You know how interviewers love asking about your greatest weakness, or the biggest mistake you've ever made? These questions may sound formulaic, maybe even borderline cliche, but be careful when you answer: they are more important than they seem.
Hear, hear. Really there were more responsive âcommunity ownersâ (or what to call it). So annoying when you take the time to report bugs, flaws or things which could increase the usability of something and itâs seemingly just ignored. I want your software/webapp to be great, donât you?
In my mind, this is when Minecraft started to go wrong, for example â when any half-baked idea got coded up and thrown into the next release, and some random RPG elements with a âstorylineâ were bolted onto the game structure. Of course, they just provide a nice illustrative example â I feel like a lot of games are good examples of âDonât listen to your community too much.â
Having members who want to participate in discussions about the site itself is amazing and rewarding.
I agree with the items on this list but Iâd include a 6th that goes something like this: Your meta users are (likely) mostly âpower usersâ. Donât focus on the meta discussion so much that you forget about the community members that you arenât hearing from.
So, in a nutshell, I was telling the people who loved Stack Overflow the most of all to basically ⌠f**k off and go away.
Jeff, I want to love the stackexchange sites, and I do often find them useful in doing my job, but to be frank youâre still telling users to take a hike. The site moderators have extremely twitchy trigger fingers when closing questions as off topic. Maybe they are just adhering to a policy thatâs too strict, but this is a real shame because I see a lot of really interesting questions shut down for not being âspecificâ enough. And whatâs the alternative? Where is the appropriate place to ask & discuss some of the more open ended stuff? If not with the stackexchange community, then who? Iâve been a lurker since the beginning and recently started participating but I very quickly became frustrated at the amount of genuinely engaging topics that are being squelched.
@Adam.
I would argue that this is more about selection from anything. While there are things that are interesting to explore, listeners of classic rock radio stations probably donât want to hear hair metal and tv sports channels donât air content about home improvements. When you go too far off topic, itâs your core audience who becomes disaffected, and theyâre the ones who make your community.
So when people go too far off topic, these posts should be dealt with as such and explanations given about why material isnât topical. Can the moderation process be more sensitive in dealing with these issues? Certainly. This is the best moderation system weâve got right now though, and I think weâre far better served by incremental change than worrying about a small group of people who canât be accommodated.
âListen to your community, but donât let them tell you what to do.â
But on the other side of the coin, donât allow this sort of thinking to proliferate to the point that you think you know better than the community. If nearly everyone in the community disagrees with your idea (example), then thereâs a good chance that this idea is part of that 90% (see lesson #1).
@Adam, in my experience the more interesting and open-ended questions have ended up on programmers.stackexchange, which is a site I find myself frequenting more than Stack Overflow by this point.
i am delirious and exhausted from relentless assaults by the tattered, bitter remnants of the Bush Cartel⌠but finding this webpage tonight~ reading your advice here and being forced to recall the Brat enabled me to also recall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax after i chased your fine wikilink.
Item #3 is the biggest takeaway for any community manager. Actually, having a community managed at all is already a blessing.
An example: Iâm a user of Amazon cloud services and with some other community members have been begging Amazon for one specific feature for several years in a row. It is structurally being ignored, whilst other requests do get attention.
It is humiliating and frustrating. They could say no. They could say maybe later. But instead they say nothing. Step 1 of communication is acknowledging the other party exists.
Brilliant. I say this stuff to customers every day at UserVoice (and I probably got some of it from our lunch last year, Jeff).
You have to listen to your customers. But you absolutely shouldnât say yes to everything, and you absolutely shouldnât pussyfoot around saying ânoâ.
As the poor sod responsible for user experience and product decisions regarding Firefox from versions 1.5 through 4, Iâd like to say that I agree completely and wholeheartedly with everything in this post. On our best days, Mozilla works this way ⌠but we have sparingly few days like that, and far too many Subaru Brats to show for it.
Well written, Jeff. Should be in every textbook or guide about community management.
By Sturgeonâs Law, 90% of Stackoverflow questions are crap. Whatâs more 90% of all SO Answers are crap. Even funnier, 90% of your blog posts are utter bullshit. Yep, sounds about right.
Or doesnât Sturgeonâs Law relate to you? Get off the high horse, my son.