The tribe has spoken: How Drop Your Buffs manages a community thousands of chats deep

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

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.

BD: You and I met a year and a half ago, when Drop Your Buffs was on Patreon and you moved over to Substack. What was that experience like for you?

Sean: We were podcasting, and we didn’t have any social media presence. We didn’t have a Drop Your Buffs Instagram page or Twitter account. People started messaging us on my personal account and on Evan’s. They wanted to chime in and have their voices heard. We started doing call-in shows where people could drop voicemails. As the show grew, that became difficult to run from a personal account. So I thought, we need to set up spaces for these conversations to happen. We created the Instagram account, which blew up, and that became unwieldy too, because there were too many people and too many messages. It could have been a full-time job to go through the inbox.

We also wanted to start monetizing the podcast, because it takes a lot of effort and money to run. We wanted to get some of that back, and if we could make money, great. That’s why we went to Patreon. Then we saw Substack’s community features—the chat in particular was a big selling point, because we realized it could solve one of our problems. All of these people want to be heard, and they’re listening to this podcast, and podcasting can often feel like you’re speaking into the void. You say words into a microphone, it goes out, maybe you get a message, maybe you don’t even see those messages on Instagram. The comments on Patreon were kind of popping off, but I thought there might be a better space. That was a big selling point for moving to Substack.

When we joined, we turned the chat on, and it immediately went wild. I didn’t know anything about the chat features at that time, so I had it set up so anybody, even a nonsubscriber, could go in and chat. That was really fun but a little bit Wild West. So I started to refine it, and now the chat is paid-subscriber exclusive.

I think it’s a great perk, because we’ve sort of eventized the chat. Our biggest chat threads are the live watch parties, as we call them. As Survivor airs on Wednesday night, we do an East Coast and a West Coast chat, and everybody can be in there reacting live to the episode. Live-tweet parties on Twitter used to be a big thing, say when an album would drop, or when an episode of TV that everybody’s watching was airing. But those spaces are difficult now, because algorithmically you’re not getting a real-time reaction anymore. That’s been lost from social media. In the Substack chat you get real time, and it’s fast and furious. One of the listeners was trying to find the stat for our biggest live watch party night. I think it was something like 3,200 comments within the span of an hour, which is insane.

It’s so fun, because so much of the lore of Drop Your Buffs and its listeners is created and evolves in the chat. If you’re not in the chat, you’re getting half the story. So much happens there. So many inside jokes, so many memes originate there. People get to know each other, they have nicknames for each other, there’s teasing. Friendships have been made in the chat, and all of this happens because we’re watching a TV show at the same time, basically.

BD: Survivor has hugely engaged fans on Reddit and other places on the internet. How does your Substack community compare?

Sean: It’s completely different. Sometimes people say that the outside world is like the Twilight Zone. The Survivor Facebook page is the dregs of society. It’s never a place I want to be. Honestly, the Survivor community on Reddit, on Facebook, even sometimes on Twitter, is super toxic, misogynistic, homophobic. The people who have found our podcast and resonate with it, to the point that they’re willing to subscribe and support it, those are your people. We’ve found this niche pocket within an already niche community of people who all get each other’s humor and points of view. I think that’s how we set ourselves apart.

I can’t even really influence [the chat] anymore. If I try, I get roasted. They want to talk about their lives. People are talking about their pregnancies, their marriages, their pets. They’re meeting up: “I’m coming to New York, who’s in New York? Let’s go get lunch.”

BD: Drop Your Buffs is also active outside of Survivor seasons. What else are you guys talking about?

Sean: We’ve expanded our coverage. When Traitors popped up as a new show, from season one we said, there’s already a crossover. Sarah is on this show, Stephenie LaGrossa is on this show. We have to cover this. We had no idea how popular The Traitors was going to become, so we started covering it as a paid exclusive, and it turned out to be huge. We love doing The Traitors because you get this mix of all different reality spheres colliding, which is interesting on its own. We also cover The White Lotus, because there’s a Survivor connection: Mike White was a Survivor player before The White Lotus premiered, and he put Survivor players in every season. It’s also fun to touch on scripted TV sometimes. Another scripted show we covered was And Just Like That. We’ve also covered things like The Challenge. Whatever pops up that we’re kind of interested in. I certainly think we’ll probably cover the Girls reboot. We’re both big Girls fans, and there’s an And Just Like That kind of adjacency to that show, so that makes sense to us. We usually try to find some kind of Survivor connection, however loose it may be. We did actually find one for And Just Like That.

BD: What was it?

Sean: A Survivor player from Cook Islands, Sundra Oakley, was in an episode of Sex and the City, because she was an actress. If you can believe that.

Chat channels let you split your community into as many as 16 subscriber chats. Maybe that’s a free chat for everyone and a paid-only space next door, or a dedicated room for each topic you cover or city your community is concentrated in. Each chat gets its own name, photo, audience, and posting permissions.

Learn more about setting up chat channels here.

BD: We just launched this new way to segment your chat—we’re calling them chat channels—so you can have different levels of group chats in Substack. How are you thinking about splitting up your chat so there are sub-pockets and communities for different portions of the Buffies?

Sean: The chat has taken on a life of its own, to the point where I can’t check everything. I can’t be in every thread. I get pinged with “Sean Ross, can we please have a thread about whatever?” Great British Bake Off is a new one. I don’t want to do a thread about that, but that’s what the people want, and I should just let this community grow organically however it wants.

BD: Let them cook!

Sean: Let them cook. Let them bake. There’s a lot they want to talk about. Right now I try to fulfill that by creating new threads. We do a thread for every episode of TV we cover. But people also want to watch The Traitors, and American Traitors, Canadian, Australian, U.K. Traitors, so it gets unruly. I’m excited about making that more manageable, both for myself and for

What comes to mind immediately is a dedicated Survivor chat group, where we do our new episodes and our rewatch episodes, because we rewatch old seasons too. I think The Traitors deserves its own, given there are so many international versions and everybody’s watching them. Then I think we’d have a general discussion group.

What I’m most proud of with Drop Your Buffs is the community that has grown around this show. It has taken on a life of its own. I can’t even really influence it anymore. If I try, I get roasted. They want to talk about their lives. People are talking about their pregnancies, their marriages, their pets. They’re meeting up: “I’m coming to New York, who’s in New York? Let’s go get lunch.” It’s heartwarming. So I think we need a catch-all group chat: What’s on your mind? What else are you watching? What video games are you playing? What books are you reading? People want to talk about that, and I think having a space for it is a good idea.

BD: You could make a channel or threads just for founding members! Shea Serrano, who we spoke to recently, does a lot of chat threads only for his founding members, and he pulls them in on questions like “What should we watch next?” There’s growth potential in thinking about how you advertise new portions of the community features to founding members only. It’s almost like an advisory council. You could even get creative, like they’re your “jury” or something. Pantsuit Politics calls their founding members “Executive Producers,” and when they do live shows, they bring all the Executive Producers in the audience up on stage and thank them and make them feel included.

Sean: Let’s say we did a founding members group chat. Can I open it up so anybody can start threads? I think if I gave them the opportunity to go ham in a group chat, they would like that.

BD: Yes! And I agree. You don’t have to check it. It becomes like an iMessage group chat, basically.

Sean: Totally. I think that could be cool.

BD: Tell me about the live show you recently hosted in New York.

Sean: We’ve been promising a live show for at least four years. We’re a little over five years old. We’d been promising it for years and years, and it became a running joke in the chat that it would never happen. There was a meme: there’s not going to be a live show. So we finally got it off the ground. We said, this is the year we’re going to do it. We set a date. Then it was pure chaos leading up to it, because none of us had ever done this. There are all these little things you don’t know. Three days before, we’re asking, do we need insurance? Anyway, we got the live show off the ground, and it sold very quickly. It was amazing because everybody got really hyped. We got great guests, very Drop Your Buffs–coded: Jerri Manthey, Parvati Shallow, Ozzy [Lusth], Sophie Clarke. And we surprised everybody with Richard Hatch.

BD: The first winner of Survivor!

Sean: He’s a controversial figure. He looms large, I would say. Almost like the father of reality TV. If Richard Hatch didn’t win season one, I don’t know that Survivor would still be on TV. He was in prison for five years because he didn’t pay taxes on his million-dollar win.

BD: Oh my god, Sean, I totally forgot about that.

Sean: And he still hasn’t paid it, and now he owes something like $4 million because of interest. He needs to go back on Thrive, or try to win again so he can pay that off. Literally. He’s kind of persona non grata for Survivor. Anyway, one more thing about the live show, related to the chat. I was watching the chat the day of the live show, and I noticed as the tickets were selling that a lot of people had bought single tickets. I thought, interesting, and they’re not from New York. I saw people making their travel plans: “I’m coming to this alone. My husband doesn’t watch Survivor, my friends don’t watch Survivor, but I have to be there.” I thought, I guess that happens. But the chat allowed all these people to find each other. There was a massive group lunch or drinks before the show. At the after party, there was a group of, I don’t know, 12 to 15 people who had all met up because they came alone, and they’re friends for life.

BD: Maybe one of your group chats, Sean, should be Survivor Singles.

Sean: That’s the last thing I need.

BD: Sorry, this is now a matchmaking service! I love that story about people finding friends from the group chat in real life. What did it feel like seeing your people in person?

Sean: It was wild. Even with the chat and the community, it can still feel not real. It’s words on a screen, and it’s hard to put faces to names. To see a room full of these people made the whole thing very real. This five-year journey of podcasting is real. People showed up, they spent their money, they flew across the country to come to this thing. It was a pinch-me moment. Podcasting is such a solo experience. You have a cohost, but it’s a bit of an isolating exercise, so to see it bear fruit in the real world is really rewarding.

BD: What else is next for Drop Your Buffs? Do you have any big wild dreams?

Sean: First of all, we’ve decided to no longer recap new Survivor episodes on the main feed. We’re only talking our shit about Survivor 51 and beyond behind the paywall, Substack exclusive. If people want to hear our real, unfiltered takes, we do a series called After Dark. For every Survivor episode, there’s a Drop Your Buffs After Dark episode that accompanies it. That’s where we’re at our meanest. People love that.

BD: If you want to be a hater, you’ve got to pay up.

Sean: Exactly. 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, so I think it’s very much worth it. We’re going to keep doing that.

BD: Lastly, do you have an all-time favorite player?

Sean: I think I have to go with Amanda Kimmel, who has disappeared. Part of the reason she’s so interesting is how elusive she is. She plays three seasons, 15, 16, and 20, in a very short span of two to three years. Then after 20, she disappears off the face of the earth. She defined the golden era of Survivor in such a profound way, and the fact that she’s vanished from pop culture is so fascinating to me.

BD: You guys have made some really good memes on Drop Your Buffs about what she’s up to.

Sean: We found her in Montana! We did track her down. We actually had a text exchange with her, because when we did our live show we thought what a gag it would be to have fog machine smoke and Amanda Kimmel walks out.

She said, thank you, but no [laughs].