Some thoughts on the community messaging feature

Hey all --

There's been a ton of feedback about the new community messaging feature so far and I just wanted to thank you.  Whether you post something on your blog, leave a comment on ours or just send an email to us, we're reading everything and discussing them.  There have been plenty of positive comments and plenty of critical ones and every one is valuable.  Here are a couple of thoughts:

1) It's pretty much impossible with a service this size to put something out that is universally loved.  Other than giving away free money, I don't think there's a single thing we could launch that didn't get criticized.  Please don't take this as a cop out, it's just cold reality.  Whether you love it or hate it, there's 180,000 people who might feel otherwise.

2) So what do you do if every feature you want to release has potential criticisms?  What most big companies do is wring their hands trying to find a solution that meets everyone's needs and the net result is usually a crap, middle of the road feature that fails to excite a single person and takes six months to get out the door.  We sort of fell into that trap for a while -- you may have noticed the lack of new features for the first part of this year?

Instead, we're going back to our startup roots.  We're going to release the germ of an idea knowing it's not perfect and we're going to solicit feedback and make changes accordingly.  No matter how long and hard we think about a feature, we're never really going to know what you want or how you want it.  So tell us and we'll try to make it better.

3) We're not going to make any immediate changes.  We released community messaging last night and an hour later there was some pretty vocal criticisms.  It's pretty tempting to just start making changes left and right in an attempt to make things better.  But that way lies madness.  We're going to leave it in the wild for a week, let people give us feedback, and make some decisions.  And in case you're creating your posting schedule for next week, we're going to give more weight to the things people say after living with it for a week than people who see it and respond today (positive or negative).

4) So far, the majority of criticisms come from people in 300 or more communities.  They are worried about the potential for spam and heck, I hear you.  I'd be worried too.  I'll leave it for other people to debate why someone would join 5,000 communities and focus instead on pure numbers.  The vast majority of our users belong to a couple dozen communities that they have a genuine interest in and wish to take part in.  I'm not going to get all Spock on you and talk about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one), but it does impact our thinking.

If you've got an opinion, please leave your comment in the original post (helps us keep things organized).

Have a great weekend!