Today marks 10 years since Karn Broad started working on Community Signal as the show's producer. I've actually worked with Karn for roughly 14 years in total, going back to a previous show that I hosted.

“The WELL [online community founded in 1985], because of its open nature/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. ...

LEGO Ideas is a platform, provided by the company, where anyone can submit an idea that gets turned into an official LEGO set. With plenty of creative talent in-house, why do it? Tim Courtney, from 2020:

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.

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:

“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. ...

“Without the protection of Section 230, a well-meaning person or organization may lose their right to maintain a clean well-lighted space for civil discussion and capitulate to every demand regardless of its merit. ...

Even though the internet is full of bad comments, that doesn't mean that one more won't cause harm. After researchers conducted a psychological experiment on an online community without consent, they seemed to think that, since their comments were like any others, there was not a risk of harm.

“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? ...

“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.bsky.social www.communitysignal.com/university-o...

“[I asked a room full of senior staff at PMI,] ‘Can anyone tell me what community is?’ The answers that I got were webinars, articles, blogs, and virtual events. I thought to myself, ‘Oh my word, everyone thinks we’re just content.’ We’re not. That is not what community is. ...

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.

One day, you receive a message from researchers at a major university, and they inform you that they have been conducting experiments on your community. They have used AI-generated comments to pose as a victim of sexual abuse, a Black man that is against Black Lives Matter, and a trauma counselor.

“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. ...

“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. ...

“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,’ ...

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 ...

“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.’ … Generally, visualizations are for people other than just the person making them. ...

“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 …

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. …

“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 ▶️ www.communitysignal.com/how-spotifys...

“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. ...

“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.bsky.social ▶️ www.communitysignal.com/building-inc...

“Most of Facebook’s investigations on coordinated, inauthentic behavior come in response to outside reports. ... NGOs doing investigations, news organizations giving reports, opposition groups complaining. ...

“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.” – @ubiquity75.bsky.social ▶️ www.communitysignal.com/elon-musks-q...

“[Community, moderation, trust, and safety pros] can learn from dating apps on the level of how personal and sensitive dating apps are in the content you’re sending back and forth. ...

“People will sometimes ask me if they should start a community [related to their passion]. My answer is usually that if you start the community, you’ll still talk about that passion but you’ll have a whole new passion that’ll suck up your time. That passion is community management. ...

“This is higher education so we want people to express themselves in an academic way. They need to be able to remain respectful and they need to be able to use sources and facts and evidence because this is the game that we call science, and you’re not allowed to just to give your opinion. ...

“It’s sometimes much easier to do the whole project by yourself end-to-end, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It always counts for more when you can do it with other people, especially in a community setting, because the community is not about you. It’s not about any one person. …

“Your internal online community will reveal your culture. You can’t use it to change your culture, it will reveal it.” -Jakkii Musgrave ▶️ www.communitysignal.com/when-communi...

From 2018: “We’re going to get down to Snapchat story-sized humanity. When a lot of people hear me say that, they scoff and go, ‘Kids these days.’ I’m thinking, ‘What if they’re right? What if stories are too bloated?’ ...

Today marks 9 years of Community Signal! Thank you to everyone who has supported our show over the years, including active listeners, subscribers, guests, and those who have shared it. Thank you to Karn Broad, our producer, for all of his work. And thank you for reading!

“What we saw, with the implementation of the 24 hour news cycle, was this ravenous need for information at all periods. Which then, in turn, makes certain items pressing news that ordinarily wouldn’t have become top news in previous years. …

“Of course, sometimes there are people who pop in and give unsolicited advice on these [handbag authentication] requests. We don’t mean to sound ungrateful by any means. ...

From 2018: “I am absolutely in love with community creations as a whole. I think it’s important that, as a community team, we create an environment that allows people to share written word on a forum, Reddit post, tweets, whatever it may be. ...

Today marks 9 years that Karn Broad, Community Signal's producer, has been working on the show. We wouldn't have a show without him! Thank you for all of your contributions over the years, Karn.

"People don't think about you if you're getting your job right" is how Community Signal's producer, Karn Broad, talks about the work of sound engineering. This is often true for community management, too. ▶️ www.communitysignal.com/the-making-o...

“One of the things I really need to think through is how do we make sure that anyone who’s in our superuser or volunteer program doesn’t feel obligated to do too much or to just have to give and not take as it were, or to feel overwhelmed by the task of supporting others. ...

“Is this person helping the community or hurting the community? If they’re hurting the community, can you define what it is that they are doing that hurts the community? [Is it] written into the community guidelines?” – @wesley83.bsky.social ▶️ www.communitysignal.com/fostering-in...

“[When I started building INmobile,] I didn’t know anything about running an online community. I was pulled from Yankee Group where I was a wireless industry expert, to run this community, because I was a knowledge expert. The idea was they’ll come talk to me. ...

“[At some point, vBulletin wasn’t giving developers] the tools that they need. That’s the thing a lot of software companies forget. Who do you have to make happy first? The developers and the designers. ... The developers are the ones who actually go out there and build those tools. ...

“[If you’re worried about starting a community in a crowded niche,] go to your regular supermarket and see how many soft drinks there are. You can look at the same for communities, how many communities for kittens are there? ...

“[When I joined CustomMade,] there was no code of conduct, in terms of how to act on the platform. Rather than send them down from the mountain top, I created a process where the makers themselves created those rules. ...

“During the Black Lives Matter protests … I’m really paraphrasing here but [a prominent white man in the community industry] effectively said community is going to be the solution to discrimination such as racism. ...

“If you would send me into the desert with one metric to rule them all, [active members] would be the one. How many members do you have, and do they keep coming back? Are they active? Do you manage to draw more people? If that number goes down, there’s something wrong. ...

From 2017: “I think a more productive way of approaching the [online abuse] conversation, at least right now, is not say, ‘How can we engineer our way out of this? How can we create technology to get us out of this?’ ...

From 2017: “As much as we’ve been getting steadily better on [casual sexism and misogyny at MetaFilter], in general, it has remained an incremental process because you have to get people on board. You have to set that expectation, you have to do education. ...

“The ultimate measure [of successful policing] is lack of crime and support of the community. Those are the ultimate measures. Measuring those is very, very hard; very, very difficult. ...

“I always tried to put MartialTalk on the mindset of you’ve just had a really good seminar, now you’re in the lobby of the school. You’re putting your gear away, and you’re shooting the breeze with everybody about what went on and what you’re going to do next. ...