Less companies more groups but the one I used to see kill forums back in the day over and over was slicing the community too thinly. You start with a general or focused set of discussions, eventually you want to split general banter out, no problem.
The problem comes in when you fall for the idea "well, I'm already here, might as well make loads of sections". Now instead of on topic and off topic you have general, misc, gaming, books, whatever else.
If you don't have the community to fill out all of those areas, they all end up becoming mini ghost towns. This makes the community look dead, feel dead, eventually become dead.
Used to happen in forums when they were the new hotness, these days if you use Discord you're probably idling at least 2 or 3 communities that did this and now wonder where everyone went.
I've seen that happen a few times on various forums I've visited; one part was because they copied sections off of established, larger forums. Another was just adding sections when someone asked about it. And another was trying to encourage certain forum topics.
Since then I've just said, if there's enough topics about a subject to warrant a new section, then we'll add it. Until then, just post it in #general or whatever. You don't need a dedicated section if you want to talk about things.
With Discord separate threads aren’t supported as well as they were on phpbb forums. They’re not prominently displayed and the older ones (a couple months old) fail to load at all. So channels play the role of a small static set of threads, not of old forum sections. Without separate channels everything is intermingled into one big mess. I’d prefer phpbb. Alas we’re in a race to the bottom since the naughts.
A mistake I've seen is when they try to suppress criticism as oppose to harness it.
A classic thing I saw moderating in the original Valve forums was the first time poster going on the all caps rant. 9 times out of 10 you could just talk to them calmly and turn them into an ally and make them know someone was actually listening. All they wanted was to be heard.
A great article but some dynamics got even worse since 2008. The idea that customers do have clout for example. Apart from major scandals / faux-pas most big companies these days don’t even have to care through sheer market dominance.
If you even get to the modern equivalent of “can I please speak with your manager” it usually doesn’t even get you anywhere as:
a) That manager is also “just an employee” who rarely has any power over process and its codified bureaucratic / more often than not nonsensical (from actual customer POV at least) increasingly ruling-above-anything-else information systems.
b) Nobody cares. At least informally, even up to the CEO. If 98% of customers don’t share that particular problem why would they? “That doesn’t scale.” Companies started to become fully data driven for a reason.
A couple of years ago I read an article about the “premium mediocre” aspects of modern consumer experience, I feel this topic is related somewhat.
Consumers these days do have it better in many ways but also have it worse in quite a few.
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While we originally stated we planned to remove the Pheons from the accounts that received the mail, we understand that many players spent these in good faith. As we caught the exploit before it was widely used, we have decided not remove the Pheons.
We want to ensure fairness. We know this situation was confusing, and it was unclear to players how many Pheons they should claim and how it was exploited by others. Although we initially stated we would not take back any of the Pheons that were distributed, we feel that fairness means everyone receiving an equal amount of Pheons.
To accomplish this, we will be removing the Pheons that players initially received from the mail and instead granting 30 total Pheons to all players. Please note that with this adjustment, players who previously collected and spent more than 30 Pheons from this incident will keep their purchased items but may see a negative Pheon balance.
It was an oblique reference to one particular social media company that is currently going through several stupid mistakes. My imagined article update would use examples from the more recent fiasco instead of dated references.
The Internet is Very Serious Business. You should always have an open poll to decide your next product or name, have an open bot collecting tweets (or whatever), have an unguarded webcam broadcasting your "art".
