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.
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.