Space Miner

Notes on what we can contribute to the communities we belong to, in real-life and online.

Nothing makes you more keenly aware of community flare-ups than having lived through one (or several) from the other side. Inside the affected company, meetings are called, people argue about the best way to handle it, and productivity and morale hit rock-bottom. And there’s inevitably someone who mentions the Worst Case Scenario: what if this is it? The moment every community site staffer lives in fear of, when a sea change occurs and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people leave immediately for greener pastures. (Help me out — has this ever happened that way? That suddenly?)

In watching Twitter and Tumblr flare-ups over the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard lots of opinions. Some people are leaving. Some people are furious and determined to get things back to the way they were. Some people have blogged that it’s now clear that social sites can’t take away features once the members have gotten used to them. Some people are upset that Tumblr added features. And some people just don’t think things are right and want you to know that.

I think we have responsibilities as community members. Forget the age of entitlement — we all have room to grow as people by looking at what we can do to contribute.

• Give feedback and offer guidance through our words and actions. In my opinion we’re better off doing that in a “adult writing a letter to our congressperson” tone than a “teenager screaming hateful things to our parents” tone. Even if you don’t believe in the “more flies with honey” adage, waiting for calm, rational thoughts usually brings better ideas and arguments.
• Encourage these organizations to grow, change, and try things. I can’t agree that social sites should never take away features previously offered. So, what, then they’d have a “loyal” fan base of their most vocal (and perhaps angriest) users but would have stagnated the progress and evolution of the site? I don’t see who wins there, except a potential competitor.
• Wield our power wisely, and when it counts. It can be tempting to release real-life frustrations on a virtual community. We need to consider who and what we are really angry with before potentially creating mob mentality in our peers. Each one of us has more power to create damage than we know.
• Remember that these are just people. Tumblr is not a huge corporation getting rich off of us. They’re just seven guys with venture capital to try this out. Just people like you or me.

These are just preliminary notes, and there’s definitely a lot more to add. If you have something to add, please drop me a line at lbrunow at gmail.com.

See also:

Community Whisperer