Closing the CHT Facebook group?

Make it a dead end page- and don’t post screenshots of things from this or any other forum there. Whomever wants to join here can. I dint post on Facebook at all anymore- posting here is so different- it is focused on a cause.

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What is wrong with posting or bridging CHT to FB. and vice versa? If it helps our forum then go for it. We need to revitalize and energize this forum. Any useful ideas are welcome.

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If there is both a FB (plus other social media channels) and a CHT forum, then the latter one should be the high value information source, the place-to-be.

The FB group in that case should offer strong incentives to move to CHT forum. If someone has something of real value to add to the humane tech conversation, then it should be added to CHT forum to be elaborated.

I don’t know what moderation features FB offers, but I think the moderation should be very permissive on what is posted, but must kick in as soon as the discussion gets interesting. The moderator should then jump in with a message, like “Wow, this is great stuff. We will promote it to CHT forum level”, create a topic on the CHT forum and post a link to it in the FB thread, and then close the FB thread for further discussion (if this is possible, and the FB group is not a long timeline of posts. I dunno :slight_smile: ) .

This way you don’t get parallel, fragmented communities where active members need to have an account on all CHT social media channels and parse them to get the union of the subject matter.

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To the moderator yes very important and I am just replying to@aschrijver. anyway no one is commenting, It is like a ghost town in here. :smile: Back to the topic. It is up to you how to do it more effectively as long as we will increase our members and they are moving here for real.

There’s no way to publish read-only content on FB, but we could definitely start promoting this group more via FB, especially as a hopeful eventual migration off FB.

There are definitely other/better private community platforms that offer the functionality that this one (Discourse?) doesn’t.

The bottom line is that communities don’t succeed or fail because of platform–as much as Facebook would like people to believe that their Groups are essential to thriving communities. They are definitely not; however, community management is.

I think this is a great idea; however, it would require a ton of work to have someone basically managing this community and the FB community. FB definitely doesn’t make it easy to do stuff like this because obviously they don’t want to drive people off FB. There aren’t any moderation tools in FB groups (that I know of).

I’ll just chime in again that having a community live on Facebook isn’t what’s going to make it a successful, thriving community, and I do think that housing this particular community on FB is counter to CHT’s mission/values.

There are moderation tools for groups on FB.

The Friends of TWS group is thriving: three times as large as the forum community and several months older. Note that people like @tristanh and @Max are moderators for the group and that Max started the FB group.

@aschrijver’s suggestion that moderators step in and redirect conversations to the forum is very good. Randima Fernando and Aza Raskin are moderators of both the forum and the FB page.

Have we communicated with these folks that we want to move FB participants here? Aza R is CHT’s chief strategy officer, but do we have his thoughts? Cross-communication would increase chances of success.

Speaking of that, how many members of the CHT team are active on the forum? Very few it appears.

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I just spoke to @Mamie who is in close contact with the team and discussed a number of actions and planning. Parts of these is determining the social media strategy. Improvements to the forum will now start very soon, and the media strategy will be on the core team’s agenda as well :slight_smile:

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For those of you not in the FB group, I wanted to share this.

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Here too! Ready to design humane online spaces?

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Did you know there are actually three FB groups related to CHT? Their numbers dwarf the membership of the forum.



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I believe it’s just one group and then two pages, one for Time Well Spent and one For The Center for Humane Technology. A strategy should be hatched on what to do with all of them for sure, also need to be careful as obviously our message is so inherently cautious of social media!

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Thank you, Max. It’s kind of ironic that CHT’s brand is such that people flock to the FB pages.

:slight_smile:

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I’m torn. There’s a certain media richness on FB that others here have highlighted. Then again…it’s Facebook. I’m truly not sure what the best answer is =(

I don’t think there is any real problem- but copying pages of this forum or screenshots of this forum feels like violating privacy. CHT has different privacy agreements with members than Facebook- so an active group on FB should really be something completely different.

Social media is great for advertising but as a forum for this group probably not. The moderators for CHT are on this forum and not of Facebook.

I think for some, social media has caused some sort of problem and humane tech has offered perspective- and with the privacy issues it doesn’t work for many people.

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I am not on FB - left in November 2016 - and am not going back. I’d encourage the group to leave FB - I believe it’s important to choose not to participate in the sale of our attention to the highest bidder. This goes beyond its affect on any of us as individuals - it is a kind of advocacy.

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I haven’t left FB yet but rarely visit. I encourage this type of activism- refusing to participate is an easy way to participate instead of just complaining about privacy issues and hope someone rescues the issue.

So I do hate FB but hate Snapchat for example even more .
I’m for nationalizing FB in a way - that is - making it a public utility that is required to follow regulations and prove its worth to the community in order to stay alive. The FB TWS group has not been of a lot of interest to me but I’m becoming hazy about the future goal exactly . Replace FB? I don’t see this as much different . I like the idea of a platform much more tied into making reality a better place instead of just circling in on itself but this isn’t that. I have no career based on this stuff and it seems like a lot of people do which makes it of less interest to me as well. Getting involved was my wish to make the internet world a better place for all of us-not a job or a career or a way to personally enrich myself.

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You are right, and you are in the right place on this forum, though we are just at the start of this :slight_smile:
We are in the process of reorganizing the forum and make it a place that focuses on creating solutions, that stimulates positive action and improvement of current tech practices.

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