, yeah.

Erin:
Awesome. What a powerful feeling. I really love that burning desire to create and how awesome that you're able to share that with your community members and fans. So let's talk about boundaries. First, let's learn a little more about how and where you all are engaging with your community. Brenda, let's start with you. I know you're on Twitch both because you've shared that in your intro and because I had the absolute pleasure of attending one of your streams and witnessing your wonderful community live. Where else are you?

Brenda:
You did so good. Claps in the chat for Erin for jumping into a literal gong show and handling it so beautifully. And we had some big golden retriever energy that day when you came to visit us, so kudos to you. Twitch is definitely one of the main spots. I would say Discord is probably another really important space for me where we do a lot of our more planning and project based work will happen in Discord. Twitch is probably the main place that we're all just acting like unhinged kindergartners for a few hours three times a week. But Discord ended up being a super helpful tool to get to have more pace to our conversations.

One of the things that, I mean, Erin, you can probably attest to, or friends who have been to one of my live streams, you're welcome to weigh in in the chat. It can get a little bit chaotic during a Twitch stream. So it's a great place in my experience to meet people, to fuel ideas, to get really excited, to follow your own tangents and interrupt yourself kind of nonstop, but chaos never... The Twitch Stream is kind of just like a sandbox. It's a place for us to play, to hang out, to joke around with each other. And then Discord is where we end up doing a lot of our projects. We do a ton of group projects together. We'll also have watch parties. We run a summer camp, virtual summer camp on Twitch every year and all of the planning for that happens on our Discord. We just wrapped making our first kids' book as a community, and most of the planning for that took place on Discord, even though we did do some of the work on the stream as well.

We just put out a calendar that's featuring art by all community members who actually collaborated together. So we have two people on each art piece every month. All of that took place on Discord. Yeah, so I'd say, I mean, all of the socials of all of the media for sure, but places like Twitter and Instagram and I guess Facebook to a much lesser extent, I use them more as wayfinding. So at this point, the primary use that I have for those platforms is to post things that say, "Hey, this is where you can find me," and the place that you can find me is on Twitch.

Erin:
Nico, I know you engage on Discord as well, reserving that just for your members on Patreon. Where else are you engaging? How is that working?

Nico:
Yeah, so being primarily a YouTube creator. I definitely do my best to engage in the YouTube comments, but the YouTube comments, those of you who do YouTube videos primarily or even partially can attest to the fact that YouTube comments can be a bit of a dumpster fire that's on fire. So it's kind of hard to really engage like I like to in the YouTube comments, and it is a blessing and a curse that comes with growth because when I first started, it was amazing. The YouTube comments were amazing. When I had thousands subscribers, amazing. You could really get to know people. You saw so many intelligent comments, so much great feedback. And when you start growing, the curse comes with, it's like you get further detached from your core audience and you start attracting less favorable individuals. I appreciate everybody that watches our videos, but I'm much more about engagement versus views.

But YouTube comments, I'm still in there as much as I can be. I also utilize the YouTube community tab. So I want to strongly encourage anybody who is a YouTube content creator to utilize that. It is not utilized by many of my peers outside of advertising, for example, their Patreon, but I encourage people to utilize it. More like I've come to utilize it in that I use it to get to know the community a little more and allow them to get to know as much of me as I feel comfortable in sharing. And so it could be just pictures of me doing daily life, or it could be me getting on there sharing an encouraging word that I hope provides a value to people in my community. And then of course, I absolutely take the opportunity to share my Patreon page on there. I highlight and I put more of a focus on the value that people will get for signing up for my Patreon. So I make sure I include that. And then, yeah, drop that handy dandy link so you can come check us out.
I also, I do Twitch part-time. So I just started doing Twitch. I might need to get some advice from you, Brenda, on how to run a proper Twitch stream. But I get on there and we just party. We have fun. We listen to K-pop music, BTS, and we just be making fools of ourselves on Twitch pretty much. So really fun experience. Like I said, it's kind of new to me, but I'm enjoying it. But I try to stay off of a lot of social media. It messes with my head. I don't know if that makes sense. But being on too many social media sites, it starts messing my head. It starts making me a little bit depressed. It's just because it's just too much. I found it to be too much for me, and it started getting in the way of me having a desire to create. And when I start seeing those signals, I have to kind of pull away.

I'm not on Twitter, people call it X, I call it Twitter. It will always be Twitter. I'm not on Twitter because I found that it is more hurtful to me than helpful for me. And being a creator such as myself, there's a gift and a curse when it comes to all of this, mostly everything. So the gift in being on social media and these different platforms, as many as you possibly can, you will attract more people unto yourself. But that's not my goal necessarily. I mainly just want to attract like-minded, or I should say my tribe, the people that I'm here to serve. And if I'm not taking care of myself properly, I can't serve them properly. So I had to cut it back a little bit.

Shout out to my Discord server. It's a Patreon exclusive community. We chose for it to be that way so that we all can have a safe place to be, and we can get away from all the chaos that is on social media and just decompress. I got to give a big shout to my community. Shout out to our mods for really holding it down over there, because without them, we wouldn't have a community. And I utilize that community to decompress myself as well. So it is very rewarding for me, and we're going to keep it like that for life.

And then lastly, I've been trying the community chats on Patreon, which has been very fun. It's kind of like I find that it's for people who mostly don't like all of the technicality of Discord. It's a lot simpler. Just get in there, we talk, we chat with each other, share pictures, all that good stuff. But I will say this, Patreon, we need the ability to add mods, please, to that. I know you guys are working on a lot of things, but we need that ability to add mods. Other than that, it is absolute perfection. So, yeah.

Erin:
Awesome. Thank you for sharing. I love that you both have found online spaces that work to engage your communities. And I know you both utilize tools like community moderators as you're just shouting out and community guidelines to reinforce the importance of boundaries, not only for yourself, but in the ways in which your community engages with one another. So let's talk a little more about those boundaries. Getting into the hot part of Hot Topics. Nico, I'm going to throw this one back to you. How have you experienced parasocial relationships in your community? That is when someone forms a one-sided relationship with you based on your public persona. Can you give an example of a time you may have had to set a boundary with someone who crossed a line?

Nico:
Okay, okay, you're throwing it back to me. Well, I'm going to catch it like a football. You heard me? Okay, let's get it. Let's go. Oh, yeah. So yeah, this story right here, when we talked about it previously, it hurt me to talk about it and it hurts me to talk about it right now, everyone. So yeah, so I had an issue and it was on Patreon of all places, which you hate to see, you hate to see happen, you hate that. But it was basically, it was a case of someone getting too familiar with me, too familiar. When I say getting too familiar, that's someone that acts like they know you when they don't know you and or they're trying to stake a claim to you. Okay?

So this patron, they sent me a DM. And my DMs are open to patrons only. I've closed my DMs to the social media platforms that I'm still a part of. And I would encourage you close your DMs if you need to. Do not be scared to close your DMs. Protect yourself. But Patreon, I have it open and I check it consistently, a few times a week. And so someone sent me a DM and they sent me, it was basically them communicating a tweet they had sent out. It was for a worthy cause, something they're really passionate about, and they wanted me to retweet it, use our platform to retweet it to attract more people. And so I checked out the tweet out of respect. I was like, "Okay, let me check it out." I checked it out and it seemed to be a worthy cause. It was all lovely and everything like that and I thought it was great. However, I made the decision that I wasn't going to retweet it for my own reasons.

And so I kindly responded to the person and I said, "Hey, I appreciate you giving this to my attention, let me know what you're doing and what you're doing is amazing, beautiful, lovely, but however, I won't be retweeting this, but I want to congratulate you on what you're doing and peace and love to all your future endeavors." So I literally just said, "I'm not going to retweet it." So whenever I say yes or no, I don't feel obligated to give a reason. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, okay? You don't have to give a reason for your no. All right? I responded out of respect, and I left it at that. Well, this person was upset. And a lot of times when you say no, people are going to get upset and you got to be ready for that. I wasn't ready for this response necessarily.

Okay, so the person responded and they were very angry saying how I've disappointed them. I let them down. I thought you were better than that. Just basically trying to gaslight me, make me feel guilty. And so I was disheartened by that. It was very disappointing. If you, patron, thought that I was disappointing in my response, your response was very disappointing to me because I did not expect that from a patron. I did not expect that from somebody that took the time to go above and beyond to basically support our creative work. So it really caught me off guard and it made me sad. I'm not going to lie. It really did make me sad. So I ignored it. I ignored the response, didn't do anything about it. I left it alone. That's how you feel, okay. Because you really do have to know when to ignore sometimes. Sometimes that's really for the best. Never be afraid to not respond, okay? You're not obligated to do so.

So I didn't respond. However, that didn't stop. That did not stop this person. They continued on. They literally began spamming me and harassing me on Patreon, bruh. I was like, "No. Oh my God, not here." I was like, "Am I going to have to block this person? Is it really going to come to this?" Look, I'm not a stranger to blocking people. I've blocked countless people on Twitter, countless people on YouTube. I'm no stranger to blocking people. On Patreon? Oh, no. So I had to look it up, how do you block... This is my first time ever experiencing this. How do you block somebody on Patreon? And thanks to the handy dandy community forums here on Patreon, found it very easy to do and I blocked the person.

Never responded again, just simply blocked them. And they got a notification that they've been blocked. I didn't see it for myself. I just read that that would happen. I was like, "Oh man, this is tough." But it had to be done. It had to be done to protect myself as a creator and protect my piece. And I was not going to get any piece with this person spamming me, telling me how much of a despicable person I am, because I chose not to retweet. To me, they felt like they owned me because they were donating $5 a month to me. I am worth way more than $5 a month.

Now, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something, guys. Don't tell nobody else this. If they were donating a million dollars a month to me or something like that, retweet it. I'm not going to lie, but look, just saying, but it's like, no, you don't own me, fam. You don't own me. I have a right to say yes or no regardless of how much you're donating to me each month. So yeah, it was painful, but it had to be done, and I have no regrets about it.

Erin:
Thank you so much for sharing that. I really love the let your yes be yes and let your no be no. And also it's okay to not respond. Like you said, they don't own you and you don't owe them that. So thank you so much for sharing that. Brenda, are there any scenarios coming up for you when community members, as Nico said, got too familiar? How did you set boundaries to protect yourself?

Brenda:
I think, yeah, to Grace's point in chat, a couple of my mods are actually in the chat. So they've probably done as much or more heavy lifting as I have when it comes to setting boundaries. I think the parasocial relationship is very, very real for sure. But also I have genuinely met and made friends with and made connections with people through my online community. So one of the things that I've tried to think about really early on, and I think about it really often, is every time I'm presented with a scenario, I ask myself before I do whatever I'm going to do, could I set this precedent and still do this if it was 10 people asking instead of one? Could I do it if it was 50 people asking instead of 10? Could I do it if it was 100 people instead of 50? If I can't scale my response, I don't do it.

So I don't tend to respond to DMs. I am really, really public about my DM. What did you say, Nico, that the YouTube comments are a dumpster fire that's also on fire? That's my DMs. That's my DMs. That's my DMs. And I'm really transparent about that. And some of that is sort of a ha ha, that's funny and silly, but it is also a very sincere plea to people to not use that as a means to get in touch with me directly. But one of the reasons why I was able to do that was because I think I saw Durango in this conversation. Durango, I can't remember if it was you or Saint that first came up with this brilliant idea. And then Grace, who's also here, helped along with another community member named Luke to make this section on Discord called Ask a Mod. And people have the ability to open up this private thread, and Grace is really the one who built this for us.

And people can go in there and ask a question that's not open to the public, but it's also not just to me. So it's this line of communication where if you want to scheme a way to send a birthday gift to someone, that's really sweet, it's really lovely, it's really innocent, but you also don't need me personally. You really don't. It's very, very, very rare that anyone would actually need me personally. And the people who do tend to be folks who are the highest level of support on Patreon, they've been around supporting me for years. They're already moderators, editors, VIPs in the community. If they're going to be inappropriate, they are really playing the long game. So for the most part, questions that I get that would even have the potential to be inappropriate, you kind of have to go into that Ask a Mod section and you know that the whole moderation team could see it.

So people just don't tend to go down a road that would make that uncomfortable. And that has been a stroke of pure genius, I think, by the community. But it also let us set a ton of standards where if people have questions or things they want to talk about, we set up group hangouts. We're about to put a little tool in place where when people have questions that come up on the stream that we can't answer, we can host little shop talks on our Discord and invite other folks who have expertise to take part. And it's incredibly helpful for me. As community members, I think a lot of people feel, oh, I don't want to bother this person, or I don't want to pester them, but they might have something really valid and important to bring up so they can use that thread and then we can sort of direct traffic through there, which has been enormously helpful for me.

And also, it's kind of self-selected so that if people were ever going to be demanding or inappropriate, they know they're kind of doing it publicly, so they don't tend to. It doesn't mean that I don't have to say no. It also means that I absolutely do miss things that are in DMs, and that is something that I'm comfortable with. I have been asked to participate in stuff. I've been asked to retweet or repost or share. I've gotten maybe some heat from people who wanted something or felt entitled to something in DMs. And also I don't look at them, I don't see them. So I have the enormous privilege thanks to that structure that's sort of built into the community not to respond.

And I think to Nico's point, I'm really lucky as well that the vast majority of the community is absolutely incredible. They are never placing demands on my time. They're just participating and adding joyfully to the energy. I think we all find it a lot easier when people sort of very overtly cross a boundary if someone is overtly inappropriate. It's a lot easier to sort of make the choice. Like Nico said, if someone is spamming you and making blatant demands on your time or harassing you, in some ways it feels a lot easier to just say no. And I think some of the harder judgment calls come in the moments before that where maybe people are just sort of in a gray area, which again, I find the Ask a Mod chat enormously helpful because it lets us sort of groupthink it when something like that comes through.

Nico:
That's amazing.

Erin:
For sure.

Brenda:
Yeah, it's a lifesaver. Everybody make one. Everybody make one right now, please. Nico, take it. Take it. Please take it

Nico:
Oh, oh, oh, hey, homie, homie, I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes. You heard me? Oh, yeah.

Brenda:
Everybody have it. Everybody have it please.

Nico:
Take notes. Take notes. Yeah.

Erin:
Thank you so much both for sharing. I was actually going to say when your members request access in these ways, but Brenda, you said something that struck me, which was demanding access, which is really what it is. They're asking for parts of your time and energy that may not feel appropriate to you, which is ultimately for each individual creator to decide. And I love how you both have shared different ways in which you think about this. Brenda, I would love to dig in a little more and hear how much of yourself you choose to bring to your community online and how you maybe set boundaries around your time.

Nico:
I love how Brenda's laughing already. That's awesome.

Brenda:
I am laughing. Well, so one of the things that I am really, really proud of is that when new people come into the stream, they tend to comment on something pretty specific when they first come into the stream. They tend to say something along the lines of, "Oh my gosh, I love your energy. Oh my gosh, can I have some of whatever she's having? Oh my gosh, I love her energy." I don't deny. I stream to the absolute maximum ability I have for every single second I am streaming. I am all in that entire time because it is my oxygen to be able to share that experience with people to be able to offer distraction and positivity. So when I am doing that on stream, I am doing it 100% to the absolute best of my ability. And that tends to be one of the first things that people say when they come through the stream.

Another really common one is, "What on earth is going on?" Or, "I don't know what I've walked into, but it seems fun here." There are some version of that as well for sure. Rightly so. Rightly so. But one of the things that I tend to say is that every single other moment leading up to that, I spend taking care of and preserving and nourishing that energy so that when I go live, I really have the absolute best, most energetic version of myself available to give. That's a really personal choice. It's one that works really, really well for me. It definitely means that I take really specific steps to be ready and to be on and to be really excited and to be fully present when I'm streaming.

It also, for me, is a really helpful tone setting device. It would look really out of place in my stream for someone to come in and be inappropriate or demanding. DMCS is asking some of my specific steps. I mean, just think of taking care of a plant and just try to do a really good job of that. Watering, feeding, sunlight, all of that stuff, all of those. We have a joke that streaming is cardio. On my live stream, I definitely work out to keep up my stamina so that I can be full on Ms. Frizzle times 100 for three hours straight.

But that to me is a very specific energy and presence that I choose to share with my community. We have a redeem that we do sometimes on my channel called a Crayon Doodle. And a Crayon Doodle is a really specific sort of timeout to take a little mental health moment and to think about a concept or something that I've been working through or chewing on, something that I'm trying to process. And they don't happen very often, but when they do, they have the potential to get a little bit deeper and a little bit more personal. And even with those, I am very meticulous to make sure that anything that we're going to bring up in a Crayon Doodle is something that I've had the chance to work through and process and that I feel confident and comfortable with my ability to deliver to my community.

That's a really personal choice. Yeah, but I make really specific choices to try to share the most positive, high energy person that I can possibly be because that is the environment that I'm looking to curate and that is very specifically something that I'm comfortable with doing online. I also have a really clear start and end times. So my streams tend to run a very consistent amount of time. When I'm available online, I'm very available, but I do not promise to be available all the time. I don't make any promises to respond to things immediately. So it's a very specific version of myself and it's the one that I am most proud of and most happy to share with the public.

Erin:
Thanks for sharing that, and I love that you kind of set those expectations with your community members up front. I am going to switch gears a little bit to make sure keeping an eye on the clock. In a moment, we're going to open it up to audience Q&A. To participate, please share your questions in the chat and use the little upvote, the emoji, the up emoji, if you would also like to hear a question that has been shared and we'll bring the most popular to the stage.

While folks are thinking and submitting their questions, I want to touch upon some of the ways that you're engaging with your community inspires you. Boundaries, community guidelines, they're not just about what to do, but also about showing your community what behavior is encouraged and you've both kind of alluded to this today. And this way, boundaries create a space that can sustain and inspire your creative work. Nico, would love to hear a way that your community inspires you and how you use that in your work as a creative.

Nico:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Before I say that, I do want to give a shout to Brenda. Everything you said, chef's kiss, my friend. In fact, I'm going to need to join some of your Twitch streams. It sounds very therapeutic. It sounds like I will be fed so that I can feed my community properly. Can I get a witness?

Okay, so now to your question, Erin. For me, my community is at the center, at the very heart of my creative work or what inspires me to just keep going every single day. I don't know if those of you who are creatives are like me. You probably are in that you're your own worst enemy. The voice in your head, the imposter syndrome, it just sets in very easily, even though you may be getting so much great feedback from people, and that's great. It feels good. But for me, I find it hard to escape the voices in my head sometimes. And so to counter that, I lean on my community. I feel like what we're doing as creatives, we're doing something that a few people venture to do.

Through our creative works, we're providing a great value to the world. That takes a lot of energy. We are shaping the world into how we see it in a real tangible way. That takes a lot of energy. And so one way that I get that energy back to some capacity is through my community, through the genuine love that my community shows me and their appreciation for my creative work. So comments from the community is always blessed, absolutely. But sometimes you forget what people are saying in your day to day. And when I'm working, I don't want to be on social media. I try not to be distracted. So what I've started doing most recently is I take screenshots of the comments wherever I see them, whether it's Patreon, Discord, YouTube, wherever I see comments that lift me up that are positive, that are showing great appreciation for what I do. I take those comments and I save them in a folder on my desktop.

And now I just started doing this, and so far so good. I'm not really good about doing it, so I'm going to try to do better. But I have a few that I've utilized. And whenever I start getting those thoughts, I try to remember, "Hey, get in that folder, bruh." Get in that folder and see the truth. See the truth about yourself, see what you are bringing to the table for the people, for the people that you serve. They're telling you the opposite of what that voice in your head is telling you. So obviously the obvious choice is to believe what the people are telling you, not that voice in your head. And sure enough, it does help to suppress it or get rid of it completely. And I'm able to move right back on with what I do best, and that's just create, get right back into the editing room, which I absolutely love to do because I love to create stuff that I know people are going to enjoy or I feel like people are going to enjoy.

So yeah, absolutely, man. I think for all of us we go through that, or at least most of us anyway. I don't know you all individually and I never like to assume because that makes you ask yourself, but I feel like a lot of us go through that. And that is definitely one way that helps me to get through it and move forward. And also everything that Brenda was saying as well, I definitely co-sign on that.

Erin:
Awesome. And I do want to get to Q&A, but Brenda, obviously, many of your community is here with you today, inspiring you.

Brenda:
Hi friends.

Erin:
I'm going to toss it to you for 30 seconds. If there's anything you want to add on how your community inspires you.

Brenda:
I mean, they're doing it right now. We're just in constant conversation with each other. I think when I first became a community engaged artist, it was the thing that made me realize that I am my best creative self when I am not working in a closed loop. So I need other people as part of that creative process, even if it's just the nonsense antics that we're doing on stream. All of that is fueled by the energy of the people who are hanging out with us. And we will often have the conversation where people come in and say, "Oh my gosh, I love it. I'm having so much fun here." And I think it's important to remind people if you are enjoying the room that you are in, remember you are a part of dictating that energy. You also get partial credit.

So anytime you find yourself in a space where you think, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I feel welcome here. I feel safe here. I feel energized here." As much as I am honored when people say that about my stream, I also really consider that a shared experience. It's actually a big part of how I decide sort of what... I'm seeing a lot of questions about sort of the private versus the public and the question of persona. It's a huge part of how I mitigate that experience. And also they really, especially patrons, we have a separate section for patrons and they have a couple of special privileges on the livestream. They actually do steer the ship. They're like my board of directors. So often I will go into that chatter, we'll have Patreon hangouts specifically to say, what are we doing next? And they always know. They always know.

Erin:
Awesome. Thank you both for sharing. All right. I am seeing a lot of great questions in the chat here. So Rain Ripple asked, "How do you make a distinction between your personal and public persona, what to share or what not to share to specific audiences?" And Brenda, I know you shared a little bit about this already. Nico, I don't know if you had anything you wanted to add about how you make that distinction.

Nico:
It's really for me is about my vision for WhatchaGot2Say. So WhatchaGot2Say is the entity that we've created that has very specific goal and that is to bring people together and provide them a value, very specific goal and be as positive as we possibly can. Now, positivity doesn't mean that you're just always overly happy and nice and all this other stuff that people associate positivity with. Positivity for me is having a great outlook regardless of the subject that you're talking about. Positivity for me is finding delight in the disagreements, in the differences between people. Because we live on a big planet, there's a lot of people here, there's a lot of differences in people. And if we allow differences to just annoy us and we take it as insult because you have a difference of opinion than me, then we can never be a community. We will never come together.

So WhatchaGot2Say, we aspire to rise above that. So we got WhatchaGot2Say, and then we have me, Nico, under WhatchaGot2Say. And my responsibility is to first and foremost take care of myself, be happy in what I'm doing, because if I'm happy in what I'm doing, I can better serve the people that I've been called here to serve. And then next thing is to share with people the things that I'm comfortable sharing with that is in line with the vision of WhatchaGot2Say. For example, I don't share too many personal things about myself. I don't share too many personal ideas I have about myself, especially if it comes in contradiction with what our vision is. So I don't talk about a couple of things that I know are going to be dividers for people. One of them is religion, the other one's politics.

Regardless of how I feel about religion and politics, I will never integrate those conversations into my community because that's automatically, I find, is going to cause disruption and people to argue unnecessarily. And I don't have an issue with arguing. Like I said, I don't have a issue with differences of opinions, but it literally creates an instant wall and then it does the godawful thing of causing people to put you in a box. And I absolutely dislike that. I dislike when you get put into a box. I don't like that because it's like there are so many layers to people. Just because they believe a certain way, they think a certain way that's anti how you feel and you believe, it doesn't mean they're just that, okay? There's so much more to them. And I feel like certain topics, they automatically put up that wall and you never have the opportunity to learn more about that person.

There's a beautiful rainbow of colors in every single individual. So why bring up stuff that is automatically going to pull up a wall? I choose not to do that even though I have my opinions about certain things. And never be thinking of it because I've thought this way as well. Never be thinking of it as, oh, I'm lying to people or I'm an imposter, I'm not giving them everything about me. Don't feel guilty about that because you shouldn't. You shouldn't feel obligated to give everything about yourself to everyone. Come in with a vision and a purpose and do your best to stick to that. And that's what we choose to do. I hope that answered the question.

Erin:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing. I love your passion. So there's two questions here that are kind of similar. One is asking about members that have a number of questions, kind of like they want you to be their coach. And then another one is about folks that are a little too excited or enthusiastic and always sharing that where it feels almost like they're too deferential. So they're a little different, but I think they come from the same space of an over interest in you and what you're doing. And the question is kind of how do you respond or how do you take that on? And I think Brenda, since Nico answered, any thoughts, or we can leave it open-ended as well.

Brenda:
I think one of the tools, and it seems so simple, but it has actually been enormously helpful, is that I will under respond to behavior that I do not find desirable and I will over respond to behavior that I do find desirable. So if someone has said the same thing 14 times in chat, I probably won't respond to it. It will get less of a response because typically that behavior is coming from a desire for a reaction. I also think when it comes to people maybe overusing you as a resource, one of the things that I've found really helpful is to have my perks clearly defined in my Patreon tiers and ongoing Q&As is not one of my perks.

I have had very clear conversations with people around things like we are now at the end of my ability to support you with this tech issue. Your next step is either to talk to this, maybe it's the tech support team on Patreon or their Discord or the shop or the mods. But when we come to the end of where I'm able to assist someone, I am very clear because that's not a good use of my time. When it's something a little more ethereal, like maybe people are asking about coaching or guidance or something that actually is within your wheelhouse. If you're getting those questions as an individual, the answers will almost always benefit a room. And it's a way to sort of appreciate someone's enthusiasm without giving them ownership of your time.

So one of the things I've been working on with Grace actually is setting up a tool where people can ask questions because our community is brilliant and talented and they have really good questions. So rather than trying to answer those questions, one-on-one 100 times, we gather them, correlate them, try to find themes and topics so that we can talk about them in a shop talk. We can have a Discord hangout where we tackle some of them. I can make a point to say it more often on stream because if it's going to benefit one individual, it's probably also going to serve the community. And a lot of these tools come from that same principle of scaling. So every time I'm doing something for one person individually, I think about, could I do this if it was 10 instead of one? Could I do it if it was 100 instead of 10? If the answer is no, don't do it. Don't do it. If you can help it, if you can help it, don't do it.

And it's okay to name that. It's okay to honor that and say, "I love your questions, these are brilliant." Or, "I love how excited you are. And also, in order for this to be a beneficial space or a room that serves everybody, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take all these questions, we're going to put them in this place." Or, "From now on, we're going to celebrate this in such and such." Or, "We've actually made a channel specifically for this on Discord. Thank you so much for the inspiration." Because even parasocial relationships are symbiotic. So if I go into a parasocial relationship and I am full of need and I'm really depleted and I drag myself into the stream, just imagine, just picture I did that everybody. Reeling with shock and I said, "Oh everybody, I am struggling so much and I need all of you to collectively lift me up and get me through this." Okay, okay, fair enough.

And also that relationship is symbiotic. Can you do that for the 10, for the 50, for the 100 if they all individually ask the same thing of you. As people who have parasocial relationships, it does not relieve us of the responsibility of relationships being symbiotic, which is one of the reasons why I think it's important to set those precedents and set those boundaries. And so far my experience has been that when you set that tone with your community, the people that I have met through Patreon and through the community on Twitch are incredible at honoring those boundaries and at building spaces that serve the community instead of just serving one person, me or any one community member, because it's not just for me any more than it's just for one other person, this is for the entire room.

Erin:
That's really beautiful.

Nico:
Erin, can I get something out really quick before we move on?

Erin:
Yeah, you got it.

Nico:
Okay. So I'm a reactor. I do this for a living. If we was on camera, you would see my facial expressions as Brenda's talking. I have to get it out. Come on, let's go. That's what I'm freaking talking about, baby. Bro, creators, if there's a creator that's on the precipice of developing some type of duplication device, please get that done post-haste. Let's put Brenda in that device and duplicate her because we need more people like her in this world, bruh.

Brenda:
Nico, you are a treasure.

Nico:
I love it. Oh my God,

Brenda:
You are a treasure. Thank you friend.

Nico:
Yeah, I'm going to write down your Twitch handle.

Brenda:
I'm honored.

Nico:
I'm writing your Twitch handle so I don't forget, bruh. Oh my gosh.

Brenda:
You're so sweet.

Nico:
Oh my gosh.

Erin:
Well, that's actually the perfect segue, Nico. The last question I have for you all before we go over to the chat after party is if there's something you want to shout out to the audience here. We'll start with you, Brenda. What would you like to shout out or where people can find you?

Brenda:
All our lovely friends, everyone that was hanging out in chat, thank you so much for contributing to the tone and the energy and the ambiance of the room. All of that applies here as well. So thank you for being here and being engaged and being incredible now and always. The two projects that I think I want to shout out, absolutely. Come hang out on Twitch. Nico, you have a standing invite. You hang out with me anytime. You come hang out with anytime.

Nico:
Yes, let's go.

Brenda:
That sounds wonderful. I will learn everything about K-pop just so that I can be one of the cool kids at your table.

Nico:
Hey, let's go.

Brenda:
We are forever on Twitch. The two projects that I'm most excited about right now are we just made that community calendar. So there is a calendar that's coming out in 2024, and it is filled with artwork that is entirely collaborations by the people in the community. It is also run and curated by the incredible calendar coordinator who I think was in here earlier, Shield Maiden, who is a gift of administrative brilliance, unlike anybody else. And also we have a very tiny little print run of our kids' book. We did a bigger print run and we now have a teeny-tiny reprint run, which is also a community project. The book is called Bedtime Stories for Business Chickens. And it is absolutely incredible and it is beginning to end a community collaboration and I'm super proud of both. So check them out.

Erin:
Awesome. And what about you Nico, what would you like to shout out to our audience?

Nico:
Yeah, so first and foremost, thank you all for joining. I am truly humbled that I was even able to participate in something like this. It feels warm here, it feels really good, and it is definitely uplifting to be around so many beautiful creators. Just remember that what you do is so valuable. What you do has so much power. You are literally creating a better world and you are serving people to the highest degree. And no one can take that from you. Not even the voices in your head, man. Look at the evidence. The evidence is clear, guys. What you do is rare. It's rare like Mr. Clean with hair, that's the bar. I can't take credit. That's from Lil Wayne.

But anyway, you can find me on YouTube at WhatchaGot2Say. And of course, here on Patreon. We also have an Instagram as well that's run by my lovely wife, Mika. So you can check us out on at WhatchaGot2Say on Instagram. Those are the primary places. I am on Twitter, but I'm not on Twitter. I'm taking a hiatus from Twitter because it became a mind-numbing mess for me. And we also are on Twitch as well, very fledgling and new on Twitch. But we just be having fun listening to K-pop. I do a stream every Thursday. I call myself Nitro Nico, and we get on there and we just wild out. We have fun listening to music, talking, chatting, having some real conversations, and I'm thoroughly enjoying that. And so yeah, those are really the spaces I primarily dwell, my friends.

Erin:
Awesome.

Nico:
I actually need to get here on this Patreon, Discord a little more. I must tell the truth, I haven't been here on here as much, but I do need to make it a point because I really feel good here. So if it's like this every day here, I need to be here every day.

Erin:
Awesome. It's such a pleasure to be able to get to know you both. Thank you so much. Let's give it up one more time for our meet ask and Nico. Throw some emojis in the chat. And thank you to our team at Patreon for being here today as well. From all of us here, take care and we can't wait to see what you create next.