I think that in all my time working on the Forum, it’s felt more like being on a typical software product team than being on a team of community builders or organizers. For example, when our team grew around late 2022, we primarily hired product and engineering capacity. (Though this feeling is at least partly because I was hired as a software engineer; I could imagine it was less the case for our various content managers.) Our success metrics tend to be things like MAUs (monthly active users), clicks, and time on page /​ engagement hours.
IMO, focusing on the software made more sense when the community was growing organically, and when it was growing for reasons outside of our control (like via comms/​marketing around What We Owe The Future). That’s not our current situation. While I still think there are a lot of valuable improvements we can make on the tech side, right now I believe that the community side is more neglected so we should be focusing our efforts there.
Going down to 1 FTE of engineering on the Forum has been difficult. We’ve let bugs exist for longer on the site, been worse at addressing customer service requests, and have very little capacity for longer-term investments (both in terms of improving the codebase and doing feature work). These things make me personally sad, and I’m sorry to any readers who have been affected by this. As of January, we’re starting to shift capacity back towards Forum engineering, so it will probably settle closer to 1.5 FTE. Even with the focus on community building, I think that the space that holds the community matters quite a lot and we don’t want it to start hindering our work.[1]
More on tech vs community building
I think that in all my time working on the Forum, it’s felt more like being on a typical software product team than being on a team of community builders or organizers. For example, when our team grew around late 2022, we primarily hired product and engineering capacity. (Though this feeling is at least partly because I was hired as a software engineer; I could imagine it was less the case for our various content managers.) Our success metrics tend to be things like MAUs (monthly active users), clicks, and time on page /​ engagement hours.
IMO, focusing on the software made more sense when the community was growing organically, and when it was growing for reasons outside of our control (like via comms/​marketing around What We Owe The Future). That’s not our current situation. While I still think there are a lot of valuable improvements we can make on the tech side, right now I believe that the community side is more neglected so we should be focusing our efforts there.
Going down to 1 FTE of engineering on the Forum has been difficult. We’ve let bugs exist for longer on the site, been worse at addressing customer service requests, and have very little capacity for longer-term investments (both in terms of improving the codebase and doing feature work). These things make me personally sad, and I’m sorry to any readers who have been affected by this. As of January, we’re starting to shift capacity back towards Forum engineering, so it will probably settle closer to 1.5 FTE. Even with the focus on community building, I think that the space that holds the community matters quite a lot and we don’t want it to start hindering our work.[1]
For more on this point, see this LW comment from Habryka.