But how do you assess progress when you remove all desire to monetize?

I run r/WallStreetBets and "quality" is an extremely nebulous term.

I look for things like "novelty", "thought-provoking / well reasoned commentary", "original content", "authenticity", "self-awareness" or "primary research". But these are human assessed metrics.

Some more easily measurable metrics might include, "length of submissions", or "number of outbound links excluding blacklisted domains". Or even "number of tickers or quality-correlated keywords mentioned".

All these metrics have very clear downsides, and if generally well-known, become useless. Interestingly, a score too high can also result in something being unlikely to be authentic.

Another challenge is your relationship with users. Surprisingly, moderators are not innately adversarial to users, they can also promote content through other channels (discord, twitter) or sticky threads for a viewership boost.

So, even without a profit motive, what do you do?

If you ignore the profit motive, presumably you are doing it for other reasons. You assess "progress" based on those motives. Or perhaps you don't assess "progress" at all, beyond "I like what I'm doing here and where this is going".

I've run numerous internet services over the years without the goal of them generating an income at all. I've run MUDs, websites, discussion groups, etc. I didn't objectively measure anything about any of them, because my goals were not ones that could be objectively measured. And honestly, even if there were some metric that could be used, I would have avoided using it because then it becomes about maximizing the metric rather than the purpose I started the activity in the first place. If I was happy with how they were going, that counted as "success" to me.

> So, even without a profit motive, what do you do?

I honestly don't understand this question. Without a profit motive, you do it for other motives. If you have no other motives, then why are you doing it at all?

This is something that technically-minded people can take to heart more. There's a lot of value in things that can't be objectively measured. For instance, I'm in a bunch of group chats with various friends. I don't always interact with it (i.e., my "engagement" is fairly low), but I derive a lot of enjoyment from those. Why? Because I like those people. Can I put a number on how much I like those people? No, because I'm not a socially stunted robot.

Or maybe there isn't much value, since apparently you wouldn't be able to tell. Except, you can tell, and so actually they can be measured. You don't want to measure them, but that's not the same thing.

> Can I put a number on how much I like those people? No, because I'm not a socially stunted robot.

You don't want to put a number on it. That's fine. But can it be done? Of course it can. In fact even if we insist on trying never to think about it that way, we make decisions based on how much we like people all the time. I've never measured how far it is from where I live to the supermarket. Why would I? But it would be silly to claim I can't put a number on it, I just chose not to.

He's not asking what motives you should have if you don't have a profit motive. He's asking, even in the absence of a profit motive, what better measure of content quality is there than how much the community engages with it? You gave an answer. In communities you ran, you just asked yourself if you were happy with them. That's an acceptable answer. But assuming someone who runs a community wants the community to be happy as well, that is a lot harder to assess, as you no longer have direct access to their mental states the way you have to your own. Now you're left again with the need to estimate their happiness via some proxy measure. If not engagement, what should that be?

I'm not saying there is no answer and all communities should throw up their hands and either just use engagement or use no measure at all, but I do think it is legitimately a hard question.

There is a middle ground here. Choose a basket of metrics, impose the natural partial ordering, and intuit your way through pushing up one or the other. If this sounds crazy, keep in mind it's roughly how the Fed (inflation + unemployment) runs the monetary system.

If WSB members were doing bad stuff like, making mean jokes about the leadership of companies Ryan Cohen divests from in; or coordinating real-life harassment of family members of employees of the Depository Trust Company or something; you'd probably want to put a stop to that and focus them somewhere else. Because it wouldn't be fun.

If Fox News interviewed you and you sounded silly and all the community members got mad at you, you'd probably also quit the volunteer job.

But as long as you make choices that make the community a fun and engaging place to hang out and feel like you're part of a big secret treasure hunt, that seems awesome, and you would probably want to make choices that maximize that.

TBH most MUDs were not data-driven and kinda govern by feeling -- they'd sort of add steering they thought was interesting and keep it in place unless there's a backlash. The tedious administrative stuff (bans, moderation, player requests for item reimbursement) would always have a backlog and you'd recruit junior imms to help out and they would feel like they were part of the fun too.

OK, and? I could guess what the problem with this is, but let's spell it out... maybe that they are subjective so different assessors can disagree... and this is a problem why?

What if there are some cases where it's actually important to use human-assessed metrics as one component, or even as the entire thing, cases where no appropriate 'objective' metrics are available? (In scare quotes, because these quantitative metrics are seldom _quite_ as 'objective' or independent from human judgement as assumed. There is usually human judgement involved in how the metrics are defined and measured, where different people might define and measure a metric different ways resulting in different numbers...)

But if you are the size of Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. it is too risky (and expensive) to let individuals define what success looks like - you need something measurable that you can spread to multiple projects or even across the complete company culture.

I fully agree with your point that metrics are typically not objective, like any data once it's used to communicate something.

So the question should be what metric(s), if not engagement in itself, should we measure for to create a healthy online community?

I wonder if it's less about metrics and more about principles; how does HN keep the level of quality so high? Is it because we share an interest? Because of the quality control? The UI/UX of the site? Something else?

My guess is that dang's moderation is a large part of it, and I think dang moderates (creates moderation policy and executes it) based on things that are "human-assessed" and not quantifiable....

> But if you are the size of Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. it is too risky (and expensive) to let individuals define what success looks like

You're probably right, but I think it's worth challenging this conventional wisdom. (Not necessarily here, we're not going to work it out, but still, I'll ask some rhetorical questions) Why is it too dangerous? Even if you have quantitative metrics, are you _sure_ this isn't still "letting individuals define what success looks like", since individuals decided how the metrics were defined and measured? So then, what's the difference? Why, specifically, is it too "dangerous" to have non-quantitative metrics defining what success looks like? Danger of... what? I would say facebook as it is, is actually incredibly dangerous to, like, human society. So... what kind of danger are we talking about? Danger to facebook's profits instead? Or what?

> So the question should be what metric(s), if not engagement in itself, should we measure for to create a healthy online community?

Sure. I don't know! I think that's the question the OP is meaning to ask too, if not completely answer. The OP suggests:

> At the start of this, I said that people join your community for support, connection, opportunities to give back, and meaningful relationships. Those are the things they value, and those are the things you should value. And if you value them, you should measure them.

> They’re not as easy to measure as engagement, sure, but they can be measured. The best part is that maximizing these metrics is always going to be good for your community.

My point is that i'm not certain this should be short-circuited with "Well of course whatever metrics these are, they need to be quantitative and have the appareance of "objectivity".

HN is successful because it can be moderated by one dang. Maybe a bonus helper can appear.

But once you get so big that your dang can't do it all anymore, it will eventually fall apart.

Instead of relying on operationaluzation, the phenomena is considered strictly immeasurable. It leaves a lot on the table. In the examples above, for instance, there are a number of unsubstantiated assumptions as well as pros and cons that implicitly do not account for operationalization and it shows.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization

But it doesn't make sense to focus on these metrics if your mission is to create a great product -- focusing on community engagement should be just one small aspect of your overall marketing strategy, which should be a relatively constrained part of your overall budget (both in labor and money). And even within marketing, there are many other important metrics besides community engagement.

Soylent had great community engagement but not enough focus on scientifically-guided product engineering. Tons of businesses that get this wrong.

Generally I interpret overcommitment to community engagement as a signal that the founders are overly narcissistic and usually apply a discount the expected future value/evolution of their product.

But measuring community engagement doesn't tell you anything about the nature of the community. Only that it "engages" people. If your goal is to build a strong community, isn't it more important that the community be a good one?

I think there are two options here:

1. If the community that you have does a "foom" and grows like crazy BEFORE it has a set of values, then you're at the whims of the mob and where certain vocal and rallying members decide they want to take the community. Usually this ends in internecine conflict and the inevitable "break offs" into other smaller groups

2. If your community starts with a value vector then you structure, nudge and contain the community to a MDP (Markov Decision Process) with the value vector as the reward, for which the moderators are the critics and the community members are the actors in the actor-critic model.

It seems like the vast majority of organizations/movements etc... fall into category 1

For me the learning here is, if you are a leader in your community it's never too early to nail down what the core value and benefit of your community is and stay obsessed with just that.

Good ol' Goodhart.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

We could pose the question even more generally. Apart from making money, what is the value of a human life or community?

Since the article is written for "community builders," understanding that engagement is a metric to quantify the advertising potential of a platform should make it obvious that people who aren't in the business of selling attention to advertisers don't need to copy social media and optimize for engagement; instead they should target better measurements of value creation for their community. Of course Goodhart's law[1] still applies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

(edited for readability)

...and the implication of that is that if we change the monetization model, then the metrics also change.

For a company selling a paid product, metrics become things like the effectiveness of the sales funnel, how much support the average user requires, the rating of the product on app stores, etc - which are not ideal, but still far better than "engagement".

Simply because people who are engaged with a product/app/whatever are by far the most likely to be repeat customers -- to renew their subscription, to buy the new version, to adopt the next product.

Once engagement drops, future revenue dries up. A drop in engagement is the canary in the coal mine -- it shows where your business is going wrong months/years before it shows up in sales stats or renewal rates.

So actually, the metric doesn't change at all. E.g. Netflix is obsessed with engagement even though it's subscription-based rather than ad-based. Because guess who winds up cancelling their subscriptions?

A user's engagement with your product is a great metric, because what you value is users using your product.

But for a COMMUNITY it's the wrong metric, because you don't value negative comments in your Slack no matter how many there are (in fact, the more there are the worse it is).

In the case of "community" around a product, the purpose of the community is usually to provide free support. That's not so much monetization as it is cost savings. For that to work, people need to be "engaged" or kept around so they are present to field those support issues.

Engagement is a better proxy for value destruction, if you define people's time and sanity as valuable. (It's not perfect; a thriving community will rate highly.)

For community building you want successful events, you want interesting questions to be asked, and interesting answers to be offered. Someone could write a book on how to make communities work. Probably several books.

I put the customer first in the belief that 'the rain follows the plough' and, if you put the customer first, then all else follows.

I see metrics as there to be cracked. If you are measuring the right things then you can see where the problems are, fix the problems and move on to measuring different metrics that are more specific and focused on the remaining problem areas. For me it is a campaign where initial reactive firefighting gives way to calm, proactive problem solving, fixing problems before they are of consequence. Along the way many unexpected things are learned about the customer.

I do all this with a focus on the customer, meanwhile my colleagues in marketing are out for themselves. They are the dead weight keeping progress back as they have to do things like buy traffic and hold on to keyword optimised URLs that are cargo cult SEO. Their reports for their micromanagers are always measuring the same stuff, e.g. 'engagement', yet they could be engaging customers solely for the purpose of pissing them off for them to never come back.

My favourite is the pop up shown as someone leaves a website begging them to stay, or the sign up to the newsletter popup. These could get one extra sale at the cost of pissing off a million people but if you only measure the former then it all seems good.

In the capitalist world only one metric matters to the shareholders. Once I worked for a highly successful company that sent out sales newsletters with no measurement whatsoever of open rates or click throughs. None of that was needed. The problem was emptying the warehouse too quickly to have no stock left. Customers would be waiting for our email, not ignoring them. We had plenty of engagement with the customers as they actually bought stuff.

Subsequently I have worked for agencies where they spend a fortune on some email service and they get these fancy graphs to show the clients of these open rates the world over. Which had wow value at the time and 'engagement' stats. But I had come from somewhere where we had no need to measure that stuff, we weren't looking at these charts, we were coping with a deluge of orders and had no time for that.

I don't get what https://savannahhq.com is and what the value add is there but that seems to be what he's interested in, niche + small communities.

Of course it isn't completely clear if anger-based engagement actually drives most people away. In that case it is actually Facebook's fiduciary duty to capitalize on it which seems to be a failing on our society.

You don't advertise to your community. If you do you're actively killing it.

Community is made up of people making connections and building relationships with other people. Savannah CRM helps you manage those connections and relationships.

I wonder if there is a cross-over between Patreon, Substack and Twitter. This would probably work for niches but not writ large. But at the end of the day, we need to find a way to pay for what we value because that is how we get more of it. Interested in new ideas in this space....

But product companies don't like it because they can't scale revenue user-transparently by repackaging data (e.g. building new / better ad products), and raising prices for users sucks.

The original sin is that the web was free, and the consequence of that, once post-content-scarcity in a free market system, has been continual sleight of hand to make money from "free."

If everyone has gotten in the habit of paying for quality content... we'd have a very different world now.

(And this said as a hard-charging "information wants to be free" type. But the end commercial result nowadays is terrible)

I disagree. The thing that has destroyed much of what made the internet great is that it became ad-driven.

But I don't think we chose ad-supported. The ads came in before anyone was seriously thinking about how to charge people for things. The decision was made for us. And even if we did pay cash money, the ads would have come anyway if history is any indication.

So perhaps the degradation of the internet in this way was inevitable. Still, it's a real loss and a real shame.

I'd agree that we (the users) certainly didn't chose ad-supported. At least in any more specific way than saying "I like free things more than not free things" ("we" as in a majority).

And I don't think pay-for-things or any other not-ads model was fundamentally flawed... it just wasn't superior or even at parity at the time that ads took off (i.e. DoubleClick/AdWords)... and so we got ads.

And I'm not arguing that we should have ads! No one would be happier than me if they disappeared from the face of the Internet tomorrow, at least in massively-tracked form.

But I do think moving past them requires an honest appraisal of why they exist -- people, on the whole, are cheapskates.

I do agree with you that it would have been better if the payment-related features of the HTTP spec weren't just dead-on-arrival stubs.

> We still want our members to be happy, right?

... we might want that, but do the people running the platforms?

I worked for many years at a company that prides itself on being metrics driven. To the point that they celebrated having many significant figures after the decimal point when measuring length of negative events in seconds.

The good side of metrics driven culture is that having a metric gives you a concrete goal.

The downside is that really good metrics are often very hard. By really good, I mean metrics that measure the desired outcome.

It’s much easier to measure, for example, how many operation X your service performed, rather than the value the service delivered to your business or your customers. So we assume that each operation X contributes a uniform, positive quantum to those outcomes and we count X’s.

I've seen ppl on Twitter posting 'unpopular opinions' that they don't even agree, just to get replies. And then admit on the conversation that they don't agree with that.

The monsters need energy to power their civilisation. Why do social media companies measure engagement? What are they extracting? There is not one single mention of the "p word" in the article.

The last two sections are delivered with such heavy doses of naivety that this ends up just coming across as Orwellian in tone.

> “We should measure what we value, not value what we measure”

Who is "we"? Is "we" the shareholders? What do "they" value do you think?

Measuring engagement then becomes one piece of data that's valuable, but shouldn't be the only piece. When engagement data is combined with qualitative community surveys, enthusiasm from members to contribute to a community, clear and timely responsiveness to community needs, membership growth over time and geographies, depth of member interactions (whether across community channels or within specific channels), what's topically important to members and why, and overall sentiment and change in sentiment over time - that's when community builders can begin to better understand the health of their communities and their impact on their business.

Engagement is an important piece, but just one of the pieces, that helps paint the full picture.

Disclaimer: I’m a co-founder of Common Room [1] and a we’ve invested a lot of energy in solving for this exact problem. You’re welcome to check out the product (it’s free to sign up) and would love to hear of ideas or feedback.

1: https://www.commonroom.io/

People are highly tribalist and banding together like that produces a lot of ugly outcomes. Communities form and likely won't go away, particularly the more people internalize them emotionally and integrate them into their identity.

It is exhausting to see a community for literally everything, even the smallest products.

Perhaps we should let products simply exist.

Near where I used to live in the Valley, there was a real-world club for enthusiasts of a particular weird antique car. Not toxic, just eccentric. They just liked getting together and drinking in a nearby pub and showing off how they'd restored this or that aspect of the car.

I think our goals should be to replicate that kind of success.

I think the other posters in this thread have it right, that the reason why we usually can't is because our metrics are all about selling audiences to advertisers.

And we know those platforms are tools for manipulation.

How much of the desire for these communities might be manufactured in the first place?

If you then take that model and try to use them in a new domain, that is never going to work out. The environment adapts to the incentives that the current system produces, and will instantly make your pre-created model worthless[0]. The only way to work out long-term is by having an expert stay ahead of the pack creating what they think are systems with better signal to the noise.

[0]: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

[0] https://rosie.land/posts/the-community-engagement-trap/

Connections between people: https://www.savannahhq.com/2022/09/06/measuring-your-communi...

Support: https://www.savannahhq.com/2022/09/08/measuring-your-communi...

I believe this falls into the 'Results Oriented' mindset of delivering value. This means figuring out your desired outcome ahead of time, then measure it over time. In addition, overtime, you may determine that your desired outcome has changed and you need to measure differently. Yes, iterating is not just for software.

IMHO pure quantitative metrics are of little value for customer experience. I believe metrics should be a little squishy and subjective. The value in the subjectivity is that it spurns conversation and actual thought instead of simple counting.

Sadly, it's pretty difficult to measure for some of the "values" that my communities run on, but "engagement" isn't even on the map.

I suspect that "engagement" does, indeed, provide real monetary value for advertising-based sites, as clicks == money. Since that isn't a factor in my communities, we don't worry about that. In fact, we try to minimize "engagement."

The article implies that community building should be some kind of altruistic purpose, where your only goal is to maximize the amount of "meaningful relationships" created? But building an artificial community in the first place can never be altruistic because the end goal of it all is to guide people to your product or conference or whatever. If you were an actual altruistic community builder, you would be telling people to get off the Internet and go make "meaningful relationships" with people in real life.

No, that's a social media manager, completely different role.

> And do they think that people care about their brand so much that they would join a community of people whose only common trait is liking the same brand?

Yes! It happens all the time. Most of the biggest brands have a community of people who share that common trait.

> And in the first place, how do you even build a "community" manually and artificially?

Again yes, just like you build a garden. The gardener doesn't make the plants grow, but they do make sure they have the right environment and resources to grow in.

> The article implies that community building should be some kind of altruistic purpose, where your only goal is to maximize the amount of "meaningful relationships" created?

That's not altruism. Those meaningful relationships help the company/project the community was built around. They provide feedback, help improve processes, make connections outside the company/project, provide support to other users, there are too many things that communities do to list them all here.

Which brings up another aspect of this whole issue -- we're talking about companies figuring out how to exploit the human need for community in order to increase profits. The companies themselves are not encouraging real community, they're farming people. Companies are not people, do not have the best interests of people in mind, but pretend like they are.

It's very distasteful at the least.

A healthy community benefits the people in it as much or more than the company behind it. As you identified, humans have a need to connect with other humans. And often they want to connect around a product, service or hobby that they share with other humans.

It should also come as no surprise here on Hacker News that humans also really like to tell companies what they think about their product, and how to make it better. They also like the appreciation they receive from helping others use the product better.

A company-backed community serves a need that the members of that community have. Nobody is being forced into it or exploited. We're giving each other a mutual benefit that, as long as it remains mutually beneficial, we are happy to keep investing in.

No, because a grocery store's purpose is to sell a product. That product happens to be food. That's very, very different from a company leveraging human emotional need in order to sell something else entirely.

> A healthy community benefits the people in it as much or more than the company behind it.

I would argue that a healthy community doesn't have a company behind it -- even if the community is centered around a particular company's products.

> A company-backed community serves a need that the members of that community have. Nobody is being forced into it or exploited.

I think we have a fundamental disagreement here. And that's OK.

A company-backed community serves the company. The proof of that is what happens when the company-backed community starts becoming too critical of the company -- then the truth of the relationship rapidly becomes very clear.

> They’re not as easy to measure as engagement, sure, but they can be measured.

I'm afraid that a citation is sorely needed here. There are no real measurements for "meaningful relationships."

In fact, the only proxy metric we have for "meaningful relationships" is engagement!

And, yes, engagement is not a very good proxy metric for meaningful relationships, but since there's no alternative, it's all we've got, so this article is pointless.

"Engagement isn't a good metric. Optimize for having a good community."

"But engagement is easy to measure AND it means people are using the product. If people are choosing to use the product, doesn't that mean the product is giving them value?"

"Not necessarily. Drugs like tobacco and heroin have fantastic 'engagement' but we consider them bad for us."

"But how do you tell the difference between something that engages because it's good and something that engages because it's some kind of drug?"

"I guess one important signal would be when people know something is bad for them but they're doing it anyway?"

"Is that the case for social media? Do people feel addicted - feel that it's bad for them but they can't stop?"

I think we've heard a lot of anecdata on this last question, but I can't recall seeing any big survey on it.

EDIT: according to this, people will pay to have their social media restricted: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/19/social-med...

Of course engagement is insufficient and of course if you want to know something else, measure that other thing, and of course you should interrogate your metrics, and maybe it's just this thing that bugs me about modern writing where you have to take this ridiculous extreme stance to get eyeballs but yeah.

All 3 are concerned with attention. Are hungry for it.

If social media could be optimized to deliver engaging conversation to everybody then the demon would be slain. Because the hunger would be satisfied.

Does that sound right?

The demon is always there. A forum filled with engaging, productive conversation can and will slide back to toxic crap if there isn't something keeping it in check.

It may be "optimized" for engaging conversation, but what does that mean in practice? If it's fully or mostly automated, then it's relying on metrics, and humans will always always always find a way to maximize the score :: effort ratio of any metric. Low effort is incompatible with engaging productive conversation.

If it's done fully or mostly manually, then that means actively keeping that demon snoozing.

Whatever I'd come up with, I'd like it to be a self-healing organism that would continue to thrive even if some important members become inactive. And to feel it's not a Sisyphean task.

[1] https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries&country=Poland

I am also starting a wiki, a golf course wiki: https://golfcourse.wiki

It's still very early for me, but I see myself in this post. It's going to be extremely slow going, as the main consumers of the content created have no desire to contribute, but since golf courses are mostly static, as long as i plug away, adding a little bit all the time, the site will be a success. It costs almost nothing to operate. Generating traffic is challenging, and i've been trying to find more people willing to contribute, but again, I see my product as best placed if i do exactly the opposite of what most of the golf course info sites are doing. Don't base my success on engagement, no aggregation, no overly-prodding to contribute. Just one day at a time, with the assumption that the task is endless anyway, having people share their passion on their own time.

If i can make that profitable at all, and it shouldn't be too difficult as the site grows, i'll see it as a total win.

Then they would instantly start using screams? Nobody making business decisions in social media companies will prioritize "user happiness" over increased production of their main product (your attention) for their customers (advertisers).

>Let’s bring this back to community building. We still want our members to be happy, right?

If it doesn't make them more money... no they don't!

No social media company is going to do this, you are correct. But community managers and community-led companies absolutely should.

They chose to pay higher prices for shares, divorced from actual revenue

The companies, in-turn, found non revenue metrics to show quarter over quarter

and thousands of startups copied the model

Just don’t rely on the A/B test, be aware of it, but don’t rely on it. Put the human control back into the process. Users aren't staying on your platform 5 seconds longer after you hid the escape hatch because they love it, they are frustrated and lost! The A/B test doesn't tell you why the engagement is longer, only that it is. It takes an empathic human to say “okay, B got us that result but not for the reason we want”

Missed opportunity to bring it full circle back to this.

Otherwise, not bad.

Stop engaging with content that angers you.

Don't follow politicians and news outlets you despise. If someone you follow retweets the latest garbage being spewed by Fox News, don't interact with it. No retweets, no replies, no likes, no matter how well they refute the bullshit or how well they "own" the original messenger.

The algorithms feed you content they think you'll engage with. Train the algorithm to feed you better content.

1. If you over focus on impact the quality of your product gets torn to shreds. You've built great direction but do people really use/like your product?

2. You build for engagement, people use the thing, but what impact did it drive?

This article is great, but it's unbalanced potentially. I think directionally, some average in the middle is likely the way - so why not both? And while we're add it, add in other indicators. Success metrics that balance all of that, plus just a vibe metric for good measure.

Saying stop measuring community engagement is a good clickbait headline, but it's absurd advice for community managers that even your own article doesn't agree with.

In the extreme, if you spend all your time "engaging", something toxic is happening

that said, you do need a way to justify to others why you are a better community manager than the next, and whether you are doinng a good job. that part went unanswered here and the article would be better if it had a constructive replacement instead of just arguing to be unaccountable to the rest of the org.

You could (roughly) measure the diversity of discussion topics, the frequency of positive and negative emotions, etc. It'd be work to do it well, but I think it could work decently.

Measuring Connections: https://www.savannahhq.com/2022/09/06/measuring-your-communi...

Measuring Support: https://www.savannahhq.com/2022/09/08/measuring-your-communi...

No, they looking for a ways how to easily and faster to fuck.

> They couldn’t measure joy, but they could measure engagement, and so they did. > That measurement became their goal, and they focused on maximizing it.

Because this is social networks profit. Ads, and more people attached to some topic where can be shown an ads to these people. That's why and only that's why it is works like that. Nobody cares about principles. Only money. Power in money, a money is a power.

> What they didn’t understand was that negative, divisive, hate-inspiring posts get more engagement than positive, supportive, kind posts do.

For what do your country has intelligence and different defense structures? Because it is very easy manipulate by people and do wars. Extremely easy to organize that and involve a lot of people to mass destruction events. Extremely easy. And i do not know (the same as you too) who is behind some kind of negative behind.

> . The algorithm didn’t care whether the posts brought joy or anger, it only cared about whether they brought engagement.

Because this is about ads and money. More people will watch ads more money social network will get. Easy.

> So in order to maximize engagement, the algorithm actively encourages and elevates posts that cause unhappiness among the platform’s users.

You said that? Is a bots with fake votes, SEO thing is not about manipulating data, opinions? Its easy to make fake accounts and promote hate as a wide interested topic, while it's not. Only social network know that.

> They join looking for support, or connections, to give back, or find meaningful relationships.

No, they looking for themselves reflected in the community.

> Measuring engagement doesn’t tell you if your community is happy, or healthy, or even accomplishing any of the things you were hoping it would accomplish.

Depends on a case. Some measuring engagement can prevent negative business processes.

> Knowing how much engagement you have doesn’t tell you how much value you’re getting

For that you have another metrics. Depends on a case. Registration, profit, grow, etc. Final countable results.

> Let’s bring this back to community building. We still want our members to be happy, right?

Who the fuck am i to let people happy? Happiness is subjective thing. I have no clue, no ability to make someone happy. The same as you, the same as anybody else. This is very agile thing depends on many factors and the most important wish to be happy and objective situation.

> So what should we value?

Does your community member even read or know about "values" at all? Is it some kind of cult, or what?

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I have a well known secret. To get maximum engagement need to say that the white color is black color. Water - is not a liquide, and planet earth is flat.

And then your "engagement" will go above the sky. Just always need to split people, and say that one thing is not the thing what you used to think, it's another thing. totally vise versa.

Oh... Darling, exactly this you have done by saying: "stop measuring engagement". And by this title invited to engagement a lot of people who forced to read all of your nonsense to one more time confirm that white is white, black is black.