I’m curious to hear where people land with how much is posted publicly vs privately. Public discussions are valuable if the answer will benefit many people or if they enable members to build on one another’s experience. They allow consensus to be challenged and present an opportunity to build trust with visible follow through.
We use private engagement channels on Meta in situations when commercially sensitive information is involved or if the topics will be overly noisy with little public relevance, but we prefer most discussions to happen in public.
One thing we have been discussing ourselves recently is how much we engage on Meta outside of directly offering support. Over the years, a lot of our product development work has shifted to our internal Discourse so we have been thinking of ways to start experimenting again with what work we might do more openly.
There are a few reasons we think this would be advantageous:
Interacting directly with the people building the product is a motivator to engage
While support can be more automated, we see this as something that is difficult to replace with AI.
Setting an example for how to do this will enable us to improve the product to better support it, and help us advise our customers accordingly
Several of our customers have mentioned a desire to get their product teams engaging directly with their customers on their communities.
We have places to point our customers about their ideas and our work in progress
Having our work available out in the open sooner will let us engage directly with customers about the work we’re doing, and to share their ideas where others can engage with them.
Which conversations happen publicly in your communities, and which become more useful in private?
We don’t permit private messaging, it really isn’t in the spirit of what the community is supposed to be. As a technical forum the risk of bad guidance and the consequences of that outweighs the benefits, the moderation team and resident subject experts need to keep some oversight on the content to ensure accuracy and safety.
Private messaging is used by staff and moderators, primarily for moving more sensitive topics to a private space and for trying to manage members who struggle with their internal filter, or assisting someone who needs just a bit more help that would add too much noise to a topic.
DM’s can make a site a bit too facebooky so for primary content we’d rather have conversations that everyone can take part in.
Tick boxes to make forum posts private to registered members, non-searchable by AI and search engines could be powerful, imho. Especially these days, when it’s so hard to know what will happen with user data.
A slight segue @rosiesherry but is this comment in regard to the entire internet, or to Discourse specifically? I ask because if it’s the latter, we have some better messaging to do.
General internet, not Discourse specific, e.g., AI companies stealing data and no idea how it will be used. Giving people flexibility on a per piece of content is interesting, I don’t think it has to be behind a paywall…it’s more about giving more options to help people feel more comfortable.
My users accepted that search engines can cralw content. They were fine with ActivityPub. But now I as an admin has started to get questions can I stop AIs from outside to not steal content. I understand that totally, but after Google made the borderline between search results and AI-created content really… hazy, such dividing has started to be really difficult.
But we need user lever option to allow indexing by search engines, but decline AIs. How is that even possible in another big question, but we should give at least an image to users we are trying.
Honestly, I’m quote sure if we had such option the majority of ordinary users wouldn’t use it.
But how to limit visibility to somewhere on user level and not break free access discussion at same time
AIs are huge and real issue now, even those offers benefits at same tile (and yet this is still some academic question for me, because those users how are concerning how AI-companies are acting, are very active in Facebook at same time).
