Wookyoung Kim, Jisoo · December 8, 2025
Commits has turned one.
What began as a small gathering where Wookyoung and Jisoo read and shared essays has grown into a KakaoTalk chat room with 340 members and a newsletter with 160 subscribers. We are truly grateful. Over the past year, Commits has brought many relationships and opportunities our way.
In this post, we wrote down the decisions we made while running Commits and what we learned.
Sail boat (circa 1914)
Why are some people smarter than others?
Learning outcomes are determined by (1) talent and (2) time invested. Each person has their own innate talent, and outcomes improve as they spend more time learning. But the speed at which learning outcomes improve has nothing to do with talent. Since talent cannot be changed, if you want to become smarter, you simply need to put in the time.
I thought it was necessary to build an incentive structure that would make me spend time learning in order to become smarter. If I could create incentives to invest time in learning, I believed I could spend time even in fields I did not know, learn about them, and become smarter.
That is why I created the Commits community as a KakaoTalk chat room: a group where I could organize and share the fields I had studied. I thought that because many people were watching, I would take ownership of learning and keep studying.
Creating Proof of Work
For a community to operate well, it needs to structure Proof of Work properly.
Facebook was initially available only to Harvard students. But because only a small number of people held the credential of being at Harvard, Facebook expanded by lowering that credential: from Harvard to Ivy League schools, then from Ivy League schools to universities more broadly.
When the credential barrier is lowered, people leave the community. So Facebook created another form of credential through followers and likes.
I hoped the community I built would have a credential like being a Harvard student. But I did not want to lower the credential for the sake of growth. To do this, I made the topics shared on Commits difficult by design and built the community as a real-name chat room based on invitations from acquaintances.
Commits shares what I have studied about difficult, annoying, and complex topics. That makes it hard to invite acquaintances who are not interested in difficult, annoying, and complex topics. So I chose to use the subject matter itself as the credential and maintain the quality of the community.
Problems with Chat Communities
After removing the Harvard credential, Facebook used text content to let people gain social status through followers and likes, giving them a reason to create content. And when it became harder to earn credentials through the existing format (text status updates), it created new credentials through other content formats such as the News Feed and Reels. Facebook therefore has a clear incentive structure for content creation.
But a KakaoTalk chat room has no incentive for sharing content (it is hard to gain social status by sharing informational content), and the operator has no way to create new forms of social status (the content format is limited to text and tied to the platform). As a result, people have no reason to share content in Commits.
My answer to this problem has been to require new members of the Commits chat room to introduce themselves. Since people have little incentive to post content in Commits, and as the room grows they feel more pressure around sharing, requiring introductions creates the first conversation. This is similar to how Facebook and Instagram encourage a first post.
A Failed Newsletter and a Successful Offline Meetup
Over the past year, I thought a lot about how to build an incentive structure where users voluntarily share content, rather than relying on forced constraints like introductions. As part of that effort, we ran a newsletter that selected informational content posted over the week, gathered it together, and shared it in newsletter form.
We thought that if informational content someone posted in the chat room was selected and shared externally, that would become an incentive and make information sharing more active. But because the people sharing information were limited to Wookyoung and Jisoo, we failed to create a successful incentive structure. The structure only worked if other people were the ones sharing content.
Then, fortunately, with support from BZCF, we got to run a Commits offline meetup, and it became a catalyst for activating the community. Talking face to face was more powerful than expected, and it raised the participation of people who had met offline. Since then, we have run another offline meetup with Levit, and we are thinking about how to do this better.
Commits
What should Commits do going forward? I am not sure. But I think we can grow if we keep organizing writing, writing ourselves, and running Commits.
We are more curious about the world where something works than the reasons something might not work. Most of all, we believe the people in Commits can change the world.
Thank you!