The tribe has spoken: How Drop Your Buffs manages a community thousands of chats deep
Lore drops, investigative (Survivor) journalism, and talking through a new chat channels strategy with the host of TV-watch-along podcast Drop Your Buffs
Substack <[email protected]>
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Substack promotes a conversation with Sean Ross, host of the podcast Drop Your Buffs, about managing a community with thousands of chats. The discussion covers the podcast's origin story and its chat strategy on Substack. Substack highlights how Drop Your Buffs has built a thriving subscriber-only community around the TV show Survivor.
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The tribe has spoken: How Drop Your Buffs manages a community thousands of chats deep
Lore drops, investigative (Survivor) journalism, and talking through a new chat channels strategy with the host of TV-watch-along podcast Drop Your Buffs
Sean Ross and Bailey Dunn
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Sean Ross started watching the reality TV show Survivor at 14, and became an early lurker in the fandom. Years later, he met cohost Evan Ross Katz, and they turned their obsession with the show into the popular podcast Drop Your Buffs. As the show grew, they joined Substack to offer their listeners a community space for it. Today, they have a bustling subscriber-only chat, covering Survivor, The Traitors, The White Lotus, and other pop culture topics with increasingly (and humorously) tenuous connections to Survivor.
Drop Your Buffs has cracked the code on building a community layer for a podcast on Substack: a booming, eventized, subscriber-only space that spawns lore, memes, friendships, and threads that regularly run to thousands of comments at a time. Survivor already has one of the biggest and most crowded fan communities on the internet, so we were curious how Drop Your Buffs managed to carve out a corner that people are happy to pay to join. Substack’s entertainment partnership manager Bailey Dunn—also a massive Survivor fan—spoke with Sean about their chat strategy, the show’s origin story, and how he’s thinking about Substack’s new chat channels to help organize and grow an audience that’s taken on a life of its own.
BD: What first made you decide you wanted to bring people together around Survivor?
Sean: It was the pandemic. There was a huge swell of people discovering Survivor during the pandemic, as they did with so many other shows, but there was something about Survivor that captured the imagination when people were locked at home. One of those people was my cohost, Evan Ross Katz, who I’d met through another podcast I was doing about the daytime talk show The View. Then I saw he tweeted, “Watching Survivor, should I start?” And I was like, slow down. Let me guide you through this process. As he watched, almost every episode, he would send me a voice note about his thoughts and questions, and I would voice note it back. We were getting into territory where we were basically podcasting over voice note. Around the time he reached season 15, he said, why don’t we just start a podcast about this?
I was very hesitant, because the Survivor podcasting world is extremely oversaturated. There are so many Survivor podcasts, and I thought, what are we possibly going to add? There’s the angle of doing a queer Survivor podcast, but even those existed. There were multiple. He really pushed me. He said, I think we could get big guests, I think we could pull people out of retirement to talk about this show. What got me was Courtney Yates, from Survivor: China, Season 15. I started talking to Courtney, and she said she would go on our podcast. So I thought, this is now just an opportunity for me to meet my favorite Survivor players. That’s why we started it, really.
Evan is so funny, because he treats the Substack-exclusive paid content like it’s the Situation Room, like nobody can access it. It’s a $5 fee a month. The price of a coffee. You will get Evan’s most unhinged, unfiltered takes.
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