When private equity buys online community platforms, who wins? What about if those platforms were built on open source software? Does the company continue to be a good citizen of the open source community that helped build the product?

History has shown us that it is often the community managers and pros who lose. They might not just lose a good platform though, they might lose their job.

Lincoln Russell has an interesting perspective on this topic. He joined Vanilla Forums, an open source community software platform, as a senior developer in 2011, having already used it for a couple of years. He left the company in 2020, then the director of engineering. Lincoln has continued to use the software. Vanilla Forums was subsequently purchased by Higher Logic, a company lacking a meaningful history of open source contributions.

As a matter of disclosure, both Higher Logic and Vanilla Forums are past sponsors of the show.

Lincoln and I also discuss:

• How Vanilla Forums’ open source ethos shifted over time
• The importance of data migration standards for community software
• Is community software best built by small businesses?

Your community software provider must answer this (16:38): “The first question you should ask a [community software] vendor is: How easy is it to leave you? It’s not a fun question to ask, but the answer is crucial to me. It’s a deal-breaker question.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Some community platforms try to lock their customer data into the platform (18:07): “When [a client is] onboarding [to new community software during the] initial year or two, they don’t care about their data export. It’s at the end. That’s a long-term reputational issue about how people talk about their experiences. We saw that with [community software] competitors. We had some trouble with a couple of competitors in trying to get the data from them and spent way more hours than particular customers were worth – just on principle, honestly – getting the data out for them because we were so personally offended. At least I was.” -Lincoln Russell

When you aren’t selling community software to the people who will actually use it (20:37): “In the [community software] sales process, you identify stakeholders – people that are decision makers. A lot of the time they weren’t a community manager. A lot of the time it was a director of technology, it was a CEO, or other positions, and that warps your roadmap. “When those are the people that [the] sales team [is] sitting in front of, day in and day out, and you’re pitching an improved moderation queue, they want this button that does this thing. You’re like, ‘But that’s stupid.’ But it doesn’t matter. If those are the people you’re selling to, [with] their own idea of community that doesn’t actually align with community management because they have internal business goals, and all they want to do are check those boxes.” -Lincoln Russell

Why community professionals should drive community platform choice (22:10): “Although I’d like to believe, ego-wise, that I could make a community out of whatever piece of garbage application you throw in front of me, I know the software can either help me or hurt me, and it’s tough when you’re making dinner with someone else’s ingredients.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Great ideas need great communicators (23:44): “The biggest issue with charting a course is you need a really clear vision, and you also need someone who can articulate that vision a lot, and over and over again, to the right people in the right circumstances. You need an external marketer. All of us in engineering at Vanilla [were] all introverts. None of us were going to conferences and giving talks about our vision for community software. It just wasn’t in us to do that. I think we were poorer off in that we had some really good ideas, and could have shifted the conversation a bit, but we didn’t put our energy there because that was a lot of energy.” -Lincoln Russell

Protecting your culture makes you unique from the big social media platforms (33:43): “I think this idea of being more private and being very selective about what you present to the world, and having an internal culture that is protected from the internet – not promoted to the internet – is the future of these independent community spaces because that’s the space those [bigger] platforms cannot touch.” -Lincoln Russell

Community drives great software projects (37:04): “To build great software, like the great software projects that are going to outlive me, you need a community of people committed to working on them for long periods of time. [You need] to replace those people when they leave, but you have to have a system to keep that going, not just like, [we] got great five minds in a room and they did a thing, and then they cash out at the end. That’s not sustainable.” -Lincoln Russell

Lincoln Russell is the vice president of engineering for uConnect, which builds virtual career centers for colleges and universities to help students get better jobs. Earlier in his career, he spent 8 and a half years at Vanilla Forums, starting as a senior developer in 2011 and leaving in 2020 as the director of engineering.

• Lincoln’s website
• Higher Logic Vanilla, from Higher Logic
• uConnect, where Lincoln is vice president of engineering
• Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com
• WordPress.org, the home of the WordPress open source community
• Arlington-Based Higher Logic Acquires Montreal’s Vanilla by Richard Foster for Virginia Business
• Nitro Porter, Lincoln’s community platform migration tool
• Lincoln’s blog post announcing Nitro Porter
• Matt Mecham of Invision Community
• Matt Mecham on Community Signal

• View on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. Thank you for listening.

Rebecca Newton is a legend of the online community profession. After 30 years, she has retired. But what does it mean when we retire from this work?

Her career began AOL in 1994, building communities and managing a massive volunteer program. Among her numerous stops, Rebecca found a focus in child safety, leading such efforts for Sulake (the company behind Habbo Hotels and Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom), Mind Candy (Moshi Monsters), and most recently SuperAwesome, a provider of tools for safer, responsible digital engagement with young people, who was acquired by Epic Games.

A program manager for community in 1997, a community director in 2001, a chief community officer in 2007: Rebecca has held all of the titles. Along the way, she has paved a path for the community profession, pushing us higher in corporate environments and creating valuable resources for us. Most notably, her 24 year stewardship of the e-mint listserv for community pros, an iconic resource that has helped countless community facilitators.

After such a career, what’s it like to step away from full-time work? What goes through the mind of a retiring community pro? That’s what we’ll discuss, plus:

• How do you prepare for retirement, as a community pro?
• What will Rebecca miss? What won’t she miss?
• The least and most effective pieces of legislation passed during Rebecca’s career

What will Rebecca miss most about being a full-time community pro? (17:32): “I’m going to miss working with people online the most. It’s a different animal than working with people offline, and I did plenty of that before I started in the online world. … Everybody thought they invented remote working. I’ve had remote teams since 1994, so it’s not new. I’m going to really miss that because there’s a special culture in the online world, as you know, that is really hard to describe, or it’s hard for me to describe but is not like the offline world. It’s like being in a special club, in a secret club. That’s how it feels to me.” -Rebecca Newton

What won’t she miss? (23:07): “I won’t miss … people naively thinking they know better than everybody who built the widget. I’ve heard the conversations. ‘Oh, they can’t let go. They don’t know how to let go. They don’t know how to grow. They don’t know how to do this.’ Then I would think, ‘Okay, well, we’ll see who’s not growing in a year, so I’m going to go looking for another job because I know in a year this thing’s not going to exist.'” -Rebecca Newton

The cyclical trend of online community obsession (31:09): “I remember in 2000 when dentists were [asking], ‘Do I need an online community?’ There was a trend of, “Oh, it’s online community,’ because of the success at AOL. I was like, ‘No. You’re a dentist.'” -Rebecca Newton

Overreaction from government officials who aren’t active online (34:21): “I’m not saying anything about how smart [government decision makers] are, about how great their intentions were, or their abilities in the world. [But] if you’re not [active online], if you’re not a heavy user, if you’re not in the kid’s world using it, how can you possibly [make good decisions]? That’s what we see in Great Britain, in the EU. Something happens to one person under 16, they want to have 27 laws about it. Because this thing happened.” -Rebecca Newton

Kids want to collaborate, they want a job (38:40): “That’s the biggest thing I learned about working with kids. The very first thing when they get online or game in an app, whatever it is, [they say] ‘I want a job. Can I have a job? Let’s do this together. Let’s do that together.'” -Rebecca Newton

When legislation goes too far (39:18): “Over-regulation is detrimental. I think all it does is create a whole lot of jobs for people to do a lot of stuff that nobody’s ever going to look at. That’s a really rude thing for me to say, but I believe that.” -Rebecca Newton

Rebecca Newton has spent 30 years in the commercial internet industry. As head of digital trust and community, Rebecca led online community, online safety, moderation, engagement, and customer services efforts at SuperAwesome (of Epic Games) from 2015 to 2023. Prior to joining SuperAwesome, Rebecca worked at Mind Candy as the chief community & safety officer, serving over 140 million registered (young) users.

From 2001 to 2007, she worked at Sulake (the company behind Habbo Hotels) as the global director of community for the world’s largest teen virtual world site, spanning 24 countries. She began her online community career with America Online in 1994, where she wore many hats, and finally landed as the program manager for AOL’s community leader program.

Among her contributions to the discipline of online community, Rebecca co-founded VirComm, the London-based annual conference for online community professionals in 2011, and the e-mint community management listserv. She serves on boards and committees for numerous organizations, including AgeCheq, the Archewell Foundation, and DitchTheLabel.org.

• Rebecca’s previous appearance on Community Signal
• Rebecca’s website
• e-mint, a community management listserv that Rebecca has managed since 2000
• AgeCheq, the Archewell Foundation, and DitchTheLabel.org, organizations that Rebecca provides guidance to
• eWorld, an Apple service that launched in 1994 and provided a community feature
• Michael Acton Smith, who was once Rebecca’s boss
• The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Communications Decency Act, and Section 230, which were all pieces of legislation passed during Rebecca’s career
• Virtual Magic Kingdom, an online game created by Disney and Sulake, where Rebecca led community and safety efforts
• Jenna Woodul, potentially the first person with the chief community officer title
• Jenna Woodul on Community Signal
• MIT’s Scratch community, which is managed by someone that Rebecca has mentored, who was initially a member of one of the communities she was responsible for

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. Thank you for listening.

Online community consultants aren’t unlike consultants for any other area of work. Some are ethical, smart, and talented, and some aren’t. Consultants also don’t often make great guests for the show because they view it as yet another lead generational funnel for them to shout generalities into.

But hopefully an exception is this episode with community consultant Jenny Weigle. On it, we discuss how being humble is often at odds with how many consultants promote themselves, as they place a certain importance on appearing authoritative and revelatory, even if that isn’t actually correct in the context of the history of this work.

Can you even be a community consultant or an online community resource if you haven’t taken a concept pioneered 30 years ago and thrown your logo on it?

We also discuss:

• An update on past guest Tim McDonald’s quest for a liver donor
• Self-promotion by community consultants
• Community professionals do roadshows, but are they ever invited to roadshows by other departments?

When consultants and resources claim general concepts (3:57): “I’ve seen plenty of [community] consultants and resources pop up over my 25 years and throw a logo on something. The commitment curve, the activity ladder, the mountain of progression… how many different upward-facing shapes can we throw a logo on? I’ve seen a lot of that, and I’ve seen people claim something that has either been claimed decades ago or no one should be laying claim to.” -Patrick O’Keefe

How much of the talk in community work is brand new? (6:01): “There are very few things that happen in our field today that make me pause and say, ‘Wow,’ either to myself or out loud. When I’m putting out my materials and what I’m personally working on, I’m just doing what’s top of mind and mainly it’s influenced by what my clients need at the time.” -Jenny Weigle

The danger AI poses to community creativity (15:19): “[With ChatGPT and similar AI tools,] I’m worried about elements of communities where creativity is usually needed. An easy example is the writing of content, the writing of posts, the writing of conversations, and how those things start. I’m worried about everyone sounding the same. I’m worried about everyone getting the same prompts. I’m worried about everyone rewriting their posts using the same tool that learns on the same data set, and will all move them closer to the same center. Ultimately, that’s the death of community.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Why community pros should read hospitality books (26:05): “There were so many things [that community builders can learn from the hospitality industry]. I was in awe as I turned each page of Danny Meyer’s book because he paid so much attention to wanting to know his customer’s preferences, their likes, dislikes, what was relevant going on in their lives at the moment, what would bring them in the door, and what would keep them from coming. These are all things that community managers are concerned about with their online communities, as well.” -Jenny Weigle

Jenny Weigle has been creating, executing, and reviewing strategies for online communities for more than 10 years. She’s worked with more than 100 brands on various aspects of their community strategy and implementations, including launch, migration, programming, and planning. These brands include, Airbnb, Google, HP, Intuit, Pinterest, REI, Samsung, Sephora, Splunk, Stubhub, and Visa.

When she’s not geeking out on community strategy, Jenny spends time in Los Angeles with her partner, John, and stepdaughter. In her personal life, she is a proud member of a number of communities, including Southern California Gator Club, Spiritual Sisters of Los Angeles (which she founded), Oak Park LA (for CrossFit), Sofar Sounds, and D23: The Official Disney Fan Club.

• Jenny’s website
• Tim McDonald on Community Signal
• Good news from Tim!
• TimsLiver.com
• Jenny’s Substack
• The Hospitality Books That Made Me a Better Community Professional by Jenny
• Danny Meyer’s book, Setting the Table
• TV shows that deal with hospitality and customer service: Hotel Impossible, Bar Rescue, Kitchen Nightmares, and The Profit
• The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray
• Be Our Guest by The Disney Institute with Theodore Kinni
• Jenny’s Community Roadshow template
• Jenny on LinkedIn

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Bodies aren’t moderated equally on the internet. Content moderation efforts, especially those at large, mainstream platforms, can suffer from policy-based bias that results in moderation centering a cisgender gaze. This reinforcing of heteronormativity can leave some of your most vulnerable community members – and potential community members – feeling alienated, ostracized, and simply unwelcome.

Last year, in her role as CX escalations supervisor at Grindr, Vanity Brown co-authored a whitepaper, Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation. Insightful, with a straight forward approach to making content moderation just a bit better, I found that it was also a validation of good, thoughtful moderation that has been going on for a long time.

Vanity joins the show to talk about these efforts, which are tempered by a realistic acknowledgement of the limitations of this work, and how our need to be in other places (like app stores) can often slow down the progress we’d like to make.

We also discuss:

• Why it’s not our job to guess the gender of our members
• The state of AI trust and safety tools
• ChatGPT, Midjourney, and how much to worry about them

How bodies are moderated differently online (2:16): “We want folks to express themselves and their sexuality joyfully, without judgment. Of course, without any harm. But what does that look like? … There traditionally are [community] guidelines for females and guidelines for males, but the world is changing and folks are becoming more in tune with who they are, and we want to be able to treat them equally and let folks, especially I emphasize our trans users, who are uploading photos … and if they are showing the top, then they’re considered a woman if they have female-presenting breasts versus male. There are just a lot of nuances there that we saw as we were moderating content from a community who is very fluid with their gender expression.” -Vanity Brown

When do kinks create a moderation issue? (6:38): “[Kinks vs. crimes get] sticky when the kink looks like a crime. … Everything is about sex and kinks at Grindr. With this mass of kinky stuff, which of these things are harmful? I often echo that, in my work, I’m always driven … to do no harm. At the end of the day, are we harming someone? … Do we have a responsibility to protect them and keep them safe? As we continue to build trust with the community, we have to realize that folks are adults, too.” -Vanity Brown

Empathy sits at the core of good moderation (14:38): “If you can’t be empathetic for the things you are not … then you’re not really doing good thoughtful community moderation, trust and safety work. … Ultimately, if you want to be truly great at this work, you have to protect the people who aren’t you.” -Patrick O’Keefe

What can community pros learn from dating apps? (24:23): “[Community, moderation, trust, and safety pros] can learn from dating apps on the level of how personal and sensitive dating apps are in the content you’re sending back and forth. Folks using dating apps, a lot of times their heartstrings are attached, and their heartstrings are attached on a dating app, but not necessarily Amazon or shopping at Macy’s. … It’s just important to look at folks with a microscope and treat them with kindness as those in dating apps hopefully are doing when they’re handling their customers.” -Vanity Brown

Vanity Brown is the CX escalations supervisor for Grindr, where she has worked in trust and safety for over 2 years, following more than 7 years at eHarmony. Vanity manages an escalations team of specialists devoted to handling the most complex cases that come through Grindr’s support channels.

• Vanity on LinkedIn
• Grindr, where Vanity is CX escalations supervisor
• Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation whitepaper, co-authored by Alice Hunsberger, Vanity, and Lily Galib, which I found via Juliet Shen
• Grindr’s community guidelines
• OpenAI’s efforts to identify AI-generated text, which were only able to identify “likely” AI-written text 26% of the time, a bit more than the approximately 10% I mentioned during the show
• Love Light Community, a youth choir founded by Vanity, dedicated to “enriching the lives of youth and families in underserved communities through the transforming power of music and the arts”
• Love Light Community on Instagram

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Safeguarding is a term used in Ireland and the United Kingdom that covers efforts to protect the health, wellbeing, and human rights of people, especially children and those who are otherwise vulnerable.

At Diabetes UK, four people alternate by week as the safeguarding lead, helping to protect those that the charity comes in contact with. One of them is Josh Poncil, the online community and learning manager. Among his responsibilities is Diabetes UK’s online forum.

On this episode, we talk about safeguarding and knowing if you’ve done the right thing at the end of the day, plus:

• What is considered “too technical” for the average member to answer in a diabetes community?
• How Josh writes for a vulnerable audience
• Moderation decisions that could trigger a meltdown

When veteran members go bad (18:39): “[After 25 years in content moderation,] I really believe that the most stressful situation is when an experienced member takes a turn for the worst. … It’s painful because they are an example to other people in the community. Especially new members who see their posts and say, ‘That member has this number of contributions and has been in the community this long. If they [post] that and it’s up still, that’s probably how this community behaves.'” -Patrick O’Keefe

An example of safeguarding in an online community (23:43): “I had someone on the forum saying, ‘I’ve just been diagnosed a couple of weeks ago. I’ve barely eaten.’ That’s like an alarm ringing bells in my head. I’ll take the lead and private message them. … ‘Is everything okay? Could you please contact the helpline or tell us what’s going on?’ “Let’s say they got back to me saying, ‘Yes, I haven’t eaten anything. I don’t feel well. I feel dizzy.’ Then I’ll contact back, ‘Do you need me to call an ambulance?’ Sometimes they’ll go back to me, ‘Yes, here’s my address, my telephone number.’ I’ll ring [the emergency service] 999. I have to be careful what I say at the beginning because of my accent. I’m American, but I live in London. I have to make sure I’m not coming off as a scam. I’m calling from a charity. I have a safeguarding concern.” -Josh Poncil

With safeguarding, you regularly are questioning if you did the right thing (24:53): “I’ve had someone on the forum saying, ‘My mom is in quite a worrying state. She’s scared to go to the hospital. She’s dizzy, she’s not coherent. I’m scared she hasn’t been testing for blood sugars.’ On my end, I’ve contacted the daughter, ‘Please get your mom to [Accident and Emergency]. It sounds like she needs medical attention.’ They’ve got back to me, ‘Thank you for getting in touch, but my mom didn’t make it.’ This affected me, and it hit me quite hard not knowing if I did the right thing. I have to just take a moment of, ‘Did I make the right choice? Is there anything else I could do at this time?'” -Josh Poncil

For the last 4 years, Josh Poncil has been the online community and learning manager for Diabetes UK, after a stint at Blood Cancer UK. He went to school for creative writing and journalism, before transitioning to community by way of social media management.

• Sponsor: Higher Logic, the community platform for community managers
• Josh on LinkedIn
• Diabetes UK, where Josh is online community and learning manager
• Diabetes UK’s online forum

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Employee resource groups (ERGs) can do a lot to create a greater sense of belonging at your organization. But the folks who volunteer to lead these groups may find themselves in need of help when it comes to utilizing perhaps the greatest tool at their disposal: Your internal employee community platform.

As a community strategist within large organizations, Lori Harrison-Smith has trained employees to help them get the most out of these platforms.

She has also managed two large migrations, both from Jive, and that has led her to have a (in her words) cynical perspective on the resources made available for these migrations, by both companies and the software vendors themselves.

Lori and Patrick discuss:

• Doing something for an employee vs. showing them how to do it themselves
• How much the ERG leaders she’s worked with have dipped into moderation
• The short timeframes given to internal community migrations

What’s really driving an internal community migration deadline (22:59): “When [an internal employee community] migration is happening, [companies are often] trying to save some money while they’re at it, and they’ve got this deadline. It’s usually a contract signature that is driving that deadline. There’s never enough time. It’s like, ‘We need to get off of this because the contract expires in November.’ It’s May when we’re having this conversation because that’s when everybody started looking at the balance sheet.” -Lori Harrison-Smith

Instead of adjustments to their platforms, vendors can push “change management” (31:52): “With the different [internal community] vendors I’ve worked with, I’ve always had great relationships with them. The people have always been great and nice, but there’s just these struggles as a community manager because I’m hearing what the employees are saying. I’m hearing them talk about the pain points they’re experiencing. Then you go back to the vendor, and a lot of it is, ‘Well, change management. You just got to get them used to this new system.'” -Lori Harrison-Smith

The downside of big dollar value community software contracts (33:57): “Maybe [the consolidation in the community software space is] a case for lower-cost platforms and open source solutions that may seem a little harder upfront but ultimately allow you to be a little more nimble internally as opposed to the sunk cost that makes you feel like you’re in a relationship you could never leave because you need to get that money back out of it.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Lori Harrison-Smith’s career began in advertising, where she worked as a copywriter and editor. She found her real passion, though, when she transitioned to a role where she launched and supported an 8,000-strong employee community. Since 2011, Lori has held community roles within large organizations, leading platform updates and migrations, developing content and engagement programs, advocating for user experience, and guiding and supporting employees around communication and knowledge sharing.

She is currently the collaboration network manager at VMware, following community roles at Motorola Solutions and Steelcase.

• Lori Harrison-Smith on LinkedIn
• VMware, where Lori is the collaboration network manager
• Employee Resource Groups Create a Sense of Belonging, Foster Engagement by Stephen Miller for SHRM

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

As we celebrate Community Signal’s 7th birthday, Patrick takes questions from Community Signal listeners and supporters in this first ever “Ask Patrick Anything” episode of the show.

Questions include:

• If everything had worked with CNN+, what would community look like for the platform?
• Would you rather be a working community professional or a community consultant?
• Will we ever see community leaders in the C-suite as the norm?

2023 will be Patrick’s 25th year of community work, so this is an opportunity to reflect on that passage of time. A lot has changed and, surprisingly, some things haven’t.

Joining Patrick to ask the questions and dig deeper is previous guest Jared Smith. They also cover:

• The early promise of CNN+’s Interview Club
• How community moderation tools have changed over the years
• Why community isn’t special when it comes to the C-suite

You have to commit to be successful with D2C products (11:55): “If you build interactive products and kill them after three weeks, it’s hard to prove out anything. It’s hard to build out loyalty. It’s hard to build out a D2C product if you’re not willing to commit.” -Patrick O’Keefe

The magic of the unexpected in media products (13:04): “I think there is something magical that can happen when you take some of the expected nature of television or media, of what we expect is going to happen, and you throw the consumer, the community, the members, the subscribers into that. You give them the freedom to make other things happen.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Operators drive moderator tool development more than platforms (22:24): “[When it comes to moderator tools], it’s often the community of people who need something driving it more so than the platforms themselves.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Developers still focus on the frontend more than the administrative backend (23:35): “It’s a cliché to say that software developers focus on the frontend and the user experience and not so much the admin and moderation experience. That’s a cliché in our business. I think that is largely the case with some exceptions. Those exceptions tend to be people who have run communities themselves or who have a really good foundational understanding of the web from being in it for so long.” -Patrick O’Keefe

If you want to make a difference in moderator tooling, start with the communities that don’t have money (23:58): “I get pitched by developers, and I always tell them that the way to make change in this industry is to make your product available to the people who don’t have anything. The Fortune 500s of the world are always going to have money, and they’re always going to have engineers. They can figure their way around problems and pay for solutions. Most communities, 99.9% of people, don’t have any money. That’s where you make change.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Artificial intelligence isn’t a moderation panacea (24:36): “If you think about it [going back 25 years], forums are not dead and the mod tools are basically the same that we had. Remove user, close thread, things like that, a lot of that stuff. It’s the same. I also don’t think it’s a bad thing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. One of the things about these AIs is sometimes they get it really, really wrong in really offensive ways. You still need that human element to counter that.” -Jared Smith

Banning Andrew Anglin is not brave, it’s obvious (27:09): “When [Elon Musk decides] to unban Andrew Anglin, who’s arguably the most prominent real nazi on the internet, the founder of The Daily Stormer, the most prominent nazi publication on the internet [that makes Twitter a place I am less likely to engage]. … Andrew Anglin can join any platform I own and he’ll be banned. That’s not a brave thing. That’s not a talking point or like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ It’s obvious. It’s not an amazing thing.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Hyping the chief community officer role isn’t helpful (39:46): “We’ve seen these tweets that are like, ‘Half of the Fortune 500 will have chief community officers in the next 10 years,’ or ‘10% of this or all big companies or all the Fortune 100 or the future of companies will be a chief community officer.’ It’s all hype. It’s all nonsense. For the most part, it’s to encourage hype in our industry. I don’t see it as healthy. I don’t see it as good. I don’t see it as aspirational. I don’t see those people as friends or allies of the work.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Be wary of the hype (41:42): “I don’t trust anyone who says chief community officers are the future of community, that there’s going to be one at every big company. It’s always hype. It’s always because they have some financially-vested interest in community work proliferating in that way or at least sounding like your friend. They want to sound like they’re in your corner or they’re your ally because there is some financial incentive tied to that for them long-term.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Jared Smith is a manager of software engineering at BoomTown in Charleston, SC, leading engineering teams and encouraging developer career growth, including a ten-year stint working on and eventually leading a team of engineers dedicated to implementing WordPress for real estate agent websites. In addition to BoomTown, Jared runs @chswx (shorthand for Charleston Weather) and the chswx.com blog, where he writes forecasts and disseminates National Weather Service alerts for the Charleston, SC metro area. Over nearly 15 years, @chswx has emerged as a key catalyst in the weather conversation, not only acting as a conduit for sending alerts but also for receiving reports in real-time, improving situational awareness for public, media, and NWS warning forecasters alike.

• Jared Smith, our guest host
• BoomTown, where Jared is manager of software engineering
• Charleston Weather (including @chswx on Twitter), a project that Jared runs
• Wesley Faulker’s appearance on Community Signal
• Wikipedia page for CNN+, the streaming service Patrick helped launch
• A clip from the Interview Club interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Anthony Fauci
• Bassey Etim on LinkedIn, who has been on several Community Signal episodes
• Mastodon, free, open source decentralized social media platform
• Ryan Hall, a weather YouTuber
• Brad Williams’ appearance on Community Signal
• Invision Community and Discourse, two community software options recommended by Patrick
• ChatGPT
• Community Signal episode covering Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter
• COPPA, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
• DMCA, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment or send me an email. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Elon Musk’s presence has loomed over Twitter since he announced plans to purchase the platform. And for these few weeks that he’s been in charge, many concerns have proven to be justified. Musk laid off 3,700 employees, and then 4,400 contractors. He is firing those who are critical of him. The verification process, perhaps one of Twitter’s most trusted features, has been unraveled. He’s offered severance to those who don’t want to be part of “extremely hardcore” Twitter. Following the results of a Twitter poll, he reinstated the account of Donald Trump, who was suspended from the platform for his role in inciting the January 6th attacks.

So, what happens now? What of the many social movements that manifested on Twitter? While some movements and followings may see new manifestations on other platforms, not everything will be completely recreated. For example, as writer Jason Parham explains, “whatever the destination, Black Twitter will be increasingly difficult to recreate.”

In this episode of Community Signal, Patrick speaks to three experts: Sarah T. Roberts, associate professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, trust and safety consultant Ralph Spencer, and Omar Wasow, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science and co-founder of BlackPlanet, about the current state and future of Twitter. They dissect the realities facing the platform today including content moderation, loss of institutional knowledge, and uncertainty about Twitter’s infrastructure, but also emphasize the importance of Twitter as a social utility for news and more.

This episode also touches on:

• The reality of moderating a platform like Twitter
• What platforms actually mean when they say they’re for “free speech”
• How Musk tanked the value of verification on Twitter

On the future of content moderation at Twitter (8:28): “There’s no way possible with the cuts [Musk has] made that he’s going to be able to do any type of content moderation. … [He] isn’t going to have anybody who remotely begins to know to how to do that [legal compliance and related work].” –Ralph Spencer

Sarah T. Roberts’ moderation challenge for Elon Musk (11:19): “I want Elon Musk to spend one day as a frontline production content moderator, and then get back to this [Community Signal] crew about how that went. Let us know what you saw. Share with us how easy it was to stomach that. Were you able to keep up with the expected pace at Twitter? Could you … make good decisions over 90% of the time, over 1,000, 2,000 times a day? Could you do that all the while seeing animals being harmed, kids being beat on, [and] child sexual exploitation material?” –@ubiquity75

Bumper sticker wisdom doesn’t make good policy (15:46): “Everything [Musk has said about free speech] has had the quality of good bumper stickers but is totally divorced from reality, and that doesn’t bode well, obviously.” –@owasow

The responsibility in leading a social media platform (19:41): “One thing that we are seeing in real-time [at Twitter] is what a danger there is in having one individual – especially a very privileged individual who does not live in the same social milieu as almost anyone else in the world – one very privileged individual’s ability to be the arbiter of … these profoundly contested ideological notions of something like free speech which again is continually misapplied in this realm.” –@ubiquity75

Musk’s peddling of conspiracy theories (20:29): “[Musk is] running around tweeting that story about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the false article about what happened between him and his attacker. What kind of example is that to set? … What it is to me is like this kid who has way too much money, and he found a new toy he wants to play with.” –Ralph Spencer

Leading with humility (21:23): “[If you’re running a site like Twitter,] you have to have a ‘small d’ democratic personality, which is to say you really have to be comfortable with a thousand voices flourishing, a lot of them being critical of you, and that’s not something that you take personally.” –@owasow

There are always limits on speech (23:50): “When you declare that your product, your site, your platform, your service is a free speech zone, there is always going to be a limit on that speech. … [CSAM] is the most extreme example that we can come up with, but that is content moderation. To remove that material, to disallow it, to enforce the law means that there is a limit on speech, and there ought to be in that case. If there’s a limit on speech, it is by definition not a free speech site. Then we have to ask, well, what are the limits, and who do they serve?” –@ubiquity75

“Free speech” platforms are not a thing (25:25): “When I hear people invoke free speech on a for-profit social media site, not only does that not exist today, it never has existed, and it never will exist. Let’s deal with what reality is actually giving us and talk about that instead of these fantasies that actually are pretty much not good for anyone involved.” –@ubiquity75

The social weight and trust that verification brought to interactions on Twitter (32:52): “[Twitter] has outsized social impact, whether it’s in the political arena, whether it’s in social movements, whether it’s in celebrity usage, all of these things have been true. In terms of political movements, the good, bad, the ugly. We saw an insurrection against the United States launched by the President of the United States on Twitter, so it’s not all rosy, but the point is that Twitter had this outsized power and part of that could be attributed … to this verification process that let a lot of high profile folks, prominent individuals, media organizations, other kinds of people in the zeitgeist or in the public eye, engage with a certain sense of security.” –@ubiquity75

How does Twitter sustain its infrastructure amidst the mass layoffs and resignations? (39:18): “We have good reason to fear that [Twitter’s] infrastructure is going to get considerably worse over time. [Musk has] fired enough of the people. … In a lot of ways, [Twitter is] like a telephone company. It’s got a lot of boring infrastructure that it has to maintain so that it’s reliable. [Musk has] taken a bunch of these pillars or blocks in the Jenga stack and knocked them out, and it’s a lot more wobbly now.” –@owasow

Musk’s Twitter user experience is not the common one (48:23): “[Musk is] obsessed with bots and spam, but why is that such a compulsion for him? Well, he has 100-plus million followers, and when he looks at his replies, there’s probably a lot of bots and spam there. That’s not where I live because I’m a civilian. His perspective is distorted in a way partly by the investment around him but partly also by just being so way out of proportion to almost any other human on Earth.” –@owasow

Omar Wasow is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science. His research focuses on race, politics, and statistical methods. Previously, Omar co-founded BlackPlanet, an early leading social network, and was a regular technology analyst on radio and television. He received a PhD in African American Studies, an MA in government, and an MA in statistics from Harvard University.

Ralph Spencer has been working to make online spaces safer for more than 20 years, starting with his time as a club editorial specialist (message board editor) at Prodigy, and then graduating to America Online. During his time at AOL, he was in charge of all issues involving Child Sexual Abuse Material or CSAM. The evidence that Ralph and the team he worked with in AOL’s legal department compiled contributed to numerous arrests and convictions of individuals for the possession and distribution of CSAM. He currently works as a freelance trust and safety consultant.

Sarah T. Roberts is an associate professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD from the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her book on commercial content moderation, Behind the Screen, was released in 2019 from the Yale University Press. She served as a consultant, too, and is featured in the award-winning documentary The Cleaners. Dr. Roberts sits on the board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, was a 2018 Carnegie Fellow, and a 2018 recipient of the EFF Barlow Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on content moderation of social media.

• Elon Musk takes control of Twitter and immediately ousts top executives (via NPR)
• Omar Wasow’s website
• Omar Wasow on Twitter
• BlackPlanet.com, founded by Wasow
• Ralph Spencer on LinkedIn
• Sarah T. Roberts’ website
• Sarah T. Roberts on Twitter
• Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, by Sarah T. Roberts
• Note from Patrick: After 5 years, this is Carol’s final episode as editorial lead on Community Signal. We’ll miss you, Carol!
• The Twitter Rules
• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig
• Elon Musk says Twitter will have a ‘content moderation council’ (via The Verge)
• Democratic U.S. senators accuse Musk of undermining Twitter, urge FTC probe (via Reuters)
• We got Twitter ‘verified’ in minutes posing as a comedian and a senator (via The Washington Post)
• How Much Did Twitter’s Verification Chaos Cost Insulin Maker Eli Lilly and Twitter Itself? (via Gizmodo)
• Patrick’s (somewhat sarcastic) Twitter thread about the policies he hoped the platform would put in place to address Musk’s conflicts of interest
• Saturday Night Live’s content moderation council sketch

• View on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

As Zendesk’s customer base and product offerings have grown, so has its community. The Zendesk community started in 2008, under the support organization, as a space for people to ask and answer questions about using the product. Since then, it has shifted departments multiple times, leading to changes in KPIs and core purpose.

Nicole Saunders, the company’s director of community, joins the show to explain how she has navigated these challenges. Tune in for her approach on thoughtfully managing change and expectations within your community and inside of your organization.

Patrick and Nicole also discuss:

• Why the comments are open on Zendesk’s knowledge base articles
• You can’t tell people to contact support in Zendesk’s community
• Handing some conversations in the community off to other teams

Going from scrappy to resourced as your community team grows and develops (04:36): “[While community was part of the support organization,] we were functioning very scrappy, very much like a startup team within a larger organization. … Being within [the] integrated marketing organization let us connect to a lot more pieces and parts of the business, which as we built our strategy became increasingly important.” –@NicoleinMadison

Participate in the community you serve (14:20): “I’m always encouraging my team to [step] out of the ticket queue on a regular basis … and just wander around [the community] and try to have that same experience as the end users to make sure we’re not missing anything, make sure that the queue isn’t keeping us in just a transactional space.” –@NicoleinMadison

Why you can’t tell people to contact support in the Zendesk community (24:58): “We were getting a lot of people that were just saying, ‘You should contact support for this,’ and what it was doing was discouraging other users from jumping in and trying to help. A lot of these were questions that people could answer for one another, and … it was short-circuiting the community conversation.” –@NicoleinMadison

The knowledge and value that community can offer (26:17): “You’re going to gain so much more out of talking to somebody [in the community] who has done what you are trying to do, than someone who knows what functionality you should use to try to do it. Even the best support agent in the world probably hasn’t done exactly the thing that you’re trying to do. There’s actually a real benefit to talking to other users.” –@NicoleinMadison

In over 12 years as a community professional, Nicole Saunders‘ experience has ranged from consulting to launching communities for startups to currently leading the community team at Zendesk. She’s built communities across forums, social media, and offline. Her background also includes social media management, event production, communications, and freelance writing.

Passionate about building community both in her work and in life, Nicole engages in several volunteer efforts, including mentoring for the Wisconsin Women’s Network, singing with the Philharmonic Chorus of Madison, and teaching dance fitness classes.

• Nicole Saunders on LinkedIn
• Zendesk community
• Zendesk knowledge base
• Zendesk’s community code of conduct

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Recently, community pro Danielle Maveal joined Community Signal to discuss her experiences reporting into the product organization at Burb. In this episode, we’re getting the opposite perspective from product leader Gitesh Gohel.

Gitesh and Patrick worked together at CNN, where community reported into product. And while the product and community that they were building were short lived, they both speak highly of their time working together. Gitesh describes creating a team atmosphere where each individual’s expertise was respected and given room to ladder into organizational goals, giving each person the opportunity to see the impact of their work. Patrick shares how this fostered trust in processes and created great experiences for the community and the brand.

If you’re debating a community role that reports into product, this conversation will give you insight into how that can be productive when the team has a strong foundation.

Patrick and Gitesh also discuss:

• Gitesh’s first experience managing community pros as a product leader
• Why community pros should be excited about reporting into product
• The successes and promise of CNN+’s Interview Club

Making room for each individual’s expertise within your org (11:35): “One thing which is really important, especially when it comes to collaboration, trusting each other, and being able to lean in on the skill set or experience that everyone brings to the table to accomplish a shared vision, is being able to create space and autonomy for folks to be able to do their jobs. One thing that we did at CNN, specifically working on Interview Club, was create goals which your team had by itself, but also having those goals be integrated into the success of the product itself.” –@giteshg

The background of a product professional (12:54): “Most people don’t train to be a product manager or to have an expertise in product development. … Most of my training came through experience. It was being part of a team who was building a product and being able to play a small role in it, being able to see what really good successful products look like, being able to see what do really healthy relationships look like across cross-functional teams.” –@giteshg

Is product the right org for community? (25:42): “When you make community part of product, [you’re saying] that your users are important, that the relationships that you develop with your users are important and positive, that you want to be able to not have a transactional relationship with your users, but actually one where you proactively engage, where you’re proactively identifying ways in which you have your users connected.” –@giteshg

Why should a community pro be excited about being part of the product org? (26:50): “[When community sits within product], in a way, you’re closest to the decision maker, and I think that’s important. What you are able to do is influence product strategy and how you think about what you build and who you’re building for, and being able to bring the skills and expertise that you have directly into that conversation. [Product is] where you get to do the most fun stuff. It’s where you get to say and explore different ideas that you want to try. It’s a way in which you get the voice of the user closest to the way in which you think about what you end up doing.” –@giteshg

Gitesh Gohel has 14 years of experience as a product leader solving user problems in the startup, consumer, media, political, and civic tech space for organizations like CNN, Tumblr, Giphy, Facebook, Jumo, and Obama 08. He is currently the VP of product for Narwhal.

• Gitesh Gohel on LinkedIn
• The Pros and Cons of Community Reporting to Product, Danielle Maveal on Community Signal
• Brigade
• Bassey Etim, who has been on multiple episodes of Community Signal

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

If you’re wondering how you can more actively foster safety and belonging for LGBTQ+ folks in your online community, there’s precedent to learn and borrow from. In this episode of Community Signal, we’re joined by Samantha “Venia” Logan, the CEO and founder of Socially Constructed. Venia shares lessons from her decade of experience building community for LGBTQ+ individuals, which started when she began sharing her transition journey on YouTube. 

Patrick and Venia discuss tools, policies, and practices that can help build queer friendly spaces over time. For example, how easy is it for someone to edit their profile information within your online community? What specific policies do you have in place to protect LGTBQ+ people? And a big one – how are others in your organization (outside of the community team) contributing to diversity and inclusion?

At this point you might be asking, “how do I measure or communicate progress?” To this we ask, what are community-based outcomes that indicate someone feels safe contributing and like they belong? As Venia explains (15:23): “As a person feels more and more comfortable self-disclosing, they’re going to use more organic language, they’re going to talk a lot more, their rate of inclusion is going to increase, but so will the length of their posts.” Work with your community to figure out which behaviors relate to their sense of inclusion and measure those over time.

Patrick and Venia also discuss:

• Making pronouns part of everyday conversations
• Twitter’s policies and handling of a recent high-profile deadnaming case
• Being intentional about your metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Make space for everyone to share their pronouns in everyday conversation (08:48): “Pronouns are not just a segment that you’re going to put on your profile. … At every meeting, [if] you invite people to share their pronouns – cis, trans, doesn’t matter – it essentially says, pervasively speaking, this is a queer-friendly, queer-safe space. … Oftentimes, you want to implement these rules so that you’re not looking for explicit consent, you’re looking for implicit acceptance.” –@SamanthaVenia

Focus on tracking the behaviors that matter most to your community (14:23): “[With behavioral metrics], we need to return to a notion of simplicity, where we are recording things that people actually want us to listen to. When people engage in our online communities, they are leaving behind comments, behaviors, artifacts of conversation, and they want us to pay attention to those things, so why are we recording every single move they make in a community and not recording anything about the nature of the comment they left?” –@SamanthaVenia

Perfectly accurate data reporting does not exist, instead, try replicating your results (18:06): “Instead of worrying about gross amounts of accuracy in your data … [measure] it again. The exact same thing that you did, in a second spot, in a second scope, just do it again, and again, and again. Once you repeat the same process and you have four corollary actions that are all telling you the same thing and one that’s different, what is the resolution of your action? It just skyrocketed without you ever having to be accurate. Social science is not about causation, it’s about enough correlation to infer causation.” –@SamanthaVenia

Keep spaces safe by upholding the commitment to exclusivity (20:50): “Don’t expand what’s working for a safe space because keeping an exclusive space is what made that place safe. Instead, go over to the other place, reproduce your success, diversify it. The phrase that I use is ‘Don’t expand, diversify.’ Exclusivity breeds inclusivity.” –@SamanthaVenia

If you’re creating a space for everyone, you’re creating a space for no one (23:56): “When you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one, and you end up having no one because no one feels particularly special, or catered to, or welcome in those spaces.” –@patrickokeefe

Focus on your role of setting precedent, building momentum (24:59): “I will boil down any community management job from architect, coordinator, moderator, facilitator… it doesn’t matter what you do in community. Your job is to set precedent, to do a thing, then build momentum for that thing until the community is doing it on its own.” –@SamanthaVenia

In 2010, Samantha “Venia” Logan transitioned from male to female and shared her entire 10-year journey on YouTube. Over the next decade, that decision snowballed into an active and healthy career in community management, diversity, education, and measurement in anonymous community health. In 2012, Venia founded RESCQU.NET, a nonprofit organization that simultaneously marketed to an invisible audience and catered to their anonymity. In 2017, she graduated with a degree focused on community management and became a full-stack marketer at DigitalMarketer.

For the past five years, Venia has built quantitative and qualitative data measurement tools for brand communities online. Through SociallyConstructed.Online, she is committed to helping businesses build robust, self-sustainable communities.

• Samantha “Venia” Logan on LinkedIn
• Venia on YouTube
• Venia on Twitter
• RESCQU.NET
• SociallyConstructed.Online
• “3 Takeaways From a Decade Building Queer Community”
• 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer
• Chris Mercer
• Twitter’s hateful conduct policy
• Socially Constructed’s Discord and YouTube channel

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.