Jure Cuhalev's dashboard

I hadn't taken Camaron's comment as a slap, but I can see how you read it that way. If I wanted to be upset at anything it's at his implying I don't understand the repercussions of mucking about with your users' content. I think it's indicative of an assumption their making about my inability to appreciate the value in good user-company communication. The same assumption that's leading them to make bad decisions about what tools to give me access to.

As for "censorship", let's be honest here, you and I are both asking for tools that can be used to censor our users. Not because we want to censor them, per se, but because they are vital to letting us provide well-maintained forums in an efficient manner. And... well... because there may in fact be occasions where we feel censorship is warranted.

Censorship is not the completely black and white issue GSFN is making it out to be. Sure, if abused, it can be bad for our reputation with our users, but sometimes that's a necessary trade off. Actually, as long as we don't abuse the power, most users will understand and appreciate the rare occasions when we do take action.

I respect and admire GSFN's stance on how companies should treat their users. But the solution is not to neuter the tools you a company is accustomed to having. It's to empower users in such a way that their opinion becomes an especially compelling motivator for us. This is the basis for my "grade" idea above. Not only will you stop frustrating companies that feel they need a certain level of control, you'll be providing a cool and unique service to users, companies, and the industry as a whole.

I'm sorry, I probably was being a bit too harsh. It was some of the things said here that let me to that point of view, though.

Cameron wrote, "Robert, I thank you for continuing *this* conversation, and I hope that we've been able to show you that a suitable alternative to censorship and absolute control is a viable option. Censorship also has a nasty tendency to be noticed by your most astute users, and used as ammunition against you."

When I read this, I saw a backhanded slap at Robert implying that he was asking to be a censor of his customer's voice. Perhaps, I was just reading this wrong. :)

I apologize if I misinterpreted this statement.

Part of the problem here is that we are casting the two sides of this issue in extremes. Nobody here has any interest in being a heavy-handed dictator/moderator. The disagreement is about how the functionality in question is going to be used. For my part, the only reason I am being so tenacious is that 1) it's an interesting philosophical discussion and 2) lack of good administrative tools for managing content is a giant pain in the ass. :)

Thor, I get that you're trying create something more than an incrementally better forum tool. I think it would be great if GSFN could actually succeed at becoming a communal middleground for users and companies. But if you want to be successful at this you need to give everyone a reason to come to your service. Right now, the only reason why Zenbe or it's users would use GSFN is if the tools you provide do a better job at solving our problems. (Right? Or is there another reason I'm missing?) In that sense, for now at least, you are "just a slightly better forum product". The good news is you mostly succeed at this - I really like what GSFN offers - but GSFN comes with this attitude bout the sacredness of content that ignores the practical need that companies have for making sure they can moderate their forums when needed, and for users and companies alike to make small, benign edits on a regular basis.

I believe the solution here is not a technical one, it's a social one. Instead of crippling your system to prevent objectionable behavior, put checks and balances in place that provide a more equatable balance of power between users and companies. Give companies the tools they need to moderate their forums, but do so in a way that doesn't leave customers helpless. For example, only allow moderation by companies that have agreed to certain standards of conduct. Then allow users to hold a company accountable by allowing them to grade a company on how well it performs against those standards.

By itself, this grade won't be much of an incentive, but if GSFN were to, for example, make the grade data available to industry trade journals (e.g. "GSFN's best and worst customer support report on techcrunch.com"), I'm betting this would act as a powerful motivator.

I'm sure there's plenty here that hasn't been thought through, but you get the general idea. This sort of social engineering would seem to offer a number of advantages over your current approach:
- Companies get moderation control
- Users get a stick with which to beat ill-behaved companies
- GSFN doesn't have to burn a lot of energy acting as moderator
- By creating a "GSFN Grade" brand, you bring more to the party than just a better forum tool. You create a potentially highly-sought after stamp of approval for companies. Especially if you can grow it into a well-recognized metric for how good a company is at supporting their products. Think of it as consumer reports for online customer service. :)

Anyhow, Thor, hopefully you find this useful. I've found myself spending a fair bit of time mulling over what you're trying to accomplish and how to make that align with the needs of our company, our users, and GSFN. This is the best I can come up with (for now, at midnight, after a 16-hour workday. So maybe that's not saying much. :-) )

here here. – Ted Grubb, on July 25, 2008 05:16

Hi Steve,
We're neither a "content dictatorship or a hosting provider." We provide a support network for people to help each other whether they're customers, experts or employees. We don't label those who disagree with us as censors or "evil corporations who want to deny the voice of their customers," we simply provide an open place for the combined voices of customers and companies.

You're arguing for a traditional forum in which you--the company--has full and unchecked control over its interactions with customers. There are many solutions to that problem, but that's just not the problem we're solving. You mention that you'd only use this power for spam or blatant abuse, but it's still a one-way power. The flip-side is that your customers have their blogs or social networks where they can discuss your company and its products and there's no clear role for your response. Get Satisfaction bridges those two worlds, to create a community where customers and companies work together, where they share control. One-way, nontransparent censorship doesn't work in this model.

On the other hand, we are going to provide tools that give companies the ability to manage community content in simple but powerful ways. These features will address your practical concerns about moderating spam and abuse (both exceedingly rare on Get Satisfaction, you'll find), but more importantly go a lot further towards distilling business value out of the community.

Just a final note: we built Get Satisfaction on this model for one simple reason--empowering customers is good business. We're seeing thousands of companies, big and small, get lasting benefit from sharing control in this way.

"All of this has me wondering, "Can you really cultivate a culture of 'transparency and openness' if you don't trust your users to do the right thing?"" Here Here – Steve Bostedor, on July 25, 2008 02:46

I don't think that it's too much to ask to allow a business to be able to control official communication done in their company's name.

You're asking companies to use your site as an official forum of communication with their customers while denying them control over the content. That's like a web hosting company telling their customers that they can't control the content of their own website. That's a ridiculous notion!

Are you a content dictatorship or are you a hosting provider?

I understand that these are the principles that you have decided to build this website around but it's not right for you to label those who disagree as censors and evil corporations who want to deny the voice of their customers.

We're going to move our support back to forums based communications because we're not ready to hand over that kind of content control to sysadmins who are not employed by our company and have no contractual obligations to uphold our high standards for support content.

We believe in openness and only remove or edit posts for reasons of profanity, software piracy, spam, or competitors advertising their products. This is something that we have staff on hand to do.

It is not in any companies best interest to outsource this responsibility to a website who has not signed a quality of service agreement and offers no control of content to the business owners.

I'm sorry to say it but this policy will keep most companies from signing up here. If I knew that was the case, we wouldn't have. I take responsibility for that because it is clearly documented and I just missed it.

I wish you good will with your website, but it's just not what our customers are asking for and not of any benefit over typical forums. It's just different.

We're not religious about every design decision. We regularly revisit things that aren't working. The 15 Minute edit window hasn't changed since launch, and I believe we borrowed the idea from Basecamp. It isn't a reflection of our lack of trust in users. Thanks for the discussion fodder.

[*sigh* My apologies for another long winded post here, but this 15-minute edit feature really calls out for a bit of commentary. BTW, Eric, I was aware of this feature, but 'didn't help when I noticed the typo 4-hours later.]

I "get" the motivation behind the 15-minutes-of-editing window - oftentimes one doesn't notice typos until after a post appears in it's final form so it's nice to make quick after-the-fact revisions. But it does beg the question, "Since you allow edits for 15 minutes, why not 60 minutes, or 600 minutes? Why not just allow a person to edit their posts any time the see the need?"

That is, of course, a rhetorical question. The answer is obvious:
"A post is a part of the transcript of this 'conversation' we're having. Revising the transcript after the fact may be misleading and confusing".

But if the answer is that obvious (it is that obvious, right?) than won't everyone know this? And if everyone knows this, why bother enforcing it, why not trust users to to use their best judgement?

By enforcing this artificially rigid notion of what is and is not acceptable behavior, you are taking away useful and much-needed tools. This thread would be much better off had I simply made the required edit, above, rather than cluttering it up with my revision request, and Eric's subsequent comment.

Might users abuse editing and moderation tools? Sure, in theory. But that's not the important question. The important question is, "WILL they abuse these tools? And, if they do, does the resulting harm outweigh the benefit the tools otherwise provide?"

All of this has me wondering, "Can you really cultivate a culture of 'transparency and openness' if you don't trust your users to do the right thing?"

Robert, the way it works is that you can edit your topic for fifteen minutes. You are always welcome, of course, to append or add additional replies and comments. It's a bit like a conversation in this way, I suppose, and less like a traditional forum.

[Bleepity bleep bleep!] Who do I submit moderation requests to? I need to change "ideally replace them" to "ideally replace the reviews" in my previous post. (And, no, I didn't do that on purpose just to prove a point. It's an honest mistake.)

Scott was actually talking about the Get Satisfaction feature of promoting a reply from the company to the spot directly under a topic, as the "first response." That's not a feature iTunes offers, but something that Get Satisfaction does. – Cameron Walters, on July 23, 2008 23:31

I suspect we both understand where the other is coming from at this point. Censorship is a double-edged sword, no doubt, but as a company it's really nice to have control over which side of that sword gets used, rather than handing control over the sword to someone unfamiliar with you, your product, or your users. In the Apple scenario we would ideally replace them with a "obsolete TOS quote removed", but I'd happily settle for deleting them outright with no explanation. Would I take a good hard look at why I'm doing it and what affect it has on the trust of our users? You bet. A couple users might notice, they might even say something about it on iTunes. But weigh that against the 1000's of bad impressions those reviews have created... it's a no-brainer decision.

Scott, we have essentially implemented the solution you propose on iTunes, "featuring the answer at the top of the topic". Check out our app description - the first paragraph is, (paraphrased) "Hey, we've fixed this!" The results? Negligible. Over 200 users have marked these incorrect reviews as, "helpful", since we added that to the description. Realistically, probably all we've done is call more attention to those reviews. :P Sometimes you really do need a simple "delete" button.

I have to agree 100% with Scott's assessment of the breakdown in the iTunes example. I also agree with how that same situation would play out in the context of Get Satisfaction.

Robert, I thank you for continuing *this* conversation, and I hope that we've been able to show you that a suitable alternative to censorship and absolute control is a viable option. Censorship also has a nasty tendency to be noticed by your most astute users, and used as ammunition against you.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for offering your thoughts on GetSatisfaction! I'm sure Thor will have some further comments, but I wanted to step in with my opinions as well.

Regarding your example about iTunes: The failure there is not in the lack of moderation, it is that apple has restricted your ability to respond. You don't have that problem with GSFN. If such a review were to be posted on Get Satisfaction, you could respond when you made the fix and feature its answer at the top of the topic. It would then show up in the search results as "Solved".

Outside of Spam and blatant abuse, I've not been shown any reason for deleting or editing history that couldn't be better served by conversation. Get Satisfaction can be better about surfacing updates and changes (such as marking a topic as duplicate and providing navigation to the canonical topic), but I don't think censorship is the solution.

Thor, thanks for the timely and well thought out reply. It's obvious that GetSatisfaction strives to be more than "yet another forum tool". The feature set and vision are evident, and I'll be the first to commend you for that.

I'll also be the first to agree that the notion of a company "owning" their customers is outdated and dysfunctional. That's certainly not how we view our users. But there are cases where having the ability to moderate and censor forum content in a timely fashion is critical. For example, go into iTunes, type "Zenbe", and then click on the one result you'll get to open the detail page for "Zenbe Lists. If you look at the user reviews, you'll see that the first two reviews are damningly negative ones. They also happen to 100% incorrect (they are out-of-context quotes from an old Terms of Service that we corrected within hours after realizing there was a problem). But users believe them to be true and are marking them as "helpful" in breathtaking numbers, which keeps them at the top of the list of reviews.

This is a situation that I expect any sane person would say warrants some sort of editorial intervention. But because we have to rely on a moderation system that is (dys)functionally identical to what GetSatisfaction offers, and because Apple is overwhelmed by support requests from other developers, we are left with no recourse.

In this case, we have no avenue to resort to because Apple, well, they're Apple and they hold the keys to the iPhone kingdom. But when it comes to _our_ community, we do get to decide what forums to adopt and sanction as the official arena in which we communicate. You can rest assured, in no uncertain terms, that we won't make this same mistake twice. As I said before, I'd love to migrate us over to your service, but given what we're currently going through with Apple, this issue may prove to be a deal breaker.

I don't say that to apply pressure to you. You guys have a free product and are free to pick and chose it's features and direction. (Actually, it always seems a bit absurd when a user says, "we have to have this feature or else".) I just thought you'd appreciate an outside perspective, one that may or may not align with other companies you're dealing with.

Finally, a quick, "oops", for saying Amy created our forum. That was just (yet another) communication breakdown on our side of things. (Sorry, Amy!). If only I could edit my previous post...

Hi Robert,
You make some good points. Many companies do think of Get Satisfaction as a "specialized forum," and have adopted it as their customer community with that notion in mind. We're happy that they get value out of it in this narrow frame, and certainly want to be supportive in their use.

Our ambitions are much larger than that, however. We did not create Get Satisfaction to provide an incrementally better forum system. In fact, we are united in our dislike for forums, a discussion format that is unquestionably long in the tooth.

Rather, we built Get Satisfaction to foster more productive and positive customer-company relationships. In developing it, we were influenced by the full range of online communication channels, from email to social networks to blogs. More importantly, it's our central thesis that the big problem with conventional customer support is that the context itself breeds contempt, since it assumes that companies "own" the customer relationship. The mistrust this approach has bred is infamous--just check out the Consumerist for a daily sampling of the results.

Our goal isn't to merely create a more elegant product, but to cultivate a shared ownership of the relationship. We think this is the key for companies to reduce support costs by increasing customer engagement. Your proposed idea of one-way, unchecked corporate censorship is at odds with our mission, and--I think--the interests of companies themselves. You're absolutely right that it's up to each company to decide how transparent it wishes to be. Its adoption of Get Satisfaction, consequently, is a public commitment to the ideals of candor and accountability with their customers.

Having said all that, we do plan to increasingly distribute "moderation" abilities to companies and trusted consumers throughout the system. We know that the most invested participants are the ones most able to make the judgements about what is appropriate behavior in the community. We'll roll such features carefully to ensure we preserve the values we've built our business on. For now, our flagging system will suffice, and you might consider our full-time community management a service rather than a hindrance.

P.S. Your company was originally added to Get Satisfaction by another member of your team, not Amy. That is just a welcome message from her.