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Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-11-11

Community Signal is turning 10 on December 7! I'm thinking about putting together a greatest hits show of some of my favorite clips from the last 10 years. That would be a fun way to reflect. Thanks to Serena Snoad for the suggestion.

I'm open to other ideas, as well. Thanks for listening to the show!

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-28

“The WELL [online community founded in 1985], because of its open nature and desire to experiment, opened up chunks of the operating system for programmers to actually play with and make little utilities for the people as a way of practicing. There was this maker culture going on at the same time. As @hrheingold put it once, it was where the tool makers meet the tool users. ...

“The WELL, because of its open nature and desire to experiment, opened up chunks of the operating system for programmers to actually play with and make little utilities for the people as a way of practicing. There was this maker culture going on at the same time. As Howard Rheingold put it once, it was where the tool makers meet the tool users. In addition to being a place where people can converse, it was also a kind of birthplace of a sort of online gift economy.” -John Coate, Former Marketing Director and Conference Manager, The WELL
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-21

When researchers at the University of Zurich conducted psychological experiments on the Change My View community without consent, it was one human space taking advantage of another human space, which made it even worse, according to Logan MacGregor, a volunteer moderator in the community.

“One thing that’s really special about Change My View is that it’s a human space; it’s a decidedly human space. … The University of Zurich is a decidedly human space. What I think is so insidious about AI is it’s caused people to behave in ways that I don’t know we would have ... because it’s a toxic influence. Unlike the bots that are invading us daily, that we’re constantly shutting down. … That hurts a little bit more than just dealing with bots, because this wasn’t just bots. These are people interacting with other people, and there was a human element there.” -Logan MacGregor, Moderator (Volunteer), r/changemyview
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-20

When you are expanding your online community into a new country, you should examine the verbiage you are currently using. Locally-minded adjustments can help members feel more at home. Here's an example:

“A lot of [ILTA's] material has the word attorney, which doesn’t exist in the UK. We have solicitors and barristers. … There are little tweaks around the material and our language that we’ve had to do in order to localize what we’re providing to [the UK] region. … It’s a big deal to people.” –Mercedes Oppon-Kusi, Former Community Manager, International Legal Technology Association
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-19

“I think part of providing a good experience is less hurdles to jump over. If you have an open community, then people can find [your] content because it’s indexed by external search engines. Not only that, but if they just visit your community, they can poke around and read the content without feeling like they’re trapped into [creating an account]. Some people don’t want to do that. ...

“I think part of providing a good experience is less hurdles to jump over. If you have an open community, then people can find [your] content because it’s indexed by external search engines. Not only that, but if they just visit your community, they can poke around and read the content without feeling like they’re trapped into [creating an account]. Some people don’t want to do that. My theory is if you have a good community site that is easy and people like to use, people are going to be more willing to create a meaningful membership in that community.” -Matt Nevill, Former Customer Community Manager, Agilent Technologies
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-18

“... Who really loses when we threaten the opportunities to build meaningful communities that can have a positive impact on people’s lives?” –@scottmoore

communitysignal.com/threats-to

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-15

Even though the internet may be full of bad comments, that doesn't mean that the one you are about to post won't cause harm. After researchers conducted a psychological experiment on an online community without consent, they seemed to believe that, since their comments were just like any other, there was not a great risk of harm.

“So much of what [the researchers] did to try to prevent harm was to say ‘comments like this happen all the time online, we don’t think that it’s going to cause individual trauma.’ We kind of dispute that because some of the comments are [you] pretending to be a trauma counselor and maybe that could actually cause some harm. … I don’t think they thought enough about community impact until after the community screamed ‘ouch.'” -Logan MacGregor, Moderator (Volunteer), r/changemyview
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-14

“I’ve always tried to think like a chameleon. Whenever you go into a company, they’re going to put you where they think you belong. … This is just another version of that question of where does the community person belong? ...

“I’ve always tried to think like a chameleon. Whenever you go into a company, they’re going to put you where they think you belong. … This is just another version of that question of where does the community person belong? For me, it’s can you have a satisfactory job? Because if you don’t have a satisfactory job, in my opinion, if you’re not happy working, that’s the time to question your job. But if you can have a job that you’re satisfied with and have the impact you want, it doesn’t matter where they put you.” -Craig Dalrymple, Community Consultant; Formerly Project Management Institute, Zynga, and Sony
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-13

“When one community person – a volunteer, a host, a person in this line of work – stands up for their community, they stand up for all communities.” -@patrickokeefe

communitysignal.com/university

“When one community person – a volunteer, a host, a person in this line of work – stands up for their community, they stand up for all communities.” -Patrick O’Keefe, Host, Community Signal; Author, Managing Online Forums; Ex-CNN Community and Interactive Product
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-11

“... If staff doesn’t know what community is, then how do we really know that our members know how to utilize it and what it is?” -Marjorie Anderson

communitysignal.com/when-you-a

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-06

After researchers revealed that they had been running psychological experiments on the Change My View community without consent, the moderators of the community wanted two things.

“From my perspective, I think the things that we wanted the most [from the researchers were] an apology and a promise not to publish. ...

“From my perspective, I think the things that we wanted the most [from the researchers were] an apology and a promise not to publish. The second was really important because we were concerned that if this was published in a peer-review journal … if it was elevated to a prominent journal, that our community, which is supposed to be a protected human space, would now become just another sandbox for researchers. We felt very strongly that it should not be published. … Unfortunately, it didn’t land well.” -Logan MacGregor, Moderator (Volunteer), r/changemyview
Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-08-04

That was the situation that the volunteer moderators of the Change My View subreddit found themselves in, back in March. One of the moderators, Logan MacGregor, joins the latest episode of Community Signal.

communitysignal.com/university

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-05-12

“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. ...

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-03-24

“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

▶️ communitysignal.com/join-for-t

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-03-20

“... 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

▶️ communitysignal.com/machine-le

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-03-13

“... 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

▶️ communitysignal.com/how-data-a

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-03-03

“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. …

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-02-17

“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

▶️communitysignal.com/how-spotif

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-02-13

“... 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

▶️communitysignal.com/news-membe

Community Signalcommunitysignal
2025-01-14

“When I hear people invoke free speech on a for-profit social media site, not only does that not exist today, it never has existed, and it never will exist. Let’s deal with what reality is actually giving us and talk about that instead of these fantasies that actually are pretty much not good for anyone involved.” –@ubiquity75

▶️communitysignal.com/elon-musks

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