Hello, and welcome to Bad community advice.
I'm your host.
My name is Seth Resler, and I am the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And this is a show with terrible tips and toxic takeaways.
When we talk to a community professional and we get the worst advice that they have ever received, my guest today is a man who is a community manager community manager over at Ciena, but more than that, he is also a historian in the field of community building.
He has been doing this for over a quarter of a century and along the way has been chronicling the changes that have been happening in the community industry.
I wanna welcome David DeWald.
David, thank you so much for joining me.
Happy to be here.
I'm excited.
So talk to me a little bit about this.
I will get to your terrible advice in a moment, but I wanna hear more about you being a historian in the community space.
Uh, first of all, how does somebody wind up doing that? Um, I think it's just I haven't been here for so long.
And I had tried so many different community platforms and talked to some of the community people, and I had just been doing it for so long.
Like you said, you know, it's a quarter century now, um, which makes it sound worse than just saying twenty five years.
Thank you for that.
You know? It's like the time I went golfing.
Yeah.
You know, I, uh, no, I went fishing.
I went fishing.
That's even better.
Uh, I must have caught a fish.
It was this far from the boat.
Yeah.
Ready.
Right.
Yeah.
So, uh, anyway, uh, it just came from that.
And I just, like, was like, what is really the first online community? Piqued my interest one day.
And I went back and I hit what was probably the most well known old community from the internet, and that is the well or the whole earth electric link for him.
That was early days of the internet.
Um, it was twenty five years ago.
You could get on it.
It still exists today.
Um, and what was interesting about that was that, back then, and noto notable people were on there.
It wasn't just Randall guy in Utah.
It was, like, the most knowledgeable and most, uh, thought leaders of the internet in the early web were there hanging out.
And, uh, doing their thing.
So, uh, I found that and then I found one before that.
And I was like, what? What was before that? And, you know, and then it that led to the BBSs that were out there.
And then I'm, like, okay.
That's kinda cool.
Where did the BBS come from? And that led further back and further back.
And the earliest entry I have is from the sixties, uh, late sixties at a university.
Uh, so that was kinda cool.
And then I guess I just kinda expanded it from there.
Went on and, uh, I kept finding things.
And I thought, well, it can't be just platforms that I'm doing.
Maybe I should do notable events in community, and I added that.
I think we have 75, 76 entries at this point.
Give me an example of some of these notable events.
Like, what what what's a really important turning point in community? Oh, gosh.
Um, that's hard.
I mean, just being online and collaborative, uh, probably the biggest one is the eternal September.
And what is the eternal September? Um, long ago, before we had greater internet access like we do today, we had small, not even small big comp small and big companies that offered what was dial up.
You would connect your phone to your computer, and you would call another computer, and it would connect you to the internet.
Um, the largest one of those was called America online or AOL.
I know people have heard of that.
Uh, we got instant messaging from AOL.
And that was actually an accident too in some messaging.
It was an internal tool that was pretty cool that they used, and they said, this is good.
Let's release it to the world.
But the eternal September is when AOL gave their little closed network access to the internet at large.
And at the time, there were communities online called USNet.
And these were forms that were to use a a modern term, uh, not.
Uh, and they weren't, like, there wasn't just a, uh, a usenet site that you went to and did it.
They were, uh, can't think of the word.
Distributed.
It was a distributed network.
So everybody around the world had a node that they ran that was using that, and they could choose to look at different subtopics in there.
So there was all binaries this kind of thing, alt books, literature, alt books, sci fi, and you could kinda go in there and have conversations with other people.
Um, but in the internal September, there was a release of the plebs, the the people who weren't tech savvy onto the internet.
And it was a mad rush.
And the used nets got flooded with people who didn't know the protocols and the the ways that they did things.
And so they just called it the eternal September.
It was the the event that never ended.
And it led to what we have today, which is millions and millions of people online at sites that hold millions and millions of users.
It is so interesting to hear you talk about, for example, America online in a way that you know, as you're saying, and I'm like, I I was there.
I know.
But I I I'm realizing that you're explaining it to perhaps a younger generation that wasn't there, doesn't doesn't know, doesn't remember.
I remember using AOL and messenger, uh, I was working in radio stations at the time, and that was how I talked to record labels about the bands that were coming out and the the records that they were working and things like that.
And and and slack is kind of the thing that it reminds me of most that we have today.
But, uh, yeah, I remember using that early on.
What is this org? Yeah.
That all that kind of stuff.
What is the What do you think is the biggest change? I mean, both as you look backwards, but also if you can put yourself in the situation where you were starting out in this community space twenty five years ago, what do you think you would be most surprised about as you look at the community space today? The distributed and nondistributed stuff.
Um, I guess it's I guess it was inevitable, and I didn't really think of it as being inevitable.
But we went from very distributed.
Email is still very distributed.
Um, not everybody I mean, I'm sure a lot of people use Gmail, and that's not distributed.
But most the protocol that Gmail runs on s n t p or pot three, whatever it is.
Um, that is distributed.
That means there's one protocol that you use and you can talk to anybody in the world over email using that protocol or those two protocols.
Um, and So we went from a very protocol based network of internet and that kind of thing to very centralized AOL was a good centralized.
And then it kinda spread out to the world.
And now we have massive sites like Facebook, Reddit.
Um, we have apps that are massive TikTok.
Uh, you know, those kinds of things.
And and so there was that consolidation.
And I guess the the way that I can best compare it to is the way that cities work.
You don't, you know, you'll you'll hear about, uh, city planners and they'll talk about how cities tend to start small.
They grow wider and wider and wider and wider and wider and wider.
Uh, and that's the distributedness.
They're they're distributing stuff.
So as it gets bigger and bigger, and then at some point, it then starts to collapse and people move away from the outside edges back to the downtown city center.
And it does this expansion and contraction.
And each time it gets wider.
Uh, but there there's that expansion and contraction of the city, and I feel like that's where the internet is today.
We started why we consolidated and brought it all together.
And now we're starting to see people are moving away from that city center of the big sites and back to these distributed networks.
We have mastodon.
We have Blue Sky.
We, you know, others, uh, what's I can't think of any of them right now.
All the different protocols out there.
So, uh, and and we're seeing that.
And I predict, you know, years from now, we'll see another contraction.
You know, it'll it'll do that just like cities do because that's how people work.
So this is cyclical.
I mean, it it it feels like it won't be.
It hasn't proven to be, but I feel like it will be.
Oh, that's interesting.
That's fascinating.
So alright.
Let's talk about your piece of bad advice.
And this was an interesting one.
You said you need a thick skin.
And I can see this as a community manager why somebody might need a thick skin, so I'm curious why I mean, this this looks like it it could be good advice.
Why do you say this is bad advice? It's both.
Honestly, honestly.
You do need a thick skin, um, because Yeah.
Here's me being a historian again.
So, um, there's there's this thing out there called John Gabriel's greater Internet theory.
Um, and I don't know if I can cuss on the show.
Can I cuss on the show? Yeah.
You can cuss on the show.
Alright.
So John Gabriel's internet, greater internet theory, uh, which came from a, uh, a comic, an online comic called Control Alt Delete.
Um, and nope.
Yep.
Control all delete.
And what it the great simply said is you if you take a human and give them an anonymity and then give them an audience, they turn to a fuck wad.
And It's those people that cause you grief online.
Um, because they can be anonymous.
There's nothing that's gonna there's no there's a good chance they will not be punished.
It's getting less and less over time.
But there's a good chance they will not be punished for being an idiot or being the jerk or being an a hole online.
Uh, and so we said, hey, you just gotta build tough skin.
There's there's not much we can do about it.
And that is still good advice.
You're gonna need a little bit of a tough skin, but as time has gone along, we are starting to realize that the dealing with that kind of stress and that kind of environment is actually pretty harmful to us as people.
Um, and that, you know, the worst of the the worst of the world is online as well as the best of the world.
And we are finding that people that are heavy into moderation, especially for these big sites that are dealing with CSA, which is child sexual assault material that gets posted online, um, violence graphic violence in videos and images that it causes harm over the long time, long term to these people.
Um, to the point where sometimes these moderation companies that hire these people are suing the company that hired them because there's not enough protections in place to help these people deal with that trauma.
And I'm just fearful that, uh, you know, saying that we you have to build up a tough skin puts this unrealistic expectation that you just gotta deal with everything.
And I don't think that's fair to anybody.
Right.
Yeah.
No.
That makes a lot of sense.
And obviously, you're talking about some areas where, um, there's sensitive stuff going on or or appropriate material or things like that.
Um, but even in communities that are a lot more mundane, it can be possible for things to escalate.
And I think it's because of exactly what you said that there's There's this way that we behave online where we might be willing to say something behind the anonymity of a keyboard that we would never say to somebody if we were face to face with them.
Um, we might think it.
But there there's sort of this, you know, this is politeness.
It's kicks in.
Right? There's there's there's a couple of, right? So a lot of us think it and don't do anything.
Some of us start writing it out and then don't post it.
That's cathartic.
Sometimes to get it out, it it's better.
And then there's the people who just do it, post it, and no skin off my back.
And I just, you know, you're gonna have to deal with that.
And having a little bit of a thick skin for that is okay.
Uh, because, you know, people I I say this a lot too.
Um, your greatest detractors, especially if you're doing business to business and somebody says your product sucks, your company sucks, and you suck.
Right? Your biggest detractors are ultimately on your side.
They want things to be better.
They just really suck at communicating it.
Right? So, yeah, I might suck.
My boss might suck.
The company might suck, and the product might suck.
But you want it to be better because you're here telling me that it sucks.
So rather than take that as a personal affront, um, because they really don't know who you are anymore than I know who they are, is to start the conversation and say, okay.
What is it about our product that sucks? We can fix this together.
Uh, you know, and don't you can you can say, but, you know, please watch the language, that kind of thing.
But some of that is okay.
Some of that's okay to deal with, but some of the stuff that people put up with is just not.
I've been doxxed personally.
Um, it it was a weird situation.
I I don't have a common name, but it just so happened that in the city I lived in, was somebody that had my name.
And that person that tried to Docs me actually posted the address of somebody else to the internet.
And I had to work with, Google because it was on blogger.
com.
I think it was.
Uh, and say, look, I don't care that they docks me.
It is public information, but it's it's not actually my public information.
It's somebody else's.
And I had to, you know, this is early internet before we had digital cameras on our phones.
And I had to figure out how to get them a photograph that showed my address being not the one that is online and say, can you please remove this, not for my safety, not for my concern? But for this other person who does not know that their name is out there in the world, and people are trying to harass me.
Uh, you know, well, it's like, at that time, thick skin.
Right? I I can deal with that.
Go ahead.
But I didn't want somebody else to get harmed who had no idea what was going on.
Yeah.
So we're obviously talking about mental health here Yeah.
And maybe even in some situations, physical health, uh, which you're talking about.
Would you say that people should not just assume that they need a thick skin? Uh, does that mean don't internalize it and know when to ask for help? You know, what what does that mean? And and What are the signs that you should enlist other people? And what does that look like to enlist that? I mean, we're talking about your managers at the company that you work for.
Right.
Yeah.
I think anytime you come across something that is that upsets you at all.
Like, I mean, sure.
Like I said, you and you're gonna have to internalize some of it.
You suck, your company sucks, your, you know, your product sucks.
You're gonna have to internalize that.
They don't actually know you.
They don't know that you don't really suck.
Uh, the product might actually suck.
It happens.
Uh, and the company that made the product might not be a great company either.
But it's not really directed at you.
And and that's okay to kinda internalize that and say, okay, it's not really attacking me.
But when you get something that really does feel like they're attacking you or that makes you very uncomfortable with what you're seeing or what you're having to deal with, I think at that point, it's okay to get a manager.
And, you know, obviously, you take that high as high up the chains you need to.
Um, you know, if you're dealing with violent material, that can be very upsetting.
And, you know, depending on your life and your circumstances, an image that doesn't phase me may be destructive to you in a way that I would never fully understand.
Um, women face different challenges than men.
Um, sometimes just admitting you're a woman brings different stressors to your life than a man would face, uh, unfortunately.
So but really, yeah.
You need to be able to talk.
And, I mean, certainly talk to your coworkers.
Um, you know, I'm not saying grovel and misery together, but just as a collective team say, okay, management, this is what we're facing, uh, and it's it's hard to deal with, uh, mentally, emotionally, possibly physically, if it really upsets you.
Uh, I just think, yeah, it's mental health, it's physical health.
It's well-being on the whole, I think, is a better way of saying.
So, yeah, know your limits, know when there are problems, know when to stop internalizing it and taking it to other people.
Can you give some advice to management, two companies who have community managers on their payroll? What can they do to ensure that they are taking care of their community managers.
Yeah.
Um, certainly be open to listening and understanding what they're dealing with if, you know, you as a manager are not dealing with it yourself.
Um, when they bring concerns, be open, listen, be willing to help if you can, certainly be open to whatever ideas they have, um, and feel, you know, don't feel obligated, but certainly consider escalating if it's something that's just way out of your control to, you know, manage.
Uh, listen, more than anything.
Just listen to your people.
They're gonna tell you.
And if they're not telling you, they're you're gonna see it.
You should see it as the way they, you know, when people leave work worse than when they got there.
I mean, that sure.
You can be tired.
You can be worn out.
You could could've had a long day, a busy day.
But, I mean, if you really see that they're struggling on their way out to door, maybe that's time for you to tape it take a deeper look and be a little proactive in finding out what you can do and what's going on.
Yeah.
Uh, what about prevention before these situations arise? Are there best practices or steps that you would encourage people to take to hopefully head some of this off at the pass.
Um, you know, there's you can't anticipate everything, um, and those kinds of things.
But I think you set rules and you enforce the rules and that kinda will hit things off in the future.
So if I'm running a dog site and I don't want cat pictures on my dog site, I'm gonna start removing them and telling people, look, we're a dog site.
We don't want cat pictures.
Uh, there's another cat site.
Maybe I'll set up a cat site for you where you can talk about cats and not dogs.
Uh, but setting rules and enforcing rules, um, don't be too explicit in your rules.
You have to be a little vague because you never know what's around the corner.
Uh, I can say, alright.
We are not allowing Buicks, and then I get hit by Akaea.
Right? So we just say we don't allow vehicles.
We don't specify what kind of vehicles.
We just know that the vehicle, you know, it's gonna happen.
Somebody's gonna like, alright, I haven't posted any cars.
I haven't posted any trucks, but we have this new flying vehicle.
I can post those.
Right? Nope.
I, you know, we said vehicles, all vehicles.
Doesn't matter what it looks like.
Air ground, water, vehicle.
Um, and so good rules.
Well enforced.
Um, and understand that, you know, you can't account for everything.
Uh, Facebook learned that long ago when they banned Unity and suddenly you couldn't put any classical art up because it was nudity.
And then that lasted long enough until the breastfeeding community said, hey, what about breastfeeding pics? And, uh, you know, Facebook back down.
There was a protest right outside the front door.
And so they said, okay.
I'm not gonna allow that with context.
But, I mean, even today, a male can post to topless picture and it no nobody blinks an eye, but a full woman does it, you know, uh, not that I'm advocating for nudity online.
I'm I'm just saying that Right.
Right.
No.
Uh We have different sensibilities, uh, and you can't you can't you can't plan for everything.
Uh, and if you do try to account for everything, you're gonna run into people that we call rules lawyers from the gaming world.
And those people are going to Look at your rules and figure out exactly how to not break them.
You know, can't post about vehicles or, you know, I can't post about cars, trucks, and planes.
I'm gonna post about boats.
And buses and mopeds and motorcycles.
And then it's like, alright.
Now you can't post about boats motorcycles, mopeds, you know, and they'll go, okay.
Skateboards.
We're gonna post about skateboards now.
You know, they'll find a way to work around your rules.
So be a little broad, be a little vague, but spirit of the rule.
And that gives you the flexibility to adapt as the world adapts.
Uh, you know, long ago, animation on the the internet was animated gifts, and they were very short because it was very first, it was hard to make.
Then it was a big file that was slow to load over slow internet.
So it changed.
And now we have four k eight k video streaming to our computers, like it was nothing, to our phones, like it was nothing.
So You know, you can't plan for everything.
You just have to be vague enough so that your rules can adapt as the world adapts.
Yep.
Yeah.
You know, so much of community building is co creation and collaboration with the members themselves, is there a role for other members to play in this or a way that a community manager can enlist their help or is this one of those things that a community manager has to do? How so? Well, you know, uh, this, this goes back long ago into early form software where you could report content.
Um, you know, if it's, if it breaks our rules, tell us, you know, because we can't see everything that happens online.
We just, you know, as a a platform owner, uh, whatever platform that is, there's no way that you can see everything that happens online at any given moment.
Fast.
To just give you the, you know, in twenty twenty one, twenty two, YouTube, and then this was a few years ago.
YouTube was getting over five hundred hours of content uploaded every minute.
Uh, it's probably more than that now.
And there's no way that people at YouTube or you, you know, can see everything that is happening in that one minute.
Then there's no human not enough humans on the planet to watch five hundred hours of content in a minute because the next minute, there's five hundred more hours.
Right? So report content.
If it breaks the site rules, if it, you know, that's the important part.
If it breaks the site rules, report it.
Because that's gonna help flag the really bad material quickly.
Um, you know, and still that's not gonna be perfect.
Sometimes the person that's doing that is looking at yours and 20 others are in the queue.
And they're just gonna have to do a quick glance and look through it.
And there's just no way around that.
AI, unfortunately, is not quite good enough to catch everything yet.
We do have technology out there to catch some of the worst of it.
Um, there is technology that will look for the CSAM stuff and will flag it automatically and remove it if you'd have it set that way.
The large sites, Facebook, Google, they use that kind of stuff so that they can catch it quickly and remove it before hopefully a human has seen it.
Um, and of course, they have reporting laws that say that when they find it, they need to report that they found it and who put it there.
Uh, so it's good to flag stuff when you found it.
Just yeah.
And, of course, you can make it a game, you know.
Uh, if you really wanna encourage it, but you gotta be careful.
You don't want them to think, man, if I flag 15 things, I get something, and then they'll just start flagging every Well, so this really is about communicating what this is all about.
And I think at the end of the day, this is about safety.
And it's about not only the, uh, health and the mental and physical safety of the moderator, but it's also about the safety of all the members.
And just creating a space that they wanna be in.
You know, that this isn't about snitching on other people or turning people in or or that.
It's it's about how do we create an environment that people wanna be in.
Right? Right.
There there's a a whole sister I'll say, you know, community we're community professionals, some of us are community professionals.
Um, that's that one umbrella, but there's a whole other sister umbrella that is called Frost and safety.
And its whole purpose in life is that is to bring that trust and that safety to these online platforms.
Uh, so, I mean, if you if you're not interested in being a moderator, you can be on the team that helps make it better for our moderators and users by saying, you know, here's kind of the rules that we're building around this.
How can we make this safe? And how can we help you trust us as a company that we are making this safe environment? So whole other industry that's completely right next door to us that a lot of people don't even know exists.
Uh, but it's it's much bigger than you think.
You know, the trust and faith safety teams are are out there and in the world.
And there's conferences and stuff like that.
That is I haven't been to one, but I hear they're great.
So give some advice to somebody who is a community manager or a community builder, and they have found themselves in a situation where something's going on, and it's bothering them, and it's bothering them to the point where they they can't just brush it off.
Uh, if somebody came to you, uh, what would you say to them? What what would your advice be? First, I would listen.
Open up, do some active listening and be like, alright.
Tell me what's going on in as much deal as you feel comfort you know, detail as you feel comfortable sharing.
Um, and let's see if there's a way that we can solve this together.
And then share that knowledge with the team, uh, that you work with so that they can use whatever we come up with.
If we can't come up with a solution, we'll take it one step past me, who's my boss, who who who can we also enlist to help get ideas and get a big discussion going.
We are seeing this.
This is how it is affecting us.
And we would like you to solve this.
Maybe that's you know, I had a I had an old manager that said, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions.
Um, and, really, he just wanted you to think through what you're asking for before you say I need, you know, maybe you want a fruit salad, but you came to him and said, I need a banana.
You know, I was like, okay.
Here's a banana.
And you're like, well, that's not what I needed, really.
And so plan it out.
Think about it.
How can we fix this? How can we solve this? Um, maybe you're more aggressive in you know, removing that content.
Maybe you are aggressive ing aggressive in removing the users that generate that kind of content.
Um, but you you can do what you can do.
And then when you can't do more and it's not getting better, then you gotta escalate and get it to people who can make the call that maybe I couldn't make.
You know, I can't be the one that says, alright, ban them all.
Because maybe there's reasons why we cannot ban them all.
Maybe I work for a company and that customer is owns our products and we need to support them.
So I can't ban them or they won't be able to use our product that they legally pay for.
Uh, although a lot of sites and apps and products have clauses built into it now that they'll just get rid of you.
Uh, fire bad customers when you can.
You know? Uh, but there may be reasons why you can't just easily get rid of them.
Uh, so talk to people and get a discussion.
Do not be afraid to speak up.
I don't care who you are.
If you're the manager hearing it from your you, you know, your employees speak up, you know, go to HR.
Uh, HR is there to protect the company.
Right? That's their whole mission in life.
They're not really there to protect the employees.
They're trying to make your life easy, so you don't complain.
But they're really there to protect the company.
And if the company's put in a position where the work is affecting you mentally and physically, they're gonna take notice because that's a lawsuit that they don't wanna get into, really.
So escalate it as in every channel that you feel like you need to.
Um, you might get some blowback.
Because maybe they don't see it as a priority like you do.
Um, but it's there's no way around that, you know.
Ultimately, if you're in a position where you are not feeling safe and comfortable, and the employer is not willing to help you feel safe and comfortable.
You need to fire the company and find a place where you're safe and comfortable.
No one to hold him.
No one to hold him.
Yep.
Walk away.
No one to run.
I know it can be hard to walk away.
I've been very poor in my life where I stayed at bad jobs because it was the only job I could get.
And it's not good for you mentally in the long run.
Right.
Yeah.
So Alright, David.
Uh, here's the final question that I ask everybody that comes on.
I know you're a historian.
You're often looking back at where we've come from.
But I want you to look forward five years from now.
Uh, what do you think we're gonna be talking about in the community space? Make a prediction.
Oh, that's easy.
We're still gonna be talking about AI, like everybody else.
But the conversation will be different.
I feel like we are on the cusp of people really trying to integrate AI into moderation and that trust and safety aspect that we talked about.
Um, and I think those early experiments are what we're gonna be talking about.
That did not work.
Here's what we're going to try.
I feel like there is a place for AI in moderation, but I think it should be a stop gap.
Basically, you know, it can look at the content.
It can't always know context.
Um, you know, and that's that's the thing that it's struggling with now.
You know, it can't it can't do context.
So there's gonna be situations where somebody says, hell, yeah.
And you're not gonna know the context.
You know, why did they say, hell yeah? Did the guy ahead of them say something obnoxious? And they're like, yeah, I totally agree.
Or was it something they said was let's solve world peace, you know, and somebody else said, hell, yeah.
And but it may flag it because it said, oh, hell, yeah.
That could be an AI will flag it, but a human needs to review it.
Um, I don't think we'll ever see situations where AI completely takes over running a community for a portal because we are very good at spotting things that aren't human.
Um, it's in our DNA.
And even though AI is getting more and more human every day.
I've seen videos recently from Google's latest video engine that are just about creepy that they're so good, um, the v three of whatever it was.
Um, and We're still gonna feel have those awkward situations where we we still today can or even today, we can look at content and say, okay.
That that feels like it was written by AI.
That wasn't human.
And we will always have a need for those human to human interactions.
You know, I had to call a very large company for tech support, uh, for a purchase that I made that hasn't shown up yet.
And so I I first tried doing it online.
That didn't work.
It just said we can't cancel this even though it hasn't shown up.
Um, so I tried calling.
And I I got a machine, a human, a very human sounding, I would say, human sounding AI, but it wasn't human.
Uh, and I never did get to a human.
And ultimately, the AI did not help because it was a unusual situation outside of the boundaries.
You know, as far as the company's concerned, it's shipped.
They have a tracking number.
Unfortunately, when you plug in the tracking number in, it's not valid.
So, I mean, they're like, we have a tracking number.
It's shipped.
And and I'm like, tracking number's not good.
And the air is like, okay.
But you have a tracking number.
You know? It's like, no.
I don't.
Uh, so I'm gonna have to call them back and try and finagle into doing that.
But I think we'll still be talking about AI.
We'll be talking about where I went wrong.
And how we can make it better going forward for community stuff.
And I think there is a place for that.
I think that AI will be really good in data analysis.
And I think that it will get better and better over time.
I used to say that if you're a community platform company, if you're building community platform, your first hire should be a community manager, uh, who's done before, uh, you know, so that they can at least tell you what's bad about all the platforms they've worked with before.
You're gonna hire your developers, but you should also hire a data scientist somebody whose whole purpose on life is getting information out of the community, out of the portal, out of the platform that lets you understand how your users are using the platform so that you can find the gaps.
Where it's not working as well as they had hoped.
They'll tell you sometimes, but oftentimes they don't.
I mean, I used to say if you invite a thousand people to come help you with a community thing, a 100 people will say yes and then only 10 people will show up.
And then half of those will bail in a week.
Um, so we're gonna it's just gonna get more AI.
I feel like it's just inevitable at this point.
Uh, if you're not using an AI, start learning it so you understand wide.
You understand the nuances of what works and what doesn't so that you can spot it when it doesn't work right, even though it might on the cover look like it's worth hearing.
Uh, I think people that deploy these AI chat bots from phone calls have never actually called them themselves to try and get a problem.
Yeah.
No.
I I have that all the time.
You know, when I get into chats and you know, we go you know, we we give the AI a good three to five minutes.
And sometimes it works But then sometimes, I'm like, no.
Just give me somebody.
So Sometimes it just takes you so much human 15 times too.
It's human human form.
Yep.
David, thank you so much for the time.
I I'm glad you highlighted this issue.
This is a really important topic.
Just dealing with the mental health and the safety of community managers.
And, uh, uh, you know, knowing that you don't have to internalize everything that, you know, yes, to a a certain point, having a thick skin is useful, but I also think knowing you know, your limit in your line and when to call in the troops and get some extra help.
Uh, it's just a really important point.
So I really appreciate you highlighting that.
Uh, David DeWald from Seattle.
Thank you so much for being here.
This is the bad community advice podcast.
Uh
