This is very true.
Although from our forum’s perspective (Drowned in Sound) we do get changes rolled out by Discourse automatically that upset/anger our community. I guess they are discussed and gone over here but none of our community have time to look over this.
Ones that come to mind are when the ability to reply to a post but stay in your current position in a topic was removed and the recent ‘sticky avatar’ setting as you scroll through long posts, which is a good example of an idea that is distracting in practice even if it seems good in principle.
Anyway @sleslie99 it’s hard to easily advise here without knowing the nature of the changes or your community I think. I’ve done a lot of stints moderating DiS and made a lot of mistakes along the way too so my thoughts are:
This line:
sounds significant.
Are your changes mostly UI/structural on the forums?
Or are they about community standards and imposing some kind of order?
These are very different things.
In the case of UI/structural changes you absolutely will get huge blowback if you just drop a new system on people without consulting them. You use the term ‘venting’ and I’d urge you to step back and make sure you are prepared to rollback any/all of those changes if the community isn’t into them. If not then maybe you’re seeing ‘venting’ when people are telling you these aren’t good. On our forum we tend to raise any possible change with the community via polls and options so that when they come in even if people aren’t as happy they know and can see it’s a majority decision.
In the case of new standards etc you have to decide what the morally correct choice is and stick to it. When you start imposing standards on a forum that has had a ‘wild west’ sort of thing then you will get abuse and yes, a bunch of your ‘top contributors’ are going to be part of that. They’ll probably bang on about ‘free speech’ or ‘fascism’ or (depending on your policies) ‘wokeness’. But you can’t be distracted by this really. If you have decided your forum is a better place with more rules then actually it will be, but you will have to accept you’ll get a change of user as a result.
And in fact those new users who are getting abused are vital and you need to step on the abusers immediately and strongly. If you’ve changed things and new people are arriving because you’ve said, “No more ableism,” or whatever then you can’t let that slide.