“When I left [my first job in gaming], I realized that the amount of fear and anxiety that I was living with every day was crippling. … Then I left, and I realized that it was never about the job in terms of what I was doing, it was about the job in terms of what I had. I was so scared to lose it that I didn’t have the confidence that I used to have. … It took leaving to get where I am now.” –Joe King

▶️https://www.communitysignal.com/the-loot-chest-that-launched-a-career-in-community-management/

#OnlineCommunities #Gaming #CommunityManager #CMGR

“I always tell them, ‘Look, you publish online ... and you enjoy the same protection when you are an intermediary, when you publish wire service stories, when you publish reader comments, when you publish advertisements. All these things are not your own content. You get the exact same protection that anybody, that Big Tech does, regardless of what that means.'” –@davidgreene

▶️https://www.communitysignal.com/how-online-communities-can-disappear-if-section-230-gets-repealed/

“Section 230 protects any person or any entity that publishes other people’s content online. That is pretty much every person and entity that I know. There’s nothing in its language that limits it to Big Tech. I actually hear this a lot from my friends in the legacy news media community who feel like Big Tech got this statutory advantage that they don’t have. ...

#Section230 #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CMGR #CommunitySignal

“When I was looking for the job in community … a lot of these companies were really looking for business development or sales or growth hacking. They were just sugar coating it with the title ‘community manager,’ which was really interesting to me because I know that for them it sounded appealing but they really didn’t want to invest in communities.” –Shreyas Narayanan Kutty

▶️ https://www.communitysignal.com/join-for-the-code-stay-for-the-community/

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CMGR #CommunitySignal

“... One of the things that you have to recognize is that it’s going to be as smart or as dumb as what it learns from. … Machine learning is only as right as whatever the data was that it was trained on.” –Cj Adams

▶️ https://www.communitysignal.com/machine-learning-by-communities-for-communities/

#OnlineCommunities #MachineLearning #CommunityManagement #CMGR #CommunitySignal

From 2019: “There are three main types of machine learning. Supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and then reinforcement learning. What we are talking about here is supervised learning, where you put in a bunch of training data and machine learning is trying to identify patterns in that data and then be able to, in this case, classify new examples to say what this does or doesn’t look like. ...

“... Generally, visualizations are for people other than just the person making them. Your audience is going to work that much harder to understand the message you’re trying to get across, so you’re creating some cognitive burden for them to just read it, let alone take away the point that you’re trying to get across.” –Tammy Armstrong

▶️ https://www.communitysignal.com/how-data-and-teenagers-power-the-future-of-online-community/

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CMGR #CommunitySignal #Data #Charts

“Basic charts are really powerful because they’re so well understood, they’re so well used, and it can be tempting to get into this, ‘I’ve created something nobody’s ever seen before, it’s so novel.’ …

“Don’t sell yourself short, really believe in yourself and push yourself forward. If you need a pep talk, let me know. I’ll be happy to do it. … I believe that this work is important and I think that it is partially on us to push it up and find those opportunities whenever we can.” –@patrickokeefe

▶️ https://www.communitysignal.com/threats-to-section-230-should-unleash-the-political-power-of-community-professionals/

“We [online community pros] should advocate for those higher roles because each time one of us does that, each time someone insists that they get the director title instead of the community manager title because their job reflects it … instead of just accepting that they can be community manager because, hey, the money’s good and I’m being paid like a director, it matters. …

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CMGR #CommunityManager #CommunitySignal

From 2018, about automated content moderation tools: “The really important thing for us in the industry is probably going to be avoiding that old tech problem which is that there’s this piece of technology and it can solve everything. …

“The technology is really a tool. Just because you have a good tool you can’t just have one person wield it. … You’re going to need a lot of people using the same tool to truly be effective.” –@bassey

▶️https://www.communitysignal.com/how-the-new-york-times-is-building-thoughtful-comment-sections-in-the-trump-era/

#CMGR #CommunityManagement

“My goal as the global community manager is to have a model or multiple models lined up side-by-side that I can show to anyone at the company and they will say, ‘I can get behind these numbers.’” -Meredith Humphrey

▶️https://www.communitysignal.com/how-spotifys-rock-star-program-empowers-and-rewards-community-super-users/

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR #CommunitySignal #Spotify

“... It’s about creating a sense of belonging, again, in this sort of membership community and feeling like you’re putting your hard earned dollar between something that is holding the powerful to account.” –Rebecca Quarls

▶️https://www.communitysignal.com/news-membership-as-a-community-model/

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR #CommunitySignal

“Membership, first and foremost, is a newsroom saying that we believe the healthiest business model for the news is one in which readers help sustain it, and that sustainment is not about exclusivity. They’re not donating because they are going to get something that other readers cannot. ...

There are great community, moderation, trust, and safety folks in both California and Texas, but this statement insults both. It implies that our work is not trainable, that because of where you are standing geographically, you have something innate that stops you from being good at this work. We all know who he’s trying to curry favor with, but this is still embarrassing and wrong.

Thanks for reading. Let’s keep building inclusive and safe online communities and platforms, folks.

Using the term “censorship mistakes,” as he did, instead of “honest mistakes” or even “mistakes by our team” is such a sell-out move that only throws Meta employees, and those who do the work of community, under the bus. We will receive abuse because of this.

Zuckerberg says they are moving their moderation, trust, and safety teams out of California and to Texas to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”

Fact-checking, community notes; both are ideas that can be valuable and even co-exist, but none of it really matters, because Meta is not good at moderation, trust, and safety. Because they don't want to be.

He said they want to “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” But that’s just another way of saying “we’re sick of policing bigots, and we’re ready to give them wider reach.”

Today is officially “Get Community Signal Off of Meta Platforms Day.” It no longer makes sense for our show to be on Instagram, a platform we’ve been active on since the podcast launched over 9 years ago, or Threads. If you've listened to the show over the years, you know my criticism of Meta has been consistent. But this recent string of comments from Zuckerberg is irresponsible.

“It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms,” Mark Zuckerberg said recently, when announcing changes to how Meta moderates content.

No. The root of Meta is rating the hotness of girls in your school.

“The domination of the major [social media] platforms isn’t infinite. It’s going to end one day. It’s our responsibility to think about what we are going to build in its place.” –@bassey

▶️https://www.communitysignal.com/building-inclusive-communities-workplaces-and-an-inclusive-profession/

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR #Zuckerberg #Facebook