Public vs private discussion

Community Building Enterprise
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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?

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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.

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