Great comment — this gets at a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about. And I appreciate you sharing your personal perspective.
drive-by professional posts
I like your description that “it breaks the illusion of a community”, that resonates with me. I also think that posts that feel too professional discourage discussion. The flip side is that there are various ways that these kinds of posts create value:
Things like job postings and org calls for donations can pretty straightforwardly contribute to making the world better by encouraging impactful action
Another way the Forum creates value is something like: readers become aware of organizations (such as via org update posts), then they later donate or get involved with the org’s work
In theory, people who do relevant work as their full-time job should produce some of the best research/ideas/work [that is relevant to the Forum audience’s interests]
So I’m thinking about whether we should, for example, move org posts to a separate section, but looking at the Frontpage now, it doesn’t feel to me like there are too many of them. I think this fluctuates so I’ll keep an eye on it.
I feel like a better long-term solution is to offset this feeling by working to increase the number of posts from individuals, and trying harder to build a community (or perhaps clusters of communities) of individuals who feel like they are in conversation with each other. Not that this is easy, but I think it’s worth us trying to do, as it feels more like we are addressing the root cause and building better foundations.
Great comment — this gets at a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about. And I appreciate you sharing your personal perspective.
I like your description that “it breaks the illusion of a community”, that resonates with me. I also think that posts that feel too professional discourage discussion. The flip side is that there are various ways that these kinds of posts create value:
Things like job postings and org calls for donations can pretty straightforwardly contribute to making the world better by encouraging impactful action
Another way the Forum creates value is something like: readers become aware of organizations (such as via org update posts), then they later donate or get involved with the org’s work
In theory, people who do relevant work as their full-time job should produce some of the best research/ideas/work [that is relevant to the Forum audience’s interests]
So I’m thinking about whether we should, for example, move org posts to a separate section, but looking at the Frontpage now, it doesn’t feel to me like there are too many of them. I think this fluctuates so I’ll keep an eye on it.
I feel like a better long-term solution is to offset this feeling by working to increase the number of posts from individuals, and trying harder to build a community (or perhaps clusters of communities) of individuals who feel like they are in conversation with each other. Not that this is easy, but I think it’s worth us trying to do, as it feels more like we are addressing the root cause and building better foundations.