I’m so glad that you brought this up! This is broadly the headspace I was in for like, most of the time I’ve been working on the Forum. I think these are important points and I agree that external factors can play a huge role in how much usage the Forum gets. This feels like a clear takeaway from looking at how media around FTX affected Forum usage, for example.
In early 2024, our team did a marginal impact analysis that provided some evidence that our work was cost-effective (above an internal bar that I’m not going to explain more here). This made me made me feel like our work was valuable even if the overall usage numbers were going down, because I believed that the primary (basically in my head I rounded it to 100%) driver of usage was external factors (outside of some spikes around drama). As in, it didn’t feel like the tech work we did made any significant improvements (I had less visibility on the content side so I won’t really comment on that).
This was my view going into this new role. However, chatting with @Will Howard🔹 more about Forum strategy actually changed my mind on this quite a bit. My current hypothesis is something like: the actual current bottleneck around increasing Forum usage and the value of discussions is content quality (and vibes), rather than the number of visitors to the site. For example, I believe that traffic to 80k resources is still overall increasing (I’m not 100% sure though), and a lot of their traffic should flow through and impact Forum usage (like, they link directly to Forum posts in various places). The fact that our usage and [in my low-confidence, lightly-held, subjective opinion] overall value of discussions has still gone down is a sign that we cannot lay all the blame on external factors.
Broadly, I think that users’ perception/expectations/feelings about the Forum matter quite a lot for reaching our goals, and I am currently optimistic that we can make significant improvements by focusing attention and intention on community building.
(I also think that things like public awareness and marketing do matter still, which is why our team is putting some capacity towards promoting content externally, and we will likely explore things like paid advertising later this year.)
On a more meta level: in some way I think it would be the “easy way out” to continue believing that external factors are the overwhelmingly largest influence. There is certainly data one could use to support that hypothesis, and maybe it would be easier to believe that I have very little influence and therefore very little culpability. But I also feel like, ignoring the possibility that our team could make a big difference (by focusing on community building) would be neglecting our duty. So you could view this as me taking a bet on a new hypothesis (which may or may not pan out).
I’m so glad that you brought this up! This is broadly the headspace I was in for like, most of the time I’ve been working on the Forum. I think these are important points and I agree that external factors can play a huge role in how much usage the Forum gets. This feels like a clear takeaway from looking at how media around FTX affected Forum usage, for example.
In early 2024, our team did a marginal impact analysis that provided some evidence that our work was cost-effective (above an internal bar that I’m not going to explain more here). This made me made me feel like our work was valuable even if the overall usage numbers were going down, because I believed that the primary (basically in my head I rounded it to 100%) driver of usage was external factors (outside of some spikes around drama). As in, it didn’t feel like the tech work we did made any significant improvements (I had less visibility on the content side so I won’t really comment on that).
This was my view going into this new role. However, chatting with @Will Howard🔹 more about Forum strategy actually changed my mind on this quite a bit. My current hypothesis is something like: the actual current bottleneck around increasing Forum usage and the value of discussions is content quality (and vibes), rather than the number of visitors to the site. For example, I believe that traffic to 80k resources is still overall increasing (I’m not 100% sure though), and a lot of their traffic should flow through and impact Forum usage (like, they link directly to Forum posts in various places). The fact that our usage and [in my low-confidence, lightly-held, subjective opinion] overall value of discussions has still gone down is a sign that we cannot lay all the blame on external factors.
Broadly, I think that users’ perception/expectations/feelings about the Forum matter quite a lot for reaching our goals, and I am currently optimistic that we can make significant improvements by focusing attention and intention on community building.
(I also think that things like public awareness and marketing do matter still, which is why our team is putting some capacity towards promoting content externally, and we will likely explore things like paid advertising later this year.)
On a more meta level: in some way I think it would be the “easy way out” to continue believing that external factors are the overwhelmingly largest influence. There is certainly data one could use to support that hypothesis, and maybe it would be easier to believe that I have very little influence and therefore very little culpability. But I also feel like, ignoring the possibility that our team could make a big difference (by focusing on community building) would be neglecting our duty. So you could view this as me taking a bet on a new hypothesis (which may or may not pan out).