At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while.
Yup this seems right to me, but I would expect that usage would naturally go down over time. You can see this happening in the chart from my January post, for example.
I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience. For example, I feel like most Slack workspaces turn into this. Most subreddits have rules against promotion, probably for this reason. Without a Forum Team that pays attention to the distribution of content being posted, and actively works to get more good content and retain strong contributors, my guess is that the site will gradually increase in promotions and decrease in discussions, and that this is a feedback loop that will cause strong contributors to continue to leave as the site feels less and less like a place to have interesting discussions.
Though of course I don’t know for sure what would happen, this is just my guess. :)
I really like and resonate with Lizka’s thoughts on this as well. For example, this bit pulled out of her doc:
Suppose that about 10% of EAs regularly use the Forum. I think we need a minimal critical mass of EAs using the Forum — under that, people start thinking it’s dead, or stop remembering it in conversations, etc., and there’s a mass exit (so it basically becomes an archive of content that you can reference on Twitter or in Slack). I don’t know exactly how big this critical mass should be, and whether it’s better to think of it as a percentage of the main EA network/community or as a raw number of very-EA-aligned users. This means If we go down to 8% of EAs, we might be passing under the critical mass, which could noticeably up the chances of a mass exit of users.
I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience.
If having too many org-promotional posts is unhealthy for the Forum, one could argue for structuring the Frontpage to prevent org promotions/announcements from becoming too prominent. That could mean a weighting adjustment, a hard cap on how many org-promo posts can appear on Frontpage (e.g., the community section), or adjusting the Frontpage algorithm to more heavily weight comments/interaction (which these posts tend to have less of).
There may be an ideal stable range of activity level for the Forum. Users feel they can commit a certain amount of time to keeping up with things, and they may experience having too much content to wade through as frustrating and off-putting. And most authors will experience getting pushed off the Frontpage soon due to the volume of other content as demotivating. If that’s correct, then there’s a point at which seeking more discussion-related content to dilute org-promotional posts could backfire. I’m not suggesting that we are outside the ideal stable range at the moment.
However, techniques to limit the prominence of org promotions/announcements should require a fairly modest investment of upfront staff time (with monitoring by volunteers or the community if necessary). Thus, calculating the risk that reducing paid staff time devoted to the Forum and/or content development will lead to bulletin-board-ization should account for mitigating measures.
Yup this seems right to me, but I would expect that usage would naturally go down over time. You can see this happening in the chart from my January post, for example.
I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience. For example, I feel like most Slack workspaces turn into this. Most subreddits have rules against promotion, probably for this reason. Without a Forum Team that pays attention to the distribution of content being posted, and actively works to get more good content and retain strong contributors, my guess is that the site will gradually increase in promotions and decrease in discussions, and that this is a feedback loop that will cause strong contributors to continue to leave as the site feels less and less like a place to have interesting discussions.
Though of course I don’t know for sure what would happen, this is just my guess. :)
I really like and resonate with Lizka’s thoughts on this as well. For example, this bit pulled out of her doc:
If having too many org-promotional posts is unhealthy for the Forum, one could argue for structuring the Frontpage to prevent org promotions/announcements from becoming too prominent. That could mean a weighting adjustment, a hard cap on how many org-promo posts can appear on Frontpage (e.g., the community section), or adjusting the Frontpage algorithm to more heavily weight comments/interaction (which these posts tend to have less of).
There may be an ideal stable range of activity level for the Forum. Users feel they can commit a certain amount of time to keeping up with things, and they may experience having too much content to wade through as frustrating and off-putting. And most authors will experience getting pushed off the Frontpage soon due to the volume of other content as demotivating. If that’s correct, then there’s a point at which seeking more discussion-related content to dilute org-promotional posts could backfire. I’m not suggesting that we are outside the ideal stable range at the moment.
However, techniques to limit the prominence of org promotions/announcements should require a fairly modest investment of upfront staff time (with monitoring by volunteers or the community if necessary). Thus, calculating the risk that reducing paid staff time devoted to the Forum and/or content development will lead to bulletin-board-ization should account for mitigating measures.