AMA Arantor

[Arantor]

Which sport do you think they'll invent next?

Good question.

I suspect we'll see a higher speed, more action orientated version of an existing sport - especially as we're starting to do more research into biomechanical augmentation.

 

[joelr]

1. Do you consider Wedge to be a successful project because you shipped a completed project, or a failure because no one uses it?

2. Excluding technology (which I know is, like, your thing), what are some resources / discussions around community management that you think are sorely lacking among hobbyist owners

 

[Arantor]

1. I left before it shipped, that pretty much sealed its fate. We had some good ideas, some that were ahead of their time and adopted to various degrees inadvertently or otherwise by other vendors in years to come, while some didn't work out the way we hoped/expected. But even if I'd stayed, it was hamstrung by some of the most bizarre technical decisions, that I think in hindsight would have seriously screwed around with any third party ecosystem that needed to come into existence to support it longer term. I think, objectively, we failed but not for the obvious reasons. I've had a decade to consider what might have been - but it's hard to objectively look at it as 'it failed because no-one uses it' because it was hamstrung in so many ways before 1.0 shipped.

2. Discussions? Why we keep making the same mistakes. Even veterans make the same mistakes over and over - the fact that we keep having the same discussions on dealing with problem members, with the same outcomes (which almost always lead to technological crutches propping up not solving the social problems) shows that collectively we're not learning.

The other big talking point I'd love to see more of is to talk about the next generation. There is no shortage of discussion about 'the death of forums' - attributing blame, such as it is, to social media, to Reddit, to fickle youth, to mobile devices. While all of these can be proximate causes, any time there's a discussion about 'how we might think about moving past it', it's inevitably mired in doom-mongering. The next iteration of forum experience isn't going to bring back the 2000s gold rush era, nor is it going to be the Next Big Thing.

I think we need to talk about what building a *community of people* means, what that looks like in a landscape increasingly dominated by corporate entities who couldn't care less about the people coming to their place as long as they can make money out of them.

We need to talk about the sizes and scales of what communities look like - whether you have a smaller group of closer-knit people that bounce ideas off each other, or a much larger spread of people where the connections are fewer and further apart. Really, social media is just the forum community concept ramped all the way up to 11, where the total number of people is so vast, that you physically can't deal with all of them in a single collective space (in the way we would think of forums traditionally) that the only way you can conceive of it is to build mini-communities and mini-networks of connections. We keep talking about Facebook Groups as though it's a replacement for forums but it's a facsimile at best: yes, you have a larger pool of people that theoretically share the same interest, but the depth of connection is far shallower.

Resources? That's an interesting one. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in our collective wisdom. Partly because there's an inherent jealousy in the forum ecosystem - too many admins afraid of losing members to rivals, when cross-pollination is much more effective as a technique just as it is in nature. I think it could be interesting to see more people do something with IPS and their learning tools... I mean, I think it could be *very* interesting to have a set of courses on running communities! Consider it this way: you decide you want a community space, and none of the forum vendors is *that* interested in onboarding you into what that means. Yes, there's documentation on the platforms themselves but imagine if that were actually presented in a course fashion rather than a dusty manual or dry wiki. Break things into courses with outcomes and a learning journey - take people through 'you have a problem', 'this is the solution', 'this is how you do it'. It kills me how much we don't do that with user-facing documentation. I miss the days when applications came with weight manuals that had tutorials and how-to guides in them where it would take you through 'here's what we're going to do, here's how we're going to do it, this will be the outcome'.

And if you're already in the place where the forum vendors are doing it themselves, it's because they'll have the tools to do it. I mean, they *could* integrate Moodle in (hahahahaha pleasegodno) but more likely some integration of something a little less hefty, or even springing up native tools in the way IPS has. Dogfood that right there. Try it, learn from it, use it in all sorts of unanticipated ways to get content out there and get people talking.


There is one resource + discussion situation that we're also not talking about. The old guard of forums has a lot of resources available for branding, theming etc. but we're not talking about how the effective half-step-forward generation don't bother. All the resources for post count pips, member group icons, site themes - observe how Discourse, Flarum et al... basically don't bother with any of that. We have all these resources - and more are still being produced, though not at the ferocious rate they once were - and... the next generation actively rejects all of it. I wonder what that says about both the previous and the next generation's attitude to content, and the value of any of it in building an effective community - at whatever size and scale you want that to be. Even the humble smileys are not immune to this, vs emoji.

There is a corollary discussion to that, and probably the single biggest conversation we're not having as community admins: we talk a lot about the tools, we talk about platforms and themes and add-ons and plugins and widgets and components and APIs and apps and... does any of it actually matter? Does any of it help or hinder people *talking*? Because at heart, that's what a community is about, people talking and sharing ideas. The allure of any one community is that it has the kinds of thoughts and things shared that help you and provoke you into doing something with them, as well as being able to find what you want, what you need and what interests you further.

Imagine if we talked about cars the way we talk about communities: we'd spend forever arguing other whether you should hang fuzzy dice on the rear-view mirror, what colour they should be, exactly how fuzzy. We'd be debating whether different shapes of steering wheel make a radical difference to driver safety (like the weird steering wheel in Knight Rider, that's not really a *wheel*). We might be talk about whether a given manufacturer can consistently turn out reliable models, whether a given manufacturer's models run efficiently with a given amount of fuel - things that are important in making sensible informed decisions, but ultimately things that are ancillary to 'how does it do getting me from A to B when I want to, does it drive where I need and want to go'. No point getting a low-chassis supercar with supercharged engine that can go 0-60 in seconds if you're needing to deal with hilly terrain.

 

[joelr]

Why we keep making the same mistakes. Even veterans make the same mistakes over and over - the fact that we keep having the same discussions on dealing with problem members, with the same outcomes (which almost always lead to technological crutches propping up not solving the social problems) shows that collectively we're not learning.

This is kind of abstract for me. Can you give 2 or 3 examples of what you mean?

The other big talking point I'd love to see more of is to talk about the next generation. There is no shortage of discussion about 'the death of forums' - attributing blame, such as it is, to social media, to Reddit, to fickle youth, to mobile devices. While all of these can be proximate causes, any time there's a discussion about 'how we might think about moving past it', it's inevitably mired in doom-mongering. The next iteration of forum experience isn't going to bring back the 2000s gold rush era, nor is it going to be the Next Big Thing.

I don't think you should let a particular admin zone forum be representative of the conversations that are happening on community development.

With that said, I embrace and invite you and others to have these conversations.

Consider it this way: you decide you want a community space, and none of the forum vendors is *that* interested in onboarding you into what that means. Yes, there's documentation on the platforms themselves but imagine if that were actually presented in a course fashion rather than a dusty manual or dry wiki. Break things into courses with outcomes and a learning journey - take people through 'you have a problem', 'this is the solution', 'this is how you do it'. It kills me how much we don't do that with user-facing documentation. I miss the days when applications came with weight manuals that had tutorials and how-to guides in them where it would take you through 'here's what we're going to do, here's how we're going to do it, this will be the outcome'.

I agree! Documentation is so generic and high level, but it doesn't apply to real world situations.

Which is also why, I believe, so many new forums are set to fail. There are no best practices or guidance.

There is a corollary discussion to that, and probably the single biggest conversation we're not having as community admins: we talk a lot about the tools, we talk about platforms and themes and add-ons and plugins and widgets and components and APIs and apps and... does any of it actually matter? Does any of it help or hinder people *talking*? Because at heart, that's what a community is about, people talking and sharing ideas. The allure of any one community is that it has the kinds of thoughts and things shared that help you and provoke you into doing something with them, as well as being able to find what you want, what you need and what interests you further.

Imagine if we talked about cars the way we talk about communities: we'd spend forever arguing other whether you should hang fuzzy dice on the rear-view mirror, what colour they should be, exactly how fuzzy. We'd be debating whether different shapes of steering wheel make a radical difference to driver safety (like the weird steering wheel in Knight Rider, that's not really a *wheel*). We might be talk about whether a given manufacturer can consistently turn out reliable models, whether a given manufacturer's models run efficiently with a given amount of fuel - things that are important in making sensible informed decisions, but ultimately things that are ancillary to 'how does it do getting me from A to B when I want to, does it drive where I need and want to go'. No point getting a low-chassis supercar with supercharged engine that can go 0-60 in seconds if you're needing to deal with hilly terrain.

This is very abstract. Can you identify 2 or 3 examples where you'd like to see substantive conversation?

 

[Arantor]

I thought I was quite clear for 1:20am writing!

This is kind of abstract for me. Can you give 2 or 3 examples of what you mean?

The obvious example is dealing with troublemakers (separate from spammers). We talk about bans, we talk about escalations of ban evasion - user vs IP vs the issues with banning IPs - this points to a) a lack of information on how to do this in the first place (see thoughts on training courses) but also b) rule 1 of dealing with trolls is to not give them the attention they so richly desire. We've never had the best tools for doing this - and if you look back to newsgroups and even BBSes, you'll see the same behaviours there

But there's other examples, e.g. how often new forums start with too many empty sections, how often new forums start with too little content. How often forums spend a lot of time in the early days fretting over plugins and themes and choices that will never be as important as getting content in good and early.

You see these same topics of conversations cropping up on admin forums, on the forum vendors' own sites etc. because people don't change even if the tech does. I feel like it points to the fact that the tools aren't really the solution - but they're used in place of actual people management skills.

I don't think you should let a particular admin zone forum be representative of the conversations that are happening on community development.

With that said, I embrace and invite you and others to have these conversations.

While I have seen them, naturally, at The Other Place (tm), I've seen them here, I've seen them on the forum vendors' communities too.

But I point you to the time I tried to get a discussion going on 'what the next generation might look like' and it was smashed upside the head with 'don't even bother unless you have a business model for it' without bothering to just talk about the central idea (though the topic did recover, eventually). This type of conversation is in fact not welcomed from what I can tell.

Especially as any serious talk of features inevitably descends into 'pah I don't need that, it's just bloat' because people fail to understand that *other* people have different ideas.

I agree! Documentation is so generic and high level, but it doesn't apply to real world situations.

Which is also why, I believe, so many new forums are set to fail. There are no best practices or guidance.

Well, there's Sturgeon's Law at work, there's the fact that a staggering percentage of all new ventures fail across the board in general and oftentimes in spite of any planning carried out. But there's also a deafening silence in the spaces where you'd think 'how to make communities' would be a hot topic for discussion.

This is very abstract. Can you identify 2 or 3 examples where you'd like to see substantive conversation?

Much as I hate to admit it, this is the place where I find myself agreeing enthusiastically with Jeff Atwood and $deity knows he and I have had enthusiastic debates in the past.

So, here's the thing: a community is about people and sharing with them, whether that's thoughts, stories or whatever else. Literally everything else is ancilliary to that. We still spend an inordinate amount of time talking about things that don't... really... get towards people talking to each other.

We aren't talking about things like how annoying it is to meaningfully reply to big posts - yes, you can select a piece of text and hit reply, but wouldn't it be nice if there were some easy way of being able to just get typing in the quote and for it to be recognised as yours and not part of the original quote? Wedge *sort* of tried this, where if you were in a quote and pressed a key combo (Ctrl-Enter maybe? I don't remember), it would break the quote in half right there, fix any bbcode that was errant but otherwise, you now had the original quote split in two while still preserving provenance. Be nice if we could do something like that again - would make it much easier than 'select this bit of text, hit reply, repeat'.

We aren't talking about the flat vs threaded vs hybrid-ish model Discourse has, and whether these are the only configurations we could have, and whether being able to create side channel conversations as a side topic or a fully first class topic (as Discourse does with reply-as-new-topic) is useful, meaningful, appropriate and/or desirable. Reddit is the obvious example here: it does the threaded model natively, and people either *love* it or hate it. But this is a core factor in thinking about *how people talk* and it changes the ways people interact. See Facebook: all too often people don't realise that commenting on a Facebook page post has a much wider reach than they thought it might, it's as though they think they're just replying to a friend, suggesting that their model has issues.

We aren't talking about ways to refine and improve the taxonomies in forums, whether it's the major taxonomies (boards and categories) or minor ones (prefixes, tags). We've concluded that for the most part content *type* is also a direct function of that taxonomy as opposed to 'here is a group of related content under this banner, regardless of whether they're topics, articles etc.'

We aren't talking about things like accepting dictation, or even voice replies, with a side option in text-to-speech handling. Make it easier to get people talking by adding more options that are out there. We're also not talking about making it easier to get media in generally - think about support tickets if it were possible to *easily* get a video showing the problem?

I'm sure there's more but work is taking a lot out of me at the moment to get things done.

 

[joelr]

But there's other examples, e.g. how often new forums start with too many empty sections, how often new forums start with too little content. How often forums spend a lot of time in the early days fretting over plugins and themes and choices that will never be as important as getting content in good and early.

You see these same topics of conversations cropping up on admin forums, on the forum vendors' own sites etc. because people don't change even if the tech does. I feel like it points to the fact that the tools aren't really the solution - but they're used in place of actual people management skills.

I agree. There's a real need for something truly focused on community management and strategy.

 

[Reverie]

@Arantor what do you find to be the most difficult thing of starting a new community these days?

 

[Debashis]

What's the biggest lesson you've learnt being in forums for years?

 

[Empire]

What's one thing in life that you never can't live without

 

[guyyanthony]

What sound would be the scariest if you could hear it?